On "Because the Fat Lady Has to Eat", i.e. my thoughts

The readings for this week were varied in style, tone, and cuisine of food review. Some were scathing, and some were a run down of the experience. My favorite was Sam Sifton's Because the Fat Lady Has to Eat. Because we've read A Cook's Tour, we know the importance of the head chef being Jonathan Benno, and Thomas Keller's second in command. For the reader then understands the high praise of the food, and Sifton extrapolates: "His rigati, a hollow ridged noodle that he offers with Dungeness crab, sea urchin, peperoncini, a few sea beans and quite a few pats of butter, is similarly charged with excess, tasting of open ocean and marsh, and the milk of the cow standing upon the shore".  I can almost taste it, and the heavy use of butter in the menu sounds fantastical. It's disappointing to hear the service is lacking with such great food behind it, but it's been four years since the review, and I assume they're improved some. This of course brings up relevancy of reviews, as one ok review did not hurt Lincoln Ristrorante. It seems that reviews themselves become time dated, and only good for one year or so. Now if the food reviewer said it was absolutely terrible, that review might have more of a negative effect. People dislike paying for bad food, so a warning from a food writer is probably a death knell for a bad one. One relevancy though, I wonder if in thirty years the writing could stand on it's own, or if this format will become so much dust in the wind, like outdated scientific knowledge.