Licking the hands that feed you

Gavin Legge is a piece of work. He's in his early 40s "with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer glasses his eyes were slitty. All his stories in the paper seemed to involve free travel and free eating and drinking." I stopped and had a bit of a think about Legge when he slipped into the cast of Melbourne sleaze that makes up the character roster for Peter Temple's Bad Debts, the first of the Jack Irish books.

What a television series must do for book sales. Although I was already a Temple convert. He undoes just about everything Tourism Victoria could ever have done to create the illusion of Melbourne as a safe, clean and decent place for law-abiding, church-going citizens.

I wondered who, exactly, had the author taken for inspiration when it came to crafting a journalist of whom another says: "For a free sausage roll and a couple of glasses of plonk, Gavin Legge will get six mentions of anything you're selling into the paper."

Another blow to the noble trade of newspaper journalism. Then it got personal.

"I still owe you that lunch," says Legge, who owes Irish money.

"What about tomorrow? It's on the paper. I'm reviewing a new restaurant. They fall over themselves."

"Don't you do these things incognito?"

"Certainly do. But I gave them an anonymous tip-off."

A low blow.

Whatever faith Temple's readers had in the restaurant review process just got shaken out of the tree. We're all corrupt.

Sixteen years (give or take a month or two) after first wandering into a restaurant with a view to eating, drinking and writing something afterwards that might prove informative/entertaining/useless to readers, I still find widespread interest in, and misunderstanding of, the process.

Pop your head up at a seminar or forum of some kind and, no matter the issues at hand, audiences always want to talk about reviewing.

We'll get to the procedure in a minute.

But the fact is anyone can review a restaurant if they have a forum in which to publish their views.

The problem for those of us who do it the old-fashioned way, and it may well be argued for the restaurant industry too, is the increasingly common blurring of the lines between review and infomercial.

These days, a lot of what is published online about restaurants that conceivably may be perceived by the reader as a review is little more than quid pro quo for a free meal. Public relations people have found, in the blogging community, their perfect lap-dogs. And even lap-dogs like to be fed. Rarely do they bite the hand that feeds them, either.

Where are the mongrels of the blogging community? The dissenting voices? The anarchists? Why do so few use the liberty of self-publishing for serious, witty criticism?

This is the likelier scenario: someone who is into food enough to blog about it gets invited to a restaurant event at which they may, or may not, be fed and watered superbly.

Let's say that the food is good and the wine is way beyond what the blogger could usually afford.

A breathless and possibly ungrammatical report of the occasion appears on a blog.

Suddenly, the blogger is on a list and there are more invitations, more drinks, more introductions to chefs and ... Shit, this is a great lark.

Gavin Legge's digital successors are alive and well.

For the record we old-fashioned types: get someone else to book; use any name other than our own; skulk to tables and keep our heads down; steal menus; pay for everything (amazing how few restaurant staff look at the name on a credit card); and sneak out without so much as a chat to the chef.

Legge's routine sounds like a whole lot more fun.

Source: The Australian, 6 April 2013