Le Blog de San Francisco.

I decided to have a Best Of The Year Award ceremony for strictly one reason: we have a winner. The only category is Best Post Proving Undeniably That Meredith Brody Is A Sucky Reviewer. See, you read her, and you understand she is a poor reviewer. You feel it. You know it. But trying to articulate why is a more difficult task, since people -ok, not many, and they all leave out in the woods- will argue that your dislike is a matter of subjectivity. She is a writer and you just cannot understand.

We have been trying to spell out the objective reasons why she is awful, using hard science, like logic or quantitative metrics, but we never got around to actually make a pie chart of the geographic distribution of the places she visits. Seamus did it in July and topped that post with THE MUST READ POST OF 2005, heck, of 2006 too, for people who like common sense in their food reviews.

I won't steal the picture from his site of what Meredith Brody's map of SF looks like, for fear of that sexy boy showing up on my site, so just go look. Seamus: by the way, Glenn Park, it was a fluke, she could not be bothered to make a reservation, too busy was she watching a movie, her friend picked the place. Also, she avoided the Sunset, but also Bernal Height, and Potrero and West Portal, etc., all of them interesting and vibrant neighborhoods.

Other metrics which would show that Meredith's choice of restaurant is plain awful: the type of food statistics. Japanese, Thai, Chinese: she hardly ever goes there (and when she does she just lump them together as Asian). Two reviews for them all last year I believe. It's all about the Cali-French-Italian triumvirate. Which means lobster on her plate, but few decent cheaper places. The neighborhood: for the tourists; the type: for the expense accounts.

Let's face it, she writes for her social caste: the over-50 wealthy people from the East Bay Hills. People who are risk adverse, who despise the cheap "thrill" of an ethnic dive, who drive a car across the bridge (thus North Beach's easy access), whose idea of a good time is to vacation in Tuscany and are happy when they can recreate it in San Francisco. This caste is so far from the demographics of the SF Weekly readership (it is definitely grungier with a median age in the 30s and a male majority) that Seamus' hypothesis of her having pictures of [her] managing editor enjoying an orgy with a young Thai boy, a goat, and Rosie O'Donnell is not so far-fetched. Or guess what? Her managing editor lives in Walnut Creek, rents a summer house on Lago Maggiore, where he would not mind spending is impending retirement.

[even if she write for folks like her, there is no excuse for the 150 words sentences, the movies, the syllogisms and the overdoses of adjectives: even for her core audience she is a truely poor writer.]