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The Literary Gestalt Of The Restaurant Review, Anke Klitzing
The Literary Gestalt Of The Restaurant Review, Anke Klitzing
European Journal of Food Drink and Society
The restaurant review is a quintessential form of gastronomic writing, but it has rarely been studied in terms of its literary form. This paper investigates the literary gestalt of restaurant reviews through a gastrocritical reading of two reviews by the Irish restaurant critic Helen Lucy Burke. It concludes that restaurant reviews typically include mimesis and evocative descriptions, a meal plot, inherent tension due to the performance character of the restaurant meal and incorporation anxiety, and a combination of phenomenological and ethnographic reporting. These literary features serve to make reviews an accurate and reliable account of the reviewer’s immersive experience, to …