Empire Kitchen & Cocktails

[dtowncitylover]

But there’s no evidence of this.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you’re a Vietnamese immigrant living in the Madison Heights/Troy Vietnamese community and you follow your life’s ambition to open a Vietnamese restaurant in your community. You lease some space on John R, invest a hard earned $200k to completely redo the space and open your restaurant. Your restaurant offers nothing original that can’t be found in a half dozen other places within a couple miles or so. Your kitchen is spotty but not awful. Some dishes ok, others not as good as the nearby places. Bottom line: you have a bright, clean new place that serves its customers commonplace, ok food. Do you deserve to have the most visible restaurant reviewer that writes for the largest newspaper in Michigan write a review of your place that savages you and essentially threatens your livelihood all because of the transgression of a lack of originality? How is this example any different than the Empire Kitchen review? Responsible restaurant criticism doesn’t mean that a critic has to become a shill, but it should mean that highly negative reviews are limited to the truly bad places where the food and service indicate that the owners really don’t care about their customers.

The evidence is the restaurant itself.

It seems like there would be a difference between a humble immigrant trying to make it, and a corporate/fast food backer who pours in money expecting they can do what a half dozen other restaurants do in a 1 mile radius and think it's something great and get away with it. That's hubris and I think that's what the article was about.

[swingline]

The evidence is the restaurant itself.

It seems like there would be a difference between a humble immigrant trying to make it, and a corporate/fast food backer who pours in money expecting they can do what a half dozen other restaurants do in a 1 mile radius and think it's something great and get away with it. That's hubris and I think that's what the article was about.

The Empire Kitchen owners are not some big corporate restaurant group. They are group of small businesspeople that are also franchisees in a small handful of Five Guys stores. They almost certainly have a lot of money at risk in the venture, just like in the Vietnamese restaurant hypothetical. How does a lack of originality translate into hubris? If the Freep wants to be consistent, maybe they should make a Top Ten Coney Island list and then have Mr. Kurlyandchik go around to the ones that didn’t make the list and write about how they are banal and should be avoided.

[JBMcB]

Ah, the New Journalism. Don't write about a subject, write about your personal experience of the subject. Contextualize the subject within the greater social picture. What does this menu say about the socioeconomic pressures in the Metro Detroit area? How is this desert a metaphor for race relations in a modern American metropolis?

Good food? Bad food? There is no such thing. There is only the hierarchical system of power and those who use it to exploit those beneath them.

And thus, journalism dies.

[Zacha341]

Yep, while some of the criticisms of this place may be apt, I've seen this style of eh' journalism mightily applied to food, would-be-news, social-culture and poli-trics. Well STATED!!

Ah, the New Journalism. Don't write about a subject, write about your personal experience of the subject. Contextualize the subject within the greater social picture. What does this menu say about the socioeconomic pressures in the Metro Detroit area? How is this desert a metaphor for race relations in a modern American metropolis?

Good food? Bad food? There is no such thing. There is only the hierarchical system of power and those who use it to exploit those beneath them.

And thus, journalism dies.