To recap the ongoing New Orleans restaurant battle:

1. National magazine writer Alan Richman writes a hit piece on New Orleans cuisine that can only be described as startling in its ignorance. HIs basic argument: “Contrary to the testimony of millions, New Orleans food has always sucked. And it still sucks.” He has apparently decided that New Orleans was having too easy a time of it lately and needed to be taken down a notch.

2. Brett Anderson, restaurant critic at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, responds by pointing out a number of errors in the article and calling Richman a big fat dummyhead. (I paraphrase.)

3. Other New Orleanians and their defenders join in the Richman bashing, pitchforks and torches in hand.

4. Richman, given the chance to defend himself, instead charges on, saying Anderson’s comments don’t matter because the T-P is “a third-rate newspaper that rose to the occasion after Katrina and has subsequently returned to being a third-rate newspaper.” To which a T-P backer rightly takes issue.

Poor, stupid Alan Richman. He commits the grave sin of calling bullshit on a culture he seems proud not to understand.

Listen, I’m not from New Orleans. But I grew up in Louisiana and can tell you that New Orleans is a strange, wonderful place, unlike any other. Sure, it has any number of problems, all well catalogued. But to dismiss the city’s culture as bland and useless, as Richman does, is just silly.

There is a certain school of commentator that takes a special pride in advancing counterintuitive arguments. Those arguments may be completely and totally false, contrary to accepted facts — but writing the boring truth doesn’t build the same pride of cleverness as going against the grain. You see these guys in various fields. In technology writing, John Dvorak is famous for it; in political writing, The New Republic has long been noted for being self-consciously clever and counterintuitive. (Although it’s gotten better about that in the last few years.)

Richman is the food-writing equivalent. At a time when there’s tons of sympathy for New Orleans — when people are pointing out that the city is a unique treasure that must be saved — where’s the buzz in writing a piece echoing those thoughts? Instead, he writes an ill-informed attack — and gets roughly 10 times the attention a more sane article would have. It’s a silly and predictable feedback loop, and it’s a shame people like Richman benefit from it.

14 November 2006

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