Pâté LaBelle

We’re looking for a new food critic, someone who doesn’t immediately pooh-pooh everything he eats. Nah, it usually takes a few hours.

I tell you what. Extrapolating something from the Simpsons is hard. Such is their attention to detail that when they mention a thing, they’ve usually got a logo for it or it features visually in some way. The Kwik-E-Mart, Krusty Burger, Costington’s, et al are all very obvious but even the deeper dive stuff is usually taken care of. So this is a bit of a collector’s item. I say that. There are at time of writing roughly 760 episodes of The Simpsons to choose from. I do take my research seriously but even I have my limits.

Pâté LaBelle is an obvious play on the singer, and features in Lisa’s write up of local restaurants after Homer’s abysmal failure. Groin-grabbingly abysmal failure. He improves (kind of), leading Springfield into an epidemic of obesity. That actually only seems to take hold for a single scene, for some reason. He then gets accosted by his peers and turns into a bitter, scathing critic who hates everything.

The design is kind of based on something, but most fine-ish dining restaurants go with serifs. I think they think it looks timeless and classy. I mean, this is if they bother putting any effort in at all. Some logos are frankly a bit all over the place.

But then my cooking is shit, so maybe it balances out.