Hanna Raskin Gives Us a Random Lesson in Southern Food

Oh, Raskin. Granted when one moves to a brand new city to be its restaurant critic, it's natural to view everything through the lens of your previous locale (or, in her predecessor's case, through the lens of your entire life).

Seattle Weekly's relatively new restaurant critic, who came to us by way of Dallas, today shares a lengthy treatise on Southern food. And while Raskin is highly complimentary of her newfound city, she paints rather a broad picture of Seattleites:

Diners here can distinguish between ramen and udon noodles, parse the seasoning differences between northern and southern Thai cuisine, and identify the sustainable seafood in a fishmonger's display case. As a food writer here, I don't have to gum up my reviews with ancillary explanations of tempeh, Alice Waters, or mole.

Why the lesson, you might ask? Her reasoning for this enormous blog post is that the South forms "a gap in Seattle's collective food knowledge."

Raskin became somewhat legendary in her previous job for writing this piece announcing that "the Dallas dining scene is broken." She also doesn't seem to be a huge fan of her time there, referring to Dallas just last week as "a city that values being seen over seeing." She seems to have a much warmer view of Southern cuisine, though Eater operatives in Texas confirm that the local cuisine is more likely to be categorized as Texan before Southern.

Now that Raskin has this out of her system, hopefully she can continue her recent streak of debate-provoking reviews, and reviewing her own reviews — a practice many readers say they enjoy just as much as the main event.

· Clearing Up Five Misconceptions About Southern Food [Seattle Weekly]
· All Previous Hanna Raskin Coverage on Eater Seattle [-ESEA-]