B.R. gets the Gun – Our food critic responds to Rien Fertel’s “City Portrait” of Baton Rouge

Our food critic responds to Rien Fertel’s “City Portrait” of Baton Rouge, published in the March/April edition of Garden & Gun magazine

Dear Mr. Fertel,

Let me begin by congratulating you on your recent City Portrait of Baton Rouge. You must be very proud to receive exposure in such an admired national publication. Your ‘portrait’ does paint a thousand words, though the first 200 or so seem steeped in rancor for our fair city. Would you begin a similar profile of Birmingham or Athens with 2-3 paragraphs delineating all you don’t like about the city? How do those cankerous words fit into an article that is supposed to be lauding Baton Rouge?

Given your antagonistic tone, it’s a wonder that any of Garden & Gun‘s readers made it past the first two acrimonious paragraphs. Should I have been uninitiated with what this city has to offer, I certainly wouldn’t have read past your assessment of Baton Rouge as “geographically and culturally unorientable.” You expound with a derisive quote calling our city a “whirlpool of despair.” But even that did not quell your thirst to further deride. “As if that was not cruel enough” (it was cruel enough) you finish with a flourish, calling our city “the inner station of the ultimate horror.”

Wow. This is a prime example of our need to keep our friends close, but our enemies closer. And as for your appraisal of our government as “infamously corrupt,” I suggest you check yourself. Last I heard our mayor is not being indicted on 21 counts of corruption from lining his pockets with bribery cash. People who live in corrupt houses should not throw stones of cash from the freezer.

I get it. You now live in New Orleans and, like most New Orleans’ residents, you are proud to call it home. New Orleans is phenomenal and unlike any place on the planet. But please remember, you live in the great state of Louisiana NOT the great state of New Orleans.

I fully understand that Baton Rouge is not like other cities, nor are we trying to be. We are simply attempting to be our own, authentic self. We are making great strides in recreation, arts, festivals, and food. And we are navigating these exciting developments while trying to find our own voice amongst the unique—and clamorous—voices of the cities to our east and west.

And, by the way, just because you go on to highlight a few of the many places and things that make our city culturally rich, this does not excuse your thinly veiled malice towards our town. I am sorry your time living in Baton Rouge was so odious that you feel you must lash out. However, your retaliation is no better than criticizing everything someone does just because it’s not the way you would have done it yet concluding by saying “surely you can see my criticism is constructive and comes from a place of love.” I’m certainly not feeling the love.

Just remember what you should have learned in Kindergarten: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. When you decide to descend from your haughty high horse please give me a call. I’ll welcome you into my “inner station” with open, friendly arms and a homemade cocktail and politely school you on how a true Southern gentleman should act. But I obviously will have my work cut out for me.