Headscratcher
I'm not usually one of those guys who goes apoplectic about the stuff that Michael Bauer writes. I really like his blog. His reviews, not so much. I'm not a fan of the restaurant critic writing style. Despite what the haters who haunt the comments section of his blog say, I believe he makes an honest attempt to be fair with his reviews and to maintain anonymity, a difficult thing to do when you've been a critic as long as he has in this city. And, I suspect that he works a whole lot harder than most people realize.
But everyone once in a while, he writes something that just makes me go WTF???
His intro to last week's San Francisco Chronicle Food & Wine Newsletter was the latest case in point. In it, he writes about how meatballs have become the latest fad to hit Bay Area menus. He concludes by saying, "If I want good ole-fashioned spaghetti and meatballs, I head to Chow...."
MB's continuing fascination with Chow escapes me. It's bad enough that he perennially include them in his Top 100. But pimping their spaghetti and meatballs???
I've tried Chow's S&M on several times and have concluded that they're Sadists for serving the dreck and I'm a Masochist for eating a dish where every bite is torture. It's among the worst renditions of spaghetti and meatballs I've eaten.
My last sampling was just a few weeks ago. I blogged it in the entry Ciao, Chow. I wrote, "By any reasonable definition of the word, there was no sauce. Instead, reddish water pooled at the bottom of the bowl while a few small, lonely globs of cooked tomato perched atop my pasta." How can an esteemed restaurant critic actually like this crap???
I'm left scratching my head in disbelief.
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