If that weren’t enough, Edwards has apparently also written a book called “Le Whif,” the sequel to “Niche.” Here’s the description of the book, by the way, just for kicks:

“Whiff is the new novel by David Edwards (Séguier). It is illustrated by the Japanese Manga artist Junko Murata and continues the story of Edwards’ first novel, Niche, co-authored with Jay Cantor (Plessis). Whiff derives from an actual experiment performed in Paris at the art and science innovation center, Le Laboratoire. In this latest experiment, the double-Michelin-starred chef Thierry Marx collaborated with the colloidal scientist Jérôme Bibette to introduce a new way of encapsulating flavors. Wishing to present these delectable capsules in an unusual way, a group of art and science college students developed with Edwards a new way of eating by aerosol, called whiffing. Whiff, whose publication coincides with the commercialization by Le Laboratoire of aerosolized chocolate, explores how we dream, and realize our dreams, through surprising combinations of aesthetic and analytical methods. Whiff is also accompanied by the first “whiffing” recipes.”

I am not sure what kind of food trend this encapsulates, other than the fact that it’s vaguely molecularly gastronomical, maybe? Hell, I am not even sure I believe Le Whif isn’t some kind of Le Joke, as in many ways, Le Whif, or at least its marketing spiel, kind of goes against the current adoration for slow food, local food, comfort food, calorie-laden food. And while dieting is probably always trendy, this seems a little more late 80s early 90s than 2009. (Though that’s where fashion is these days, right? Scary.)

In fact, here’s what the homepage says Edwards says about his product: “Over the centuries we’ve been eating smaller and smaller quantities at shorter and shorter intervals.  It seemed to us that eating was tending toward breathing, so, with a mix of culinary art and aerosol science, we’ve helped move eating habits to their logical conclusion. We call it whiffing.”

I don’t think that’s true — in fact, I think most first-worlders are eating larger portions than ever. But I urge you to all check out out this site yourselves, if only to be grateful that more products like Le Whif aren’t the current status quo. And to get a laugh, of course.

Now, apparently, the country’s top restaurants are serving $100 dinners of the birds, simply roasted or fried and served family style. As I’ve harped on several times — indeed, so has everyone else with a place to harp publicly about food — chicken isn’t the only commoner cuisine that’s been given the nod to come aboard the Ship of Serious Food.

Top chefly takes on the world’s comfort foods have been on the rise for what seems like forever, and the most recent New York Times Fall Restaurant Preview issue shows that the next step in the trend is that instead of chefs doing their food truck (like Anita Lo) or their fast food burger joint (like Bobby Flay) or their SuperBowl chili spread in Food & Wine (like Michael Symon) they’re straight up converting their restaurants or building them from scratch with simpler, more down-to-earth fare as their theme.

Check all this from the Times piece:

“Mark Birnbaum and Michael Hirtenstein have named this restaurant for grandfathers and are building a dining room for Franklin Becker’s grill menu on the ground floor of the former Lotus.”

“It took Dung Trinh and his partners nearly two years to get their banh mi shop open on Bedford Avenue. Now they’re putting the finishing touches on this adjacent Vietnamese restaurant, which will specialize in home cooking, like pork belly and egg braised in coconut juice.”

“Ed Brown is downscaling. In late August he turned the front room of his Upper West Side restaurant, Eighty One, into Grill 81, with burgers and clam rolls. Now Center Cut, Jeffrey Chodorow’s second-floor restaurant in the Empire Hotel, will go from featuring steak to Mr. Brown’s casual take on the Jersey Shore.”

“David Graziano, who owns Sky Studio, and Corey Lane, a night-life entrepreneur, have rented the iconic space that was Florent and will turn it into a gentrified diner with comfort food from all over the map.”

“His place, as yet unnamed, is the brainchild of Mr. Hille, a former chef and owner of A16 in San Francisco; Mr. Foot, also a San Francisco chef; and Mr. Ronis, a New Yorker. It will focus on quick-service cafe items to eat in or take out, in a setting built from recycled bowling alley materials.”

“Named for a historic Los Angeles neighborhood, this tacqueria with ceviches and tequilas replaces Suba.”

“This storefront addition to Delicatessen will serve only macaroni and cheese.”

“Danny Abrams and Cindy Smith are turning what was Smith’s into a more casual version of Mr. Abrams’s Mermaid Inn with more sand on its feet.”

And the examples literally go on and on.

