A highlight of a recent trip to New York was eating at Gordon Ramsay’s new place at The London hotel. We ate there on New Year’s Eve - an astonishing nine-course tour de force, during which the couple at the next table got engaged, and after which we got a little tour round the immense kitchen. The chef de cuisine there, Neil Ferguson, was born in Millport - the island just down the Clyde from Dunoon, where I was raised. We’re everywhere, I’m afraid.

So it was a good night. I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with some great restaurants, even luckier to have been able to eat in a few of them thanks to an indulgent Mrs Tosh, and the joys of (other people’s) meedja business expenses. And the meal in Ramsay’s in New York ranked as the best I’ve enjoyed in a restaurant; not because of its scale, but because of the mixing and balancing of flavours, perfect again and again.

It was food that simply tasted like very little I’ve ever experienced before. I’ll spare you any attempt to replicate it in words; I lack the vocabulary. Let’s just say it was damn fine. And I’m probably sold as a result (plus, of course, the clear Scots Mafia connection).

I’ll accept I didn’t necessarily have a typical experience. The menu was special, it was a special night, stops were pulled out. But I was not surprised to see m’colleague Gareth MacLean’s warm review of the place on our travel site in January, or the Indie’s four out of five review around the same time.

And, thus, I was surprised to see this very lukewarm review in the New York Times, which I’ll guess will be a Huge Deal because it’s the New York Times and Their Word Goes in NYC restaurants.

Now, of course, I disagree with what it’s saying, although I accept that maybe the day-to-day menu is less impressive than the one I experienced on December 31. What bothers more is the style of the review, and how that style appears to interfere with the substance. My suspicion is the theme for the review is founded less on food, more on Ramsay’s TV persona, and thus the riff the reviewer can derive from that. That’s a very Bad Thing, for reasons I’ll explain at the end.

But this is a trick I know, because I’ve done it too; you look for an angle into a story from the moment you start work on it. Here, you sit down, you note the surroundings are very muted (they are) and tasteful (they are), you note that’s is in stark contrast to the man you see on TV, who’s brash and rude. So you immediately think your intro’s going to be something like this:

“THE chef Gordon Ramsay has a British television show called “The F Word,” an American television show called “Hell’s Kitchen” and, by all accounts and appearances, the kind of foul mouth and foul temper those titles suggest.

You might expect his debut New York restaurant to be brash and any of its shortcomings to be attributable to audacity, not timidity.

You’d be wrong.”

Sound enough intro. Little wonder: the reviewer’s a time-served former political and general reporter with years of experience of doing this stuff. But already you’re moving down the road of swapping a convincing analysis of the food, one that’s of use to your reader, for a snappy way into your piece.

Still, the review soon moves into a much more interesting comparison…

And for all his brimstone and bravado, his strategy for taking Manhattan turns out to be a conventional one, built on familiar French ideas and techniques that have been executed with more flair, more consistency and better judgment in restaurants with less vaunted pedigrees.

… but doesn’t expand on it. Which restaurants? One example? One chef? A hint? Nope, instead we’re going into a description of the food that sounds pretty good, but ends with an absurdly obvious conclusion:

“An appetizer of caramelized sweetbreads with creamed artichoke had a textbook luxuriousness, but it didn’t venture into any new or particularly gripping chapters. An entree of roasted chicken for two was adorned with a sufficiently flavorful fricassee of bacon, onions and prunes, but it was still just a roasted chicken for two.”

I’ve never known a roasted chicken to be anything other than… roasted chicken, except when subjected to my remarkable kitchen skillz, in which case it becomes burnt roasted chicken. Unique, gripping taste, let me tell you, with the added edge of is-the-the-oven-on-fire drama.

Weirdly, the review then goes on to be pretty nice about the place (although it gets only two out of four stars), but the reviewer can’t resist a return to the old riff with…

But the restaurant fails to deliver the most important thing of all: excitement. And it’s impossible, given Mr. Ramsay’s reputation, not to be primed for it, and not to be rankled by the low-key loveliness that you get in its place.

The “most important thing of all” is “excitement”? Are you quite sure? For all my good fortune in getting to eat in these places from time to time, I can only hope I never lose my taste for “low-key loveliness” and - naive as I might be - the taste of the food itself. In my madder moments I think that’s the most important thing of all - other than not being poisoned by the damned chicken for two.

But it would be silly to take this kind of thing too seriously. Really, they should teach this in media classes at school: there’s an age-old trap lots of people in the media business encounters early on. Some fall for it, some dodge it.

It’s this: working as a commentator it’s inevitable that one day, someone will invite you to say something outrageous or otherwise noteworthy. That, or you’ll feel the temptation to pep up the ordinary with something a little more exciting. Nothing wrong with that, except they - or the temptation - will be asking you to say something you won’t quite believe, or which is an exaggeration of what you actually think (or even the opposite of what you think). But you know you’ll get points - audience, another commission, brownie points, a column - if you say it. So some do. You see it every week on Newsnight review, or from guests on rolling news stations or talk radio (I’ve been there) or in the papers.

The best, I think, don’t fall for it; if they’ve nothing to say, they say so. Their art is in picking their moments to go off on one, and to say nothing much, but artfully, the rest of the time.

Everyone else, seduced by the lights, the airwaves and the attention, ends up on clip shows reading their views off a junior researcher’s script. It’s a choice you make. Paint mostly in greys, or entirely in dramatic black and white.

This review is not that lost. But it shows enough to suggest the reviewer felt that obligation weighing heavily as he typed away. And it’s a real old media failing, because getting to the position of writing big reviews in a big paper is hard work. The holder will know the pressure to make it interesting to read, whatever happens.

But the usurpers aren’t necessarily forming an orderly queue at the editor’s office door. I’m not much into Adrian Holovaty’s data driven vision for journalism - it sounds like a dull old world. But some areas cry out for more data, less posing.

When you see the demand for vast, wisdom of the crowd-style reviewing on the web, for the collective voice of hundreds of people offering their opinion no strings, or paychecks, attached, this is why. No conceits, no witty turning of paragraphs, just what really (really) matters.

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