I'll have whatever Pixie Geldof is having.....

A very shallow dish :Observer food monthly

It’s sad fact that the Guardian/Observer are getting more slight, trite and shallow every day they seem to have mistaken an obsession with celebrity, fashion and vain aspirational shopping for what people really want from a newspaper enjoyable, informed, accessible writing.
Take the food monthly, today we have “the 50 coolest places to eat” you’ll note not the best, worst, cheapest, tastiest but coolest.

You can tell how muddle headed this is, of the places on the list I’ve been to they aren’t even the best places to eat of their kind in London. Brindisa is a fairly average tapas bar in everything except the bill, and the rock and soul plaice is jolly (love the mural down stairs) and the fish is good but their chips just aren’t that nice. As for the Vietnamese place in Kingsland road it’s tasty and cheap but so is the one down the road and the one in Camberwell or the one on Deptford high street. Also there’s no Hungarian cool places to eat nor any ones in Leeds or Bromley. They all seem to be near shops that sell clothes.

Of course the media always think cool is an immutable idea that their definition is the only one that counts but they forget that when I was 6 the coolest place to eat was BHS cafe because they had raspberry flavoured pop, that chips are better eaten sat on a cast iron bench fighting off the seagulls on a blustery seafront, that cool doesn’t just mean “whatever Marc Jacobs does”. I’m not sure that sitting four tables away from the bass player of T’arctic monkeys is going to make a kebab taste any better and lastly any paper that asks models for their opinions on where to eat has left the path of wisdom

PS: Oh and in a straight forward good piece about a top Danish restaurant did Jay Rayner really need to tell us what Valhalla is or are we now to assume that the constant waffle about Jade Goody has forced out a working knowledge of Norse mythology (or in deed anything other than the gender of Lindsay Lohan’s current squeeze) out of the heads of educated readers.

Next week Tanya Gold tells us that posh people go to the Chelsea Flower show (sorry it seems she already done that story)