Like Zoe says, the only catch with this trend, which appears to be giving diners both a break (financially) and a boost (emotionally) during the recession that we may or may not be in, is that none of these restaurants are necessarily a deal. Cheaper than the over-the-top steakhouses and mammoth dim sum palaces of 2004 true, but cheap? Not a chance. If you pick your chicken well (a pastured bird; a heritage breed with flavor rather than giant breasts), you are much better off making roast chicken at home, Zoe wisely points out, than paying a 1,000% mark-up.

In other words, go out for sushi. Make your mac and cheese at home. And for chrissakes, if it’s cheap tacos you want, get thee to a real tacqueria, of which there are now plenty in the United States. I’ll go with you.

For sure the Midtown space — led by his former Ssam Bar chef de cuisine Tien Ho — will be similarly streetwise. There’s not yet a name or a set concept (at least beyond a mix of what Chang and Ho do best, which is Asiany, Southerny, cutting-edge cool food), but we know it’ll have no fancy tablecloths or whatnot and be just as sparse on four-star accoutrements as Chang’s first three restaurants.

It makes sense for the chef to continue to expand his empire – everybody’s got to make a dime somehow, right? And creative types get bored quickly, meaning they have to do something else once the latest something is done. But I can’t help but feel a little let down, much the same way I felt when Scarlett Johansson moved from geeky chick in Ghost World to same-old same-old sexy starlet.

It’s not that Chang wasn’t yet a celebrity or wasn’t yet discovered, it’s more the sadness of seeing small things grow bigger and bigger, till one day they’re not the upstart, but the man. That’s the nature of trends, though, whether they’re food, or fashion, or music. What was once something that belonged to the few, goes on to become the province of the masses, sometimes retaining its quality and integrity, sometimes not. Bobby Flay, Todd English, Tony Bourdain: These were once young chefs on the edge of the pack, right? Now they’re not just household names but brands. Similarly, surely there’s some poor old sod out there who remembers the first McDonald’s as his neighborhood burger joint.

I wish Chang and Ho the best of luck, and I know Momofuku Midtown will no doubt rock. But that move uptown just means somebody here in NYC is going to take Chang’s place as the outsider with all the right moves (why thank you, 70s movie titles). Meanwhile, I would personally like to put in a request that this person do this in my neighborhood. I’ll be the first to blog about you. I promise.

Instead, it’s something my Dad pointed out as we pulled into the packed parking lot of a spanking new winery near Winston-Salem: “They call this a recession?” Because this place was a show-room of capitalism, and people were there to buy it. (It was also tacky as hell). The space was kind of Italian-Americanate in style, with soaring ceilings, bad tapestry-like walls, a spurting fountain in the lobby, massive meeting rooms — one bride-to-be gasped as she peered in to check out the space — a terrace restaurant overlooking the vineyards out back (which were neatly labeled with fancy lettering), and a tasting room in the gift shop where the cheapest flight was $10 and most folks were buying not-so-cheap North Carolina wine, cheese straws and spicy peanuts, bad pottery, and pricey wine openers (hey! it’s got a logo on it!) hand over fist.

I am used to living in a place where the recession doesn’t seem to make a difference in flashy new restaurant openings, trendy stupidities like $100 chicken dinners that only include two chickens, and hordes hitting the hottest new thing the second it opens.  (That would be New York City.) That wasn’t what I’d expected to see when I went home, I guess. North Carolina’s strong and diverse economy hasn’t been totally shattered (and in fact the unemployment rate dropped while I was there) but I thought maybe the rush to stuff one’s face with artisanal cheese straws and whatnot might have been a little less in your face.

I was wrong. Everywhere I went, people were out spending money on good food, good wine, good beer, even as some things — most notably all the new condos built in the past few years — sat empty. In downtown Durham, they might have a bunch of apartments on Main Street unsold, but Toast (Counter Culture coffee, carafes of wine, shrimp and arugula bruschetta) and Whiskey (a leather couch, fine cigars and craft beer bar) are doing just fine, while Dos Perros, the newest fancy Mexican restaurant in a place with a ton of kickass and cheapass taquerias (like the amazing Los Comales), was so crowded on one night I couldn’t even take a seat at the bar.

In Raleigh, there’s a new beer garden (the Boylan Bridge Brewpub) with brews made in the basement and a view of the scrubby trainyards (and kudzu Jesus!) I used to walk over from my grungy post-collegiate apartment. Downtown, people are actually sitting outside at a slew of new restaurants. “Who knew Raleigh had a café society?” is what my Dad asked, only half in jest, while eating his spicy chipotle turkey sandwich at the cool new Remedy Diner on the sidewalk in front of the bus station and next door to the chic new Landmark bar. Which if you grew up in the South, you will realize is INSANE. (Fancy café and swank bar near downtown bus station? Wha?)

