Dare I say there’s a better burger then Shake Shack?
New York Burger Co. (located on Park Ave. between 23rd and 24th street) has Burger enthusiasts, like myself, salivating for more. With a diverse selection of: all-natural angus beef patties and sliders (all grilled to order) to an all-natural turkey burger, a vegetarian black bean burger, sandwiches, salads, and chili, you will keep coming back for more.
I walked in one afternoon with a friend, and pleasantly waited no more then 5 minutes to order. I asked the cashier for a recommendation; she recommended the popular Chelsea Burger, that’s served with cherrywood smoked bacon, cheddar cheese and 1000 island sauce. And her personal favorite, the Soho Burger: portobello mushrooms, swiss cheese, grilled onions and NY Burger Sauce.
Portobello mushrooms (also known as Portobella mushrooms) are not different then your standard white mushroom in taste. They’re just more grown and have meatier caps on them then the standard mushroom and just as soft. Along side the melted, buttery, nutty swiss cheese, and their signature NY Burger sauce, which added a touch of sweetness to the burger, was just mouth watering.
Hate long lines? How about something other than cheese as a topping? Would you like some hand-cut fries to go along with your meal? Are nine dipping sauces enough for you? If you said yes to any of these then i’d recommend New York Burger Co for you.
With nice decor, a friendly staff, and plenty of chairs to go around I can see you already packing your things to leave school now.
Burgers start at $6.75 (speciality ones are about $8) plus another $3.50 for an order of fries and a soda and you’ve got yourself a real meal. Don’t forget to show them your Brauch ID card for a 10% discount. It may be above the average amount spent for lunch, but with food this good, who cares?
So I can’t tell you how many times I read and re-read my blog to make it sound the way I want to and it didn’t come out. I try and write with a casual tone and do the “show don’t tell” and it failed miserably.
I can agree that maybe my voice sounds casual but I wanted it to sound like I’m sitting next to you and I’m telling you how I feel about this one-on-one. It seems like I’m teaching you how it is and not really sharing my experience. I really dislike this and for this reason I can say I’m strongly dissatisfied with the piece. “Show don’t tell” is also something I’m struggling with. I want to share my knowledge of food with my audience but am unaware of how to do this without showing. I don’t want a review to be a learning experience, although I think that I want to make it that way. I don’t want to teach I want to share.
Writing this was fairly simple. The process of doing this was just like a journal. I went to many restaurants and other places, asked for the best dish, and wrote what it had in it and how it all went together. I have about 10 other restaurants that I have to review but it doesn’t come out as smoothly as I would like it to. I know how I feel and how I want you to feel about these places but for some reason it won’t come out that way. I’m playing more with commas, semi-colons, colons and dashes in an attempt to improve my writing and playing with the pace of the piece. At times it sounds forced, but I’m not forcing it.
How do you do one of these”—“on an online blog? It won’t come out! I keep having to copy and paste it from word and it gets lost somewhere in-between. Now that I’m actually writing this blog it feels as if I’m intimidated by many people reading my writing and feel like I have to ask 102893467 people to read my writing before I finally put it up and make this is a fully functioning blog. Ahhh who would’ve thought it would be this hard?!
Carlos,
I’d say that, on many levels, you achieve your goal of writing in a casual way that feels like you’re speaking to the reader. There’s an approachable quality to the work.
The main thing that I’d like to see you do for revision is to revise this essay–which is pretty much straight-up review–into a genre that we’ve been working on in this class, as the final project assignment calls for. I think it’s possible to use what you have here, and to use the ideas and passions of your personal food blog, for this assignment. But you need to re-orient it toward creative non-fiction writing. It has to read more like creative non-fiction or a personal essay than an excerpt from a foodie blog. How do you do this? You make it more personal, you provide an introduction that sets up your interest in starting the blog, maybe you write an essay about your desire to do the blog and narrate the adventures and challenges of of blogging. Include some of the frustration you note in your cover letter, perhaps. Talk about the birth of this interest, your perceived need for such a blog for Baruch students, etc. You might include excerpts from some of your reviews, or this NYBurger review, but the reviews won’t be the “point” or the center. The story of your interest in food and the birth of your blog idea will be the center. Then, you would be producing an essay in line with what we’ve been working on this semester and be able to do it in a way that resonates, I think, with your interests (thus bridging the course and your interests). Does that make sense?
In terms of local issues in the review (e.g. sentence-level issues, mostly), there are some inconsistencies and errors that, if you correct, will make your prose more “readable.” You might look first at King’s big arch-enemy: adverbs. Take your very 1st sentence, for instance. “Infamously, well-known…” Infamously is an adverb. Do you need it? In this case, doesn’t it say almost exactly the same thing as well-known? Just use one good adjective, there and it’d be stronger. Put the whole piece to this test.
