Following on from last week’s celebration of musical meh-ness, here’s Marina O’Loughlin in the FT explaining why it’s OK for reviewers to say that a rubbish restaurant is rubbish.
The job of newspaper critics — film, TV, restaurant, whatever — is to sell newspapers, not proselytise for what they’re employed to critique. Opinions are just that, so we find voices we trust and follow accordingly. If not, if personality and preferences, tendencies and turns of phrase don’t matter, then bring on our AI overlords. There are some restaurant critics I find almost unreadable, but then I don’t have to read them, do I? But nor do I feel the need to announce their obsolescence from a standpoint that celebrates the vanilla.

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