Okay, granted, plenty of restaurants have struggled and closed around the country, and the recession has certainly taken a toll on food-related businesses big and small. But I am hoping that maybe I wasn’t just witnessing the luckily monied few spend their inheritances. From the looks of the crowds, it doesn’t seem so. Many of those people at those bars and restaurants are friends of mine, who, last time I was home, made their drinking and eating decisions based on how many Pabsts you could get down your gullet for a ten spot and whether or not they knew the dude in the kitchen so they could swing a basket of free chili-cheese fries.

Who knew Raleigh had a café society? Not me. But it does now, apparently. Which is pretty damn cool, especially in the face of the first recession in my lifetime as a consumer.  So maybe, just maybe, people are spending their money on decent food — and the lifestyle that goes along with getting it — instead of new cars or hair-dos or whatever? Okay, it’s doubtful, but a food geek can dream, right?

The Dimins go to areas of the world — the fishing village called Charlottesville in Tobago, remote parts of Alaska — where fisherfolk (okay, mostly men) catch a lot of fish (using traditional methods, BTW) but can’t make a living. They can’t, Sean explained to me, because they don’t have local demand for their catch, and lack the means, the time or the ability to sell their fish to bigger markets that would pay premium, meaning big city restaurants and the fine foodies that love them.

Sean’s father started the company in the early 2000s, after taking his family to Tobago for vacation (yes, they’re from Long Island) and seeing first-hand the fishing communities, their amazing catch (oh wahoo, blackfin tuna and mahi mahi, you are so tasty) and those communities’ inability to make a real living. Amazingly enough, to me at least, Sean’s father, who at that point was in the plastics biz (!!) was able to see that what they needed to was to get their product to chefs hundreds of miles away.

That’s exactly what they set out to do. Sean says one of the hardest parts was getting fishermen to ice down their catch; they had to actually give out coolers and build an ice-making plant, along with fish processing facilities, on the island. And that’s exactly what they’ve done, connecting restaurants like Savoy and Landmarc in Manhattan with Tobago fishermen who catch sustainable species in traditional ways, all  thanks to the wonders of overnight delivery via FedEx. Since then, they’ve expanded that model, called Tobago Wild, to other fishing communities that need connections — and processing and distribution support as well — to bigger markets, launching Alaska Wild in Alaska and, most recently, Dixie Wild in the South. (In addition to North Carolina Amberjack, Dixie Wild is responsible for bringing Gulf Coast shrimp to NYC. I thank you. But please begin home delivery now.)

Here in New York City, there are a handful of groups doing similar things with farmers: Basis Farm to Chef is working to help collect and distribute far-flung farmers’ products from cheese to corn to city restaurants by providing pick-up and delivery. The book Organic Inc. also chronicles a former farmer near Philadelphia and D.C. who decided he might have more of an impact by creating a co-op of farmers with some trucks to get to those nearby markets than actually farming. And even Whole Foods, whether you approve of their CEO’s health care stance or not, has programs to handpick a few local businesses in each region and help them get their products into its stores.

What’s amazing to me is that this father-son combo with no food-world experience was able to see clearly one of the sustainable food world’s biggest problems: How to connecting rural or remote or small producers to the hordes of people with the demand for those products and the ability to pay for them.

It’s that arena — that gap between grower and fisher and consumer — where the most exciting moves are being made, IMHO, to feed the world in maybe more globally minded ways than the cargo truck of food from California. Of course it’s true that those trucks are the commercial extension of these little co-ops, and you always have to balance the costs (to the community, in gas, in environmental impact, to workers, of Fed-Ex flights) of collecting and distributing stuff from one place and getting it to another with the benefits. So … let’s just try to not make all the same mistakes again, shall we?

Lockard — he works for Levy Restaurants, a Chicago outfit that manages food service at many sporting events — is so happy with those red beauties, in fact, that he’s showcasing them at two of the upscale, box-ticket holder only restaurants he runs at the two-week long event: At Champions Bar and Grill the steaks come with a whole local Jersey tomato, baked with an herby Provencal bread topping. Meanwhile, alongside the fish mains at Aces, the seafood and sushi restaurant next door, the tomatoes are dressed with yogurt and cilantro, then topped with pickled red onions and a deep-fried wedge of avocado.

