I think I've finally figured out what bothers me so much about WW's food writing: the overuse of flowery adjectives that a) make the writing clunky and b) do nothing to explain the food to me. Reading a WW food review is like reading a paper by a high school sophomore who just discovered a thesaurus--let's throw in some fancy words to cover-up otherwise mediocre writing!. Although a few creative adjectives can help keep the writing fresh, overuse weighs it down and makes it seem like you're trying too hard.
For example, in this review, you used:
"glistening," and "crowned" to describe the Mac and cheese. I can let glistening slide because that word triggers a couple of senses that I might use when eating, but crowned is too much--it tells me nothing about the dish that I couldn't get without that word. Over the course of a review, non-economical use of words adds up and becomes obvious to the reader.
"blotted with grease" and "smeared with feta cheese"--fairly certain this could have been written in a less pretentious, less over-the-top way. These two are prime examples of WW's big flaw--failing to tell me what the ingredient does and thinking that telling me how it was applied (using creative adjectives no less!) somehow compensates. It doesn't. It's lazy and/or poor writing.
"Lardoons"--this is a term of art that, I'd speculate, a high number of your readers won't recognize. Was the bacon really lardoon (or lardon) or just bacon that you decided to call lardoon? Given that lardoon is generally not smoked, your description indicates that it was just bacon. Either way, you shouldn't use words that require your readers to go to a dictionary unless the word is being used correctly (at which point you're educating your readers; but when used incorrectly, you are miseducating them.)
Finally, the worst offender in this review is the sentence that uses "swiped," "dusted" and "dotted" to describe the pizza. Three adjectives were used in that sentence to describe the pizza and yet I have no better understanding of this dish than I would have had you simply said "with olive oil, pungent roasted garlic, and earthy mushrooms and spicy sausage." (Note: pungent and earthy actually tell me something useful; note 2: How do you "dust" something with roasted garlic? dust is dry dirt, roasted garlic is generally not dry; did you mean "mudded with pungent roasted garlic"?)
In the end, this review reads too clunky and fails to tell me anything about the dishes in question that would assist me in deciding whether to eat at Rackhouse. And that's a problem across WW's food writing (as a reference, I went over to the Denver Post's website and read some reviews; they generally didn't make the same mistakes as WW.)
