Blog off?!

Lurking amongst the tongue-tied first daters, confused tourists, fussy eaters, expense-account executives, quarrelling couples and discomfited conference delegates that go towards making up the bulk of any restaurant’s clientele, a recent arrival to the throng is set to fascinate people watchers - in themselves another discrete social subset - everywhere.

The Food Blogger is the food world’s equivalent of the train spotter, lurking feverishly in the waiting room on any given prandial platform until the gravy train gives them (and their followers, via the tannoy system that is twitter) something to tweet about. Some Food Bloggers herald their arrival by dropping a notebook on the table before they’ve even taken their coats off, when even a ‘traditional’ restaurant critic knows that notebooks are the sole preserve of those who attempt to scam discounted meals by posing as a reviewer. All of them, however, identify themselves by using their cameras to take endless shots of the table, the menu, the food, the cutlery and the aftermath of the meal itself rather than the grinning maws of their fellow diners, using the images to illustrate a fresh post that will be rattled out immediately after the event and posted online often before the dishes they ate from have been cleared away.

Many food blogs constitute a lively, informative alternative to the mainstream media, but for every insightful, original self-styled food writer there are reams of sites operated by egotistical, delusional, pompous maniacs who start every sentence with the word ‘I’ and think ‘delicious’ is sufficient description for any dish they were impressed by. But don’t confuse the folk who post pernicious, mean-spirited barbs on sites such as tripadvisor.com with genuine FB’s; these comments are in fact generated by restaurant owners with an appetite for destruction of the enterprise next door.