Obviously The Open isn’t the first sporting event to think community when it comes to the food — many stadiums, including the new ones for the Mets and the Yankees — pour city brews or have installed outposts selling local products from pickles to Philly cheesesteaks. But the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center — part of the sprawling Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, N.Y., it’s used only for the Open each year — is one of the first to consider food miles when it comes to sourcing, and it’s something Levy is trying to do across the board in the future.

Even with just 10% sourcing, especially impressive when you think about what sports events food sellers have to deal with: Things are supposed to be consistent when they’re called concessions, and you have to serve thousands upon thousands of people a day. That’s not always possible when you are dealing with small sustainable farms that can’t be sure how many pounds of tomatoes they’ll actually be able to deliver. Lockard works with several farms to cover the gaps, which also adds a layer of complications: Think 15 delivery trucks instead of one to a place where trucks need clearance and can’t always easily get into unload.

Part of the reason the produce push got passed at the Open, maybe, is that the high-end restaurants must be on par with what the world’s richest are used to: Which these days is seasonally sourced food, or at least something that looks like it (plus the associated price tag).  The United States Tennis Association was also on board with the idea from early on, says Lockard. Perhaps more importantly, it’s also chef Lockard’s personal passion. He grew up among the farmstands of Long Island, and last year decided to start out small, working to get all his arugula from Satur Farms near Mattituck. The chef, who spends the entire year at the National Tennis Center planning the event, even has a pipe dream to start a garden on the site, if he can figure out a way to do it.

And, Lockard adds, “we’re lucky where this event falls.” If the Open arrived in Queens around December, he means, there’s no way they could use or afford local lettuces or Jersey tomatoes at all. (He’s jealous of what they can do at The Staples Center in Los Angeles: “They have a longer growing season,” he says wistfully.)

But there’s also the draw of the local for those who might have avoided sports concessions entirely if possible. (Like me, maybe). A few year’s back I was talking with the PR rep for the New Jersey Nets, which may or may not relocate to Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, a move that has angered many residents. I suggested to him then that the Nets food service go local, both from a produce and a product perspective. Not only would it be totally cutting edge for sports food, I think I said, but it might endear the project to the nearby Park Slope parents who shop at co-ops and belong to CSAs.

I kind of thought then, like Lockard’s tennis garden, that it was a pipe dream for big sports to have small food. Looks like I was wrong, and this time, I’m glad to be.

With the exception of maybe serious jerk chicken fanatics, the Caribbean ain’t known as a foodie hotspot, so that recommendation a) might be a little weak and b) might be for restaurants like Casa Havana in the Westin Casuarina resort, or Eric Ripert’s Blue in the Ritz-Carlton next door.

But this chef is also showing me the island’s mostly overlooked local spots - the jerk chicken spots on farms that raise their own birds and little bars serving conch fritters and fry bread and the strip mall joint with damn good turtle stew. (Turtle, raised in massive quantities on the slightly cheesy farm on the island’s northern tip, is actually awesome; a little like supermuscular and flavorful steak, it takes both to stewing and to frying.)

For me this type of trip is a no-brainer. I work as an editor at two publications (Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn) dedicated to lauding local food traditions and locavore leanings. I’m also a food writer in New York City, where Cypriot honey from bees who only hit the fourth peach tree on alternative Sundays is sold at Fairway and friends gather to eat Szechuan peppercorn-doused beef tendon as a recreational activity.

But this is way beyond cutting-edge thinking here in the Carribean. The bartender at the Westin actually tracks down a local medicinal plant called Plumeria in the flower-filled cemeteries here at night (the blooms lose their flavor in the daytime, he says, noting that bunches also have less scent than singles) steeps them into a tea and makes a cocktail. That would be page one food blogger news in New York, but it’s not even on the menu in Grand Cayman. (For some reason, BTW, mudslides are the big drink here.)

And instead of turtle-tasting menus at the hotter spots that showcase this local meat in myriad ways or local conch on display, it’s likely sea bass, flown in like nearly 100% of this island’s restaurant food, that’s highlighted as haute cuisine. (Though it must be said that a) the sea bass at the Westin is freaking awesome, crusted in Macadamia nuts and served in a wild mushroom tea and b) plenty of visitors will seek out turtle soup at surfside hangouts.)

I am not faulting the hotels and resorts for not doing the local thing at this stage – this type of eating is just beginning to be mainstream in the mainland States, after all — but I hope the first one to make the move (and one will, for sure) will find that people might respond positively. And when it comes to deep-fried conch fritters with housemade jerk mayo and callaloo slaw, how could you not?

