Talk about your burnings of Kingston. We don’t mean next month’s thing based on the thing from 1777. We mean the now-notorious review of Uptown restaurant Brickmen Kitchen + Bar in the Albany Times Union by one Christopher J. Yates. It’s a review loaded with so much sarcasm, snark and rudeness that your Editorial Team can still catch a whiff of its condescending scorch coming from the direction of North Front Street. It also brings up a lot of questions about community, journalists writing in small communities about the subjective and the impact an unfair restaurant review can have on people trying to make a living.

A few excerpts if you haven’t read it:

Here’s how Yates described the Thai dumplings, using language generally reserved for H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King novels: “They were four roundish lumps, randomly thrown into a dish and sunk in an unfathomably terrible sauce, looking like worm casts muddled with soy sauce. It was the worst dish I’d eaten for some time. That these inedible balls emerged from the same kitchen as the divine sushi roll was flabbergasting.”

He didn’t like this dish either: “The pasta (on the chalky side of al dente) was reasonably coated with a meaty mushroomy sauce and arrived with a hunk of short rib, as huge as an elephant’s heart, plopped on top. It’s as if the cook had planned to incorporate the beef, shredded meltingly into the sauce, but then lost the will and decided that dinner is too easy for diners. How about they do some of the damn work for a change?”

That last line was a bit of foreshadowing, as Yates went on to both insult his server and the world’s oldest surviving religion, Hinduism, with some 1.3 billion followers: “It doesn’t help that our waiter offered Parmesan and forgot the offer five seconds later, instead entering into a deep zen-like trance. I waved desperately, pleadingly. But I could have set fire to the room and this zen master would have remained in his impenetrable transcendental bubble. Ommmmm!”

(The phrase “aum” — not “om” and definitely not “ommmmm” — is to Hindus one of their most sacred symbolic phrases, “a sonic representation of the divine.” To be fair, Yates is far from the only one in this allegedly “enlightened” county who has no idea what “aum” really means.)

Like we said, ow, it burns. Don’t get it twisted: restaurants have been reviewed in Kingston before. Some of those reviews have been bad. Reviews of restaurants, movies, records, books, plays, et al. are a valid form of journalism and an important component of consumer protectionism. We respect a writer that calls them as he sees them, and sometimes that calls for strong language. Brickmen is set up in the former Boitson’s space, taking upon itself some pretty big culinary shoes to fill. But no one on your Editorial Team, one of whom goes back all the way to 1997 in Kingston journalism, can remember a local anything written about with this level of sarcasm and derisiveness. And in a legitimate news outlet, no less.

Maybe this sense of a line having been crossed is on us —Kingston has long touted its restaurant scene as worthy of prime time and when you do that, you place yourself in an area where a reviewer can rip you to shreds. You got slammed in the newspaper? That’s life in the big city, kid.

But Kingston isn’t Manhattan — not yet anyway. The restaurant owners and staff are all local people, and we’re still small enough to feel it when one of our own is wronged. You only need to look at the hundreds of social media posts supporting Brickmen after the review came out to know that’s true. May it remain ever so.

To get to the bottom of things, last night an Editorial Team member went to Brickmen and ordered much of the same dinner Yates did. With Yates' words fresh in mind, they expected the worst. But they found it to be “not bad at all” and “perfectly safe to order.” They also talked to restaurant staffers, who described being blindsided and disheartened, the review landing on them like a foreign invasion.

We caught up with Brickmen owner Dave Amato of Ole Savannah fame today. While his staffers were upset when it came out — “Everyone felt it was out of line,” he said — the amount of support shown by the community was very welcome.

“I have a great group of professionals working for me and I stand behind them,” he said. Amato added that he’s a “positive thinker” who’s not angry about the situation but very happy with the community’s response.

"It's easy to get behind a keyboard and bash somebody," Amato replied when we asked him what he would say to Yates if the two met. "You should think about the effects of speaking so negatively about someone who's put their blood, sweat and tears — and money — into a business."

We found the review to be an ill-advised and unfair piece of writing that really and needlessly hurt some good people. The maxim from the PR world is “never punch down” — Yates’ review was the polar opposite of that. It comes off to us as a large, out-of-town organization pouring derision on a small-town business because it amuses them and because, since Kingston is small potatoes compared to their home base of Albany, it can. Which we know is a look the Times Union is not seeking; since it started covering this region a few years ago, the TU has done solid professional work here. (And their website is a lot easier to deal with than the Freeman’s.)

To our restaurateur buddies, we recommend printing out a picture of this Yates fellow — they’re on his Instagram but we’ve included one above — and posting it in the kitchen with appropriate advice on what to do if they see him walk in. Democracy dies in sunlight and so does snark.

If the review was meant to be a legitimate warning of bad food ahead, a heads-up for which we should be grateful to its author, it failed enormously. Instead of us thinking Yates is a hero in consumer protectionism, we think he’s got no sense of proportion and about the same level of empathy. It makes us, and apparently a lot of other people, want to stick up for Brickmen and its staff and go there more, not less. (But if its purpose was just to be a s--t-stirring piece of clickbait, mission accomplished.)

Kingston’s gone through her changes in recent years, but it remains for the most part a close-knit community, more a family than a city, and a family that’s there for one another. So the next time some out-of-town writer cooks up a cauldron of unjustified snot to dump on us, they and those who employ them had better be ready for the pushback.