“The Mt Everest of Dining Experiences”: Multisensory Style in Restaurant Reviews

A restaurant review is a genre of food discourse where writers use rhetoric to evaluate a restaurant. Because few studies have apparently focused on the genre’s stylistic features, in this chapter we aim to examine those features in several dozen restaurant reviews. We study how authors structure their reviews, how they evoke the senses and use figurative language, and how they use rhetoric for various reasons. In sum, we try to show how reviewers verbally portray their multisensory experience in convincing and creative ways.