Joe McNamee: I watched a TikTokker sweat, grunt, stuff his face and call it a food review

Instead of a new wave of digital food critics or reviewers, we instead got a cadre of self-appointed food ‘influencers’.

Bastion Restaurant, Kinsale. Picture Chani Anderson

In these digital days — when many restaurants appear to spend as much time online as they do in the actual kitchen — Bastion, in Kinsale (see last week’s restaurant review), is something of an outlier, extremely reticent when it comes to social media.

Neither can you blame those digitally dynamic restaurants; they are only speaking the lingua franca of our age, believing the national conversation around dining out is now primarily online.