UNLEASH THE FURY:

We live in a world of restaurant review oversaturation. The second some cool new place like Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco is discovered, its swarming with writers at the Times, Bon Appetit, GQ, and any other place that pays a food critic ungodly sums of money to live like a God. The end result is that such restaurants become overrun with critics and cameramen from Bourdain and the Food Network and you, the common man, will probably have to wait in line for six hours just to get in the fucking place. Food critics don't help readers find restaurants anymore. They RUIN them.

I say all this with the full understanding that most Yelp reviewers are fucking idiots. There's obviously a place in this world for professional food writing. But at this point, it feels as if the entire food critic culture has dissolved into one giant circle jerk, with writers hanging out with chefs and chefs hanging out with writers and chefs and writers judging reality shows together and living inside this bubble of obscene decadence that's completely disconnected from the everyday dining experiences of regular people.

Well, shit.  On one hand, it's easy to dismiss this “woe the common man” criticism as baseless, given MCF's humble beginnings as a cheap food truck parked on a smelly Mission St. corner—never mind their amazing charitable givings to the food bank.  But every time I walk past Mission Chinese with the hopes of delighting my mouth with heaps of Szechuan pickles and thrice cooked bacon, I'm confronted a giant gaggle of idiot food blogger pontificating about the so-called “food truck revolution” outside and walk right past to a cheaper-but-still-remarkable meal at Yamo or Big Lantern.

It wasn't always that way though.  When they first opened, I remember just walking up Lung Shan on a weeknight and sitting right down for dinner, paying a small sum for one of the most innovative meals around.  But that is an increasingly-distant memory, now that Danny Bowien is busy playing rock star with Vice and Bourdain.  Really, the only hopes a “common man” has to getting anywhere near the Mission's most sacred dinner is calling some bike messengers to go and get it for you, just so you can eat it out of a carton on your couch while watching last week's episodes of The Daily Show.

Was this the food critics' fault?  Did they vault these guys into the limelight and prop them up as Gods, making their food worthy of wasting 2 hours of your life on a shitty Mission Street sidewalk?  Perhaps.  Or maybe it's just that fucking good.

[Photo by Nicole Wong | via Grub Street]