What I hope it all this means, I guess, is that maybe instead of reaching for organic whole wheat Trix and Snapple made with real sugar instead of corn syrup and low-cal breakfast patties on sale and buying the latest tome on eating right and dropping pounds for the perfect bikini bod, we might start cooking from scratch. It’s cheaper, no question, even if you are buying organic produce from the farmstand. (Boutique pea shoots and wild boar sausage for $21 a pound is another thing entirely, but nobody HAS to buy those from the farmers’ market.)

From my own personal (and positive) experience, I found that if you cook most of your own food starting with the whole ingredients, you avoid so much of the hidden salt, sugars and calories in anything you didn’t make yourself — even locavore restaurants taste so good cause they use way more artisanal grass-fed butter than you would, right? So even if you make yourself a BLT with thick-cut bacon and a thick sludge of mayo or a quarter-pound of goat cheese on farmstead bread every once in awhile (like, everyday, if you’re me and it’s summer) you’re probably gonna come out ahead — or behind, in terms of calories.  And when it comes to calories, I know from my most basic nutrition classes, weight loss and weight gained is all about calories in, calories out, no matter what mixture of carbs or proteins or whatever trans fatty foodstuffs they’re made of.

It’s occurred to me recently that the newest wave of diet books, in fact, aren’t diet books at all, but the Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle books that cover, well, to borrow from Nestle, “What to Eat,” both from a food safety, food policy and perhaps personal health perspective. They don’t have charts or graphs or calorie counting because they’re meant to help show us what’s going into our food and where good food is really grown. But they’re really the most effective diet books, if readers actually change their eating habits to what they suggest. Which is pretty much eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains than other stuff, don’t eat too much most of the time, and for god’s sake, get some exercise.

It’s boring, but one good thing I’ve found is that, hey, a homemade BLT tastes pretty damn good. Even without the bacon.

That’s Julie Powell, whose 2002 blog about sloppily cooking her way through Julia Child’s 1961 work in a year was one of the first to intrigue the masses and scored her a book and then a big-screen deal. There were always a few negative voices back in the early years (on the interweb? Never!) but when the book came out, Powell was reamed publicly for being self-absorbed: her work too fluffy, to full of sex and cursewords, too coarse to be translated to the printed page. Powell, in other words, wasn’t capable of the food-writing gravitas needed to be worthy enough to pair herself off with good old Julia.

Not welcome to the canon of great food writers was Powell, for sure. And a lot of this criticism comes from fellow un-booked and un-flicked writers, who perhaps could be, um, like, jealous?

But Powell also takes flak from food writers who maybe spent years on the line in small, exclusive French restaurants that raised their own chickens in the 1970s and decades on the food desk of a daily paper, who might be a tad offended that an upstart could take over their role with nothing but a WordPress account.

Virginia Willis, a cookbook author with her own blog, wrote exactly that: “People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts. The incredible proliferation and self-indulgent blabber of many food blogs has given people the freedom to hallucinate, ‘I can type and I eat, therefore I am a food journalist’!”

And the great Laura Shapiro totally reams Ms. Powell, or at least the onscreen version of herself, in a recent piece on Gourmet.com. (Note to Julie: Don’t read it.)

“The idea of Powell as a contemporary heir to this personal and culinary epic is absurd. Nothing in her relation to the kitchen offers the slightest hint that she has learned anything at all from her heroine. In the film, Adams tackles each recipe as if it’s her opponent on a battlefield and the only point of cooking is victory. If the dish comes out well, she glows; if it fails, she throws a tantrum. Watching tapes of The French Chef (splendidly recreated with Streep as the 1960s Julia), her sole reaction to the sight of a genuine master at work is to coo, “She’s so adorable.” This is a journey of self-discovery? At the end, she visits the Julia Child kitchen exhibit at the Smithsonian, and her husband takes a picture of her mugging at a portrait of Julia (i.e. Streep). It’s completely unbearable.”

All this is pretty damn similar to the crap flung upon Amanda Hesser, the former Times Dining section writer and Times Magazine food editor who got trashed for doing first-person columns on Mr. Latte. He was the fellow journo she ended up marrying who didn’t know you weren’t supposed to order a latte in the afternoon. (And countless other super-important rules known only to the true gourmet.)  Hesser got much the same critique from my fellow food writers, as I recall: Fluff, worthless, self-absorbed, not worthy of the Best. Food. Section. in The Country. (But people liked to read it, I guess, cause you know what? She got a book deal.)

