Endurance critics march so families eat perfectly while sleeper picks reach Thanksgiving table
COSTA MESA — The publication of a comprehensive guide to the OC Fair’s best bites, chronicled in LAist’s fair coverage, has drawn scholarly attention to the fair-food review itself, the one branch of culinary journalism in which trained critics apply the full apparatus of gastronomic analysis to foods engineered on the explicit principle that everything improves when fried, a genre researchers describe as criticism’s annual vacation from its own standards, and its most honest work.
The guide, produced through the traditional method, a team eating its way across the fairgrounds with notebook and courage, joins a venerable canon in which words like caramelization and mouthfeel are deployed, sincerely, in the direction of foods served on sticks.
The Genre’s Honesty
“Fair-food criticism is the only food writing with no pretense gap, and the readers can taste the freedom,” said food media scholar Dr. Augustin Pelletier-Nakamura. “Restaurant criticism carries the weight of the form, the chef’s intentions, the room, the wine program, the discourse. Fair criticism carries a corn dog. The critic at the fair is liberated from every anxiety except the only real one, is this delicious, and the prose shows it. The best fair reviews read like war correspondence from a battle everyone is winning. And here is the secret the industry protects, the fair guide is annually among the most-read food coverage these outlets produce, outperforming tasting-menu reviews by multiples, because the readership can act on it, immediately, for eleven dollars, in a parking lot they can find. It is service journalism at its purest, criticism with a map, and the map leads to a deep fryer, and the people, wisely, follow.”
Pelletier-Nakamura noted the genre’s technical rigor is real, “do not mistake the joy for laxity. The fair critic evaluating twelve fried items in one afternoon is performing palate management under conditions no tasting menu imposes, sequencing, pacing, strategic beverage deployment. It is endurance criticism. The tasting-menu critic sits. The fair critic marches.”
The Practitioners
Veterans of the fairgrounds beat described the assignment’s realities with the mixed pride of the specialist. “People think it is the fun assignment, and it is, and also I trained for it, physically,” said one longtime regional food writer familiar with the circuit. “You walk in with a strategy or the fair defeats you by the third booth. Savory before sweet. Shareable formats, because the unit of fair criticism is the bite, not the portion, and the amateur who finishes a full turkey leg at booth two files nothing that afternoon, we have lost people that way. And you need the vocabulary discipline, because the fair will tempt you toward irony, and irony is the coward’s condiment. When the pickle lemonade is good, you write that it is good, in your own voice, with your whole chest. The readers know the difference. The readers are not at the fair for jokes. The readers are at the fair for the truth about the pickle lemonade, and the truth, this year, between us, is that it slaps, which I phrased more professionally in the piece, but only slightly.”
The Public Depends
Fairgoers confirmed the guide’s operational role in the modern fair visit. “We do not enter those gates without the article loaded. That is not a family, that is a search party,” said Anaheim project coordinator Yolanda Fitzsimmons-Marquez, 44, describing her household’s system. “The fair is huge, the day is hot, the budget is finite, and every wasted booth is a tragedy someone will mention in the car. So the guide is the itinerary. We highlight, we route, we assign scouts. My husband handles savory reconnaissance, I handle the dessert corridor, the kids verify the lemonade findings, and we regroup at the picnic tables to compare notes against the article like it is scripture, which, from June to August, it is. Last year the guide called a booth’s chicken sandwich the sleeper hit, and it was buried by the livestock barns, and we would never have found it, and it was the best thing anyone ate all summer, and we still talk about it, by which I mean we talked about it at Thanksgiving. That is what the fair critics do not get told enough. They are not reviewing snacks. They are routing family memories. Route well, critics. The Thanksgiving table is listening.”
The satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine has proposed the genre receive its own awards category, “the Golden Stick, for excellence in criticism conducted upright, in heat, against sequencing odds,” while Britain’s The London Prat confirmed the UK equivalent thrives at village fete scale, “our critics applying identical rigor to the cake tent, where the sponge discourse has ended friendships, and where irony was never a risk, as the British take cake with a seriousness the OC Fair reserves, correctly, for the pickle lemonade.”
Gates Open
At press time, the fair’s food corridors were operating at capacity, the guide’s traffic was performing to genre standard, and Mrs. Fitzsimmons-Marquez’s search party had completed its opening sweep with the article’s top recommendations verified.
“The guide went four for four, and the sleeper pick this year is real, I will not say which booth, buy the journalism,” she said, reconvening her scouts at the tables with the satisfaction of a commander whose intelligence held. “People say print is dying. Print walked this entire fairground in August so my family could eat perfectly in ninety minutes. Print is not dying, honey. Print is out here doing the marching so we can do the eating. Support your local fair critic. They suffer beautifully, annually, on sticks, for us all.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com