The Literary Gestalt of the Restaurant Review

The restaurant review is a quintessential form of gastronomic writing, but it has rarely been studied in terms of its literary form. This paper investigates the literary gestalt of restaurant reviews through a gastrocritical reading of two reviews by the Irish restaurant critic Helen Lucy Burke. It concludes that restaurant reviews typically include mimesis and evocative descriptions, a meal plot, inherent tension due to the performance character of the restaurant meal and incorporation anxiety, and a combination of phenomenological and ethnographic reporting. These literary features serve to make reviews an accurate and reliable account of the reviewer’s immersive experience, to champion but also critique the performance of the restaurant, providing pleasure through visceral responses while reading as well as potentially affecting the reader’s behaviour. Thus, this paper proposes that restaurant criticism offers an interesting focus for further literary exploration, and that the gastrocritical approach provides keys to understanding its literary and gastronomic nuances.