There might be something here about how if women write in the first-person about their own daily thoughts and lives in the food world, they get bashed, unlike Tony Bourdain or the Amateur Gourmet or Michael Ruhlman, who do much the same and get kudos. But I’m more interested in the thought that these people were causing offense because of self-absorption and lack of gravitas about FOOD.

Because in case you hadn’t noticed, food entertainment with plenty of fluff-factor is kind of hot right now, meaning Top Cheffery and Iron Cheffing and Gwyneth with her blog and her future book and Bourdain with his travel show and every blog and vlog and Twitter feed. Just take a peek at any headline on Eater.com or The-feedbag.com, two NYC industry food sites that play more toward snark than serious food knowledge most of the time.

And for the mainstream, it’s been pretty much a given that as the Food Network has gotten ever more successful, their shows have less and less to do with the underpinnings of mastering cooking and more about personalities, people, competitions. More of us are getting into cooking shows and all the rest of it, perhaps, not because they really care about making or even eating good food but because knowledge of such is considered de rigueur these days, and any solidly self-absorbed American should know what mis en place means and that Tom Colicchio is surprised on a weekly basis that so many talented potential Top Chefs never seem to remember to taste their food for salt and pepper before they present it to the judges. (It’s so pedestrian a mistake! That even we wouldn’t make! Because we watch food Teevee!)

One of the commenters on Shapiro’s Gourmet.com post wrote that Powell “paved the way for Carol Blymire’s infinitely more enjoyable cook-with-me-through the French Laundry Cookbook (www.frencchlaundryathome.com), which is arguably the epitome of this genre.”

If working your way through a cookbook while simultaneously blogging about it is considered a freaking genre, then I think my point is proven. We are all just as self-absorbed wanna-be foodies with little or no gravitas like Julie Powell. We just weren’t smart enough to blog about it ten years ago.

1) This is the end of the era of the anonymous restaurant critic, which, while obviously already over as soon as people could scan photos and probably always somewhat circumspect, is now really, really over because the paper of record has decided to go with somebody whose mug is easily found online and was already known in the New York City food world.

2) This is the continuing death knell of the power of the restaurant critic, since there are no so many voices — some expert, some wack, but hey, all worth a read — commenting on any given restaurant, the power to “make or break” a space, as we all like to say, is no longer quite as possible.

OK number one is probably true on most levels. With current technology (meaning everything from restaurant gossip blogs to Google Image search to me, if I were a restaurant general manager, being able to shoot a photo with my fancy phone and send it to my PR agent for verification that so and so was over at table nine) it’s pretty damn easy to know when you have somebody worth paying attention to in the house if you care. And perhaps that does skew the results (feel free to debate away here).

And that fact gives more credence to the second point, which is that social networking, that reading a mish-mash of observations and experiences from normal people, some with trained palates, others with scant brain cells, actually helps you form a rounder picture of a restaurant. In fact, this was and is the whole concept behind the Zagat Survey guides, which bucked the mainstream (meaning the sole opinion from the Times critic back in the late 1970s) by letting regular diners — us — give our opinion in some kind of accessible forum.

But I wonder what most diners really think. Meaning the person somewhat interested in good food and great restaurants who reads their local review and looks up recipes and gets Gourmet magazine and Googles where to find the best hot dog in Raleigh, N.C. but doesn’t obsessively follow Twitter feeds about openings or whose place got shut down by the Department of Health. Meaning my parents, or most of my friends, and most of the people they know.

I worked at the New York Daily News as a features food reporter when they hired Restaurant Girl — a food blogger as famous for planting her face (and her cleavage) on her home page as her gumption for deciding to go ahead and review restaurants on her own terms. The New York food world was aghast, but our readers mostly didn’t even know who she was beforehand or that there was a controversy. So in the end, it was just as if they’d hired anyone else to do the job: Did they like her writing enough to read a review all the way through and halfway agree with her point of view if they’d been themselves?

My guess is that most people still care about what the reviewers say as much or as little as they did before, as long as they have this vague sense of trust that the writer isn’t taking foie gras home in a cooler and going on trips to Napa on the owner’s private jet. I also think that restaurant critics don’t have the power to make or break, not so much because there is more critical chatter about the restaurants, but because there is more chatter period.  Used to be the only restaurants you could really know about were the ones your friends told you about or the five or six your local paper covered every week. Now, should you so choose, you could obsessively read about five or six new places every hour, at least in a city like New York. (And that’s a habit I’d have to give zero stars, by the way.)