The problem is moreso that he chose to share out a picture of it proudly when it literally is just thrown into a bowl and I can barely recognize any of the ingredients involved. I didn't know that was even supposed to be fried rice without the accompanying context. By comparison, I can actually identify the ingredients in this image:
Yes, because that's a professional stock production image from
Food Panda, professionally cooked, studio lit, retouched for colour, and almost certainly not how it looks when it gets to you in the suspiciously cheap Bangladeshi restaurant this dish is apparently served in. Chinese cookery isn't exactly known for visual finesse, and Nick's dish seems to be rice, chicken, onions, presumably garlic, looks like an egg, which when stir fried in soy sauce become more or less the same colour, and bok choy wilts fast and loses its vivid greeness, all of which completely accounts for a drab dish - and I'm being annoying and pedantic about this because it illustrates what we're kind of doing.
Nick's rice looks like what a normal person trying to make a quick, no-fuss fried rice would look like: serviceable and unspecial - and yet, like many, many people on social media new to cooking who's lack of skills mean it makes it more effort, trouble and confusion than it should, he took a photo and posted it, because he felt it did take effort and was a relative success - as in, it's by far the
least objectionable thing we've seen him do this last year. He actually managed to cook something that was just acceptable, and yet we're zooming into grains of rice, seething about chopsticks (Nick presumably has state of the art cutlery) or being annoyed that a man who's prior culinary experience is mostly fumbling with ramen at 3 in the morning isn't more dainty with his ladle of brown carbs. It's fun to watch Nick fail and suffer because he is a shit, but looking for criticism in mundanity is a sign we've become a bit too addicted to hating Nick and expecting more reasons to keep doing so - which is understandable for a two-time consecutive LOTY award, but it's getting the thread full with hyberbole and tangents just like this one.
