Melissa McCart has left the building. She blew out of town on Sunday morning. She seemed genuinely relieved; as if a long ordeal was coming to an end. So she left town; back to DC; back to her real friends; back to the safe feeling you get when everyone sees things the same way that you do.
She spent her short time here pumping up mediocre chefs and struggling to fill her blogging space. It didn't take long to figure out that she wasn't very good. She had no ideas, no insight and always seemed to miss the point of places she reviewed. You couldn't tell from what she wrote if you might like the place yourself; which is the entire point of reading reviews. She made the biggest mistake that a restaurant critic can make; she tried to be a know it all before she knew anything.
Melissa McCart wouldn't have been such a big deal if New Times hadn't rolled her in with such arrogance; like she was some sort of big-time hire. When you hire a nobody and try to make them seem like a somebody you're just setting them up for a fall. Asking her to single-handledly revive a Newspaper that has fallen so far is a tall task, even for a somebody.
Melissa started badly by reviewing the worst restaurant ever to hit Fort Lauderdale, The M Bar. I didn't even recognize that it was a new writer, because it was written with the same idiocy as every other review in New Times. She didn't yet know that the editor who accompanied her was a hack, and she wrote like a student trying to please the teacher. It didn't get much better.
She never learned that Restaurant Owners Lie, and when you just parrot what they tell you, then you're just a tool. Insight is what readers expect from a Critic. We can hear how great the chef and the food is on the Restaurant's Facebook Page.
In the end, Melissa McCart wasn't much different than the chefs she wrote about; it was all just a lot of hype. Her dream job turned into a chore; because she just wasn't good enough to make the job her own.
Mission aborted
"The custom became established in New York City in the 1980s, thanks partly to Jews on the Upper West Side who went to Barney Greengrass for bagels and lox"
I wonder what it was I was eating in NYC on Sundays in the 1970s.
I don't think you leave a staff job at a major newspaper with benefits to blog for a virtual magazine that doesn't even do reviews unless 1) you get fired 2) you don't get along with your boss or 3) you hate Long Island. All possibilities. NYC is a lot more interesting, but also a lot more expensive place to live. If you make $50K in NYC you're virtually living in poverty.
As long as she doesn't come back down here, I don't really care.