Then look at the colon in the next paragraph. You never want to put a colon after a preposition (like “of). You might review the handout on semi-colons, colons, etc. It’s the right impulse to use them, especially when you want to write clear, immediately accessible prose as in a review-type essay, but you need to make sure you’re doing it right.
Also, I think if you want to use the second person here and speak directly to the reader as “you,” then you might consider doing it a bit more consistently. And check for little errors like capitalization, etc. You definitely don’t want these in your final posts on your blog or in the essay you end up crafting for this class.
You may give some thought to audience. Your classmates might help with this one, since they are your target audience. But I thought the paragraph on the mushroom mostly unnecessary. Do most people probably know this information? Perhaps it would be better to focus on the palatability of the mushroom, how it worked in the overall concoction–that is, focus on the review rather than explanation of what an ingredient it, info many readers might not need as much as the opinion on if it’s good or not. Or, if you want to explain an ingredient, explain what NY Burger sauce is. That’s the real unknown ingredient that you mention.
I look forward to reading the story of your food passions, of getting from idea to concept, and of the challenges you’ve faced along the way!
So you think i should write a piece more like “the life of a food blogger” or something of that nature? Where I can use it as a reflection of the process that I’m taking to create this blog? I like that idea. So separate my blog from this assignment and use it more as a vent to all of the things that come along with doing this kind of writing. I think that it will be a fun and interesting piece of creative non-fiction and i might take this different way of looking at this and have fun with it.
I remember you bringing this idea up when we were talking about my final project but was a bit confused by it.
I will start writing it now and edit my post and hope to appeal to everyone in this way. I hope it will give everyone enough time to read it before class tomorrow and i will also e-mail them letting them know of my new post.
Dear Carlos,
I like the idea of your final work as a food blog. You’ve obviously gone out and done some “research” on the topic and I can see it being helpful to the people who read it.
I had the same problem with my first essay where when you try to write something informative, it tends to sound uninvolved or detached. I don’t know how much creative capacity you have writing food reviews other than getting really descriptive with the food itself. As a suggestion, maybe you could write these reviews based on your own experiences with the food rather than just giving us the facts or telling us what other people say about it.
Dear Charlos,
I think what you are trying to accomplish with this final project is really cool (I clicked on your original link on our blog and saw the BaruchEats site though maybe I’m completely wrong). So are you aiming to create a blog with different links to different reviews – is that it? I think your finished product is going to be great! It’s definitely creative.
You said you wanted to come off as casual – I think with a little bit of work you can easily get there. The only thing that sort of keeps me at an arm’s length is your approach to the foods you describe. I am not much of a foodie, so the ingredients you mention don’t really create a vivid scene in my mind as I believe they do for you. I think it would be helpful to approach this assuming that most people aren’t really familiar with different types of mushrooms and cheeses. It will force you to think about walking us through it a bit more, in turn (I think) making your writing more warm and approachable. I would suggest playing with your descriptions and what senses you decide to let your reader tap into. Instead of telling me what the burger had in it, maybe tell me what it smelled like, the anticipation before that first bite, what it tasted like, how great of a food-gasm it gave you – that I would be more interested in. I think showing us and bringing us with you into those restaurants, rather than telling us what was there will help with the casual tone you are trying for along with making your reviews more vivid. Two birds with one stone!
That being said, my favorite line in your draft was “Along side the melted, buttery, nutty swiss cheese, and their signature NY Burger sauce, which added a touch of sweetness to the burger, was just mouth watering.” You give me texture here, an image, a taste. Because you are working with food in your piece, I think a major part of bringing your reader in will be to engage us with the sense of taste. Here, the buttery, nutty swiss cheese gets my mouth watering (and my stomach growling). I don’t even think you have to give us taste in every description, but I do think it is something worth playing with.
Charlos,
I completely understand your problem with writing a review in a casual tone and trying to make it sound sincere and, to a certain degree, personal, to the reader-but I’m not entirely sure that the way you’re doing it in this draft is the best way to go about that. It’s not for lack of trying–I honestly believe that writing a review on ANYTHING will always have a pedantic tone to it, one that’s difficult to shake off. But I wonder if the kind of review you’re writing might be able to change that entirely for you.
In this draft, you describe the process of dining at New York Burger Co., which I think is something anyone would be interested in if they are unfamiliar with the place. But I think, more than anything, people want to know what kind of experience they’re walking into. A review that throws in the cheery lighting, the fresh smell of veggies, the friendly cashier’s smile, the sturdy trays they serve the food on, the clean floors, and more descriptions that paint a scene is one that more people will find helpful, I think. It’ll also help to have the reader feel like you’re talking to them directly, one-on-one, as you mentioned in your cover letter.
I think that if you were to work in your personal experience, you would automatically bring in an authentic tone to your review. You’d also have room to use metaphors, play with sentence structure, and really create in vivd images to make your review tangible to the reader.