The Art of Blind Reviewing
Editor
News that Robin Goldstein’s fake Italian Restaurant - Osteria L’Intrepido - won an ‘Award of Excellence’ from Wine Spectator magazine, despite being completely imaginary, has put a spring in the step of hoaxers everywhere. The magazine has, with astonishing chutzpah, described the hoax as “an act of malicious duplicity”, overlooking its own duplicity in recommending a restaurant to its readers which it had not properly evaluated. Click here for more on Goldstein’s hoax, and for his book, here.
In The Times, Ben Macintrye draws parallels between the magazine’s restaurant reviewing practices and book reviewing, where it has, apparently, never been seen as a requirement that reviewers actually read the book.
