Confessions of a Restaurant Critic
Charleston City Paper's Robert F. Moss is exiting after seven years.
After a relatively short run (seven years), Charleston City Paper food critic Robert F. Moss is hanging up the knife, fork and dessert spoon.
His farewell note to readers is a full meal, covering all sorts of fun territory. For starters, he writes that he will not miss his beat vocabulary:
There are only so many ways to describe food. You become hyper-aware of your own clichés. If you’ve gotten tired of reading “lovely,” “tinged” and “delightful” in my reviews over the past seven years, all I can say is that you should have seen the first drafts.
Moss also recalls, rather comically, how when he first hit the beat, he was assigned mostly to lower-rung restaurant targets because at that time Jeff Allen was the senior reviewer. He jokes that his credo became “We eat this stuff so you don’t have to.”
And when he recently tabulated a list of all the eateries he has reviewed, he discovered that more than half the places he wrote about between 2008 and 2011 are no longer in business. Moss ends by joking that for the right local restaurant price, he will happily reveal the photo identities of the colleagues he is leaving the beat behind to: Eric Doksa and Allston McCrady. He remains a contributing BBQ editor for Southern Living.
Read the rest of Moss’ musings here.
[Photo via: @mossr]
