Reverb Watch
If you read my post last week you will have seen my rather unflattering opinions of a restaurant review in The Echo. I’ve made my thoughts known before but this time I felt it needed a full post. I had quite a big response, mostly supporting what I said, except for one fellow who turned out the be posting form an IP address registered to Trinity Mirror (owners of the Echo), I’ll let you draw you own conclusions.
Anyway, the whole post is here, including a twitter conversation I had about it with some Echo Staff. I also has another twitter discussion with another Echo employee about it, that can be seen in my mentions.
Basically I wasn’t very happy with the response, or lack there of, from the Echo, but felt that it would be a subject I would leave before commenting again. However, that was until the Echo’s recent restaurant review about The Olive Press. A review, that gushed and fawned over a restaurant that serves decent and reasonable priced pizza and pasta. I felt, after reading the review, that a Michelin Star would soon be on the way to the Olive Press.
This was another review that I felt didn’t give a fair impression of the chosen restaurant, I feel the Echo should be doing better. The full review is here, if you can bear to read it all, you’ll see a similar lack of critical understanding in the previous review.
In summary, The Olive Press does decent pizza and pasta and a few other things, its reasonable food at a reasonable price. It is not the culinary wonder that the Echo seem to fawn over.
This will be the first in “Reverb Watch” as a kind of review of reviews, hoping to keep an eye on the Echo, hoping they raise their game and perhaps start offer a more accurate opinion. Their readers deserve it.
Well done and keep up the good work. Echo reviews make me laugh especially when they judge quality by the quantity of food received. They also need to try much harder when they review chain restaurants
Thanks Lesley, I’m glad you liked it.
After moving here from London I’ve been reading your blogs posts for some time to get an idea of what’s what in Liverpool and in all honesty I find some of your comments laughable. Reviewing a restaurant doesn’t always mean you need to give scathing account of what you ate, what didn’t arrive on time and what the staff should have said. Yes you could argue that you have a certain audience which values your opinion, but that’s most likely because they have similar tastes to you and will be drawn to your posts. That’s fine. But what you’ve got to remember is The ECHO is your city’s newspaper. Grannies, office workers, mothers of two look to paper for information. They know their readership and cater to what works with them. So somewhere like Olive Presse will probably be quite special for a young teens special occasion – as described in the post you’ve linked to. So basically you should get off your high-horse; especially when your most recent posts include reviews of local ice cream vans!!
Lani
Thank you for you comment, I’ll assume that you are not an employee of The Echo, even though similarly worded comments have come from employees masquerading as members of the public in the past. I don’t think you’ve really grasped the post, that or you are trying to pick wholes that aren’t really there.
Firstly, I like the Olive Press, it does decent food at a reasonable price, it wont blow your socks off nor will leave you unhappy. I would quite happily eat there. This post isn’t about the Olive Press.
Secondly I don’t write deliberately scathing reviews, I write reviews that are accurate and truthful, there are plenty of very positive reviews on my blog.
Thirdly this post is about a level of critical writing in the Echo that is not good enough for Liverpool, the grannies, office workers etc that you name don’t get an accurate view of the restaurant the Echo writes about. All these people do turn to the Echo for guidance, thus they should expect a good level of critical analysis, they do not get it. This point was made quite clear in my original post.
Your ‘high horse’ comment doesn’t really make sense, as I wasn’t having a go at the Olive Press.