Our dining habits and intensions aside, is it the critic’s job to enter a restaurant to enjoy it, or to report on their observations as unbiasedly as possible?

Just like a critic is free to judge, a restaurant is justified in controlling its clientele. I think what Red Medicine did is rad, for the record.

Also, I DO believe, as you said, that honest writing is possible without anonymous eating. The difference (I think) between our stances is that I believe it has its value.

Anonymous eating and food criticism can be smutty and harmful, sure. The fun is sifting through what’s believable and what’s not. Are critics meant to be loved, and agreed with? Take away the elements of surprise and conflict and the only real service from a ‘write up’ is for the restaurant and the writer. There’s no fun in that.

Thanks for writing and commenting.

I don’t really have a beef with critics or restaurant criticism (except when it’s poorly done). I just think Red Medicine was, potentially, acting admirably in putting the interests of its relationship with its community above the needs of the critic. Basically, if the critic is just coming to critique and not to enjoy the restaurant, fuck ‘em, I say. The restaurant doesn’t exist to give the critic something to do.

I think that the intentions of the restaurant are all that it has to sell; all that exists, really. If the intentions are a certain way, they’ll manifest themselves in a better (or distinctive) tasting meal, most of the time. Or almost all of the time, if the intentions are about consistency.

As a diner, I don’t put too much stock in the taste of one meal, it can be bad and I’ll still go back, or, if it’s very cynical, it can taste good and I’ll never go back. I’m more interested in the communication I’m having with the restaurant, its chef and cooks, its owner, the farmers, the artisans. Their intentions come through, and that is, in my opinion, the only meaningful or interesting part of a restaurant experience.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

No credible journalist is going to go undercover, eat a meal or even a few, and write a review based solely on those experiences. Treating the food and the business as 2 separate subjects is necessary, and takes more work than most food writers can sanely handle when hourly pay breaks down to less than a dollar more often than not. Understanding a restaurant’s philosophy doesn’t come from reading related editorial, or studying the restauranteur’s blog, ‘about’ section, and so on. To have authentic experiences from ordering and eating food (that an average diner would be served), to the thoughtful exploration of a restaurant’s philosophy through staff and/or owner interviews results in a credible piece of work. These are attributes ALL works of journalism should have, obviously. It seems your beef (Jay) is more about the quality of journalism being produced, than the institution of food criticism itself.

Food writing, food journalism, food blogging, food review sites and food criticism all have one thing in common: food. But these ‘genres’ or whatever you want to call them are not synonymous. To generalize anonymous eating as misrepresentative of a restaurant’s food makes no sense at all to me.

I’ve got beef with the following:

‘People who know restaurants can tell you 90% of the truth about a restaurant from its menu, watching the staff during service, seeing food delivered to other patrons, and knowing the cultural and economic context in which it operates.

None of those things are affected by whether the staff knows the identity of the diner.’

Something is missing from the above. How the food TASTES. The taste of the food comprises only 10% of a restaurant’s ‘truth’? I don’t want to eat at that restaurant. If the food tastes good, people will come, and eat, because that is the business of a restaurant– the production of food. Ultimately I could care less about the cultural and economic meaning of the food, what it looks like on other tables, if the space has shitty acoustics or oppositely, if the atmosphere is the grandest I’ve ever experienced. I’m after tasting the food the way I can depend on it being served to anyone, at any time, because that’s how I judge if I’ll be back or not.

Everything else is a bonus. I know restaurateurs (like most independent biz owners) are a little crazy, control freakish, and ultimately want their ideas and culture embraced by the masses. But it’s the job of the journalist to interpret, outside of kick-downs, recognition from restaurateurs, and the smoke and mirrors that can and (sometimes) do detract from the most important aspect of dining: the food.

Cheers
Jay

That said, I suspect that for most “major” critics (a dwindling breed), anonymity has become a illusion maintained by both sides. I’ll pretend you don’t know me and you pretend you don’t know me.

I’d also say that this kind of anonymity is very different from the usual internet trollery, in that the end result is attached to a very public name. It has a different purpose and (in theory) a different outcome.

But this is a great discussion and I’ve enjoyed it. Thanks for the thoughtful post.

Yes, it’s true that the first impression is the most important, and many people won’t come back if they have a bad first experience. However, to infer from, say, one poorly executed dish, that the restaurant is bad, or inconsistent, and to broadcast that is a fallacy — although a very natural one given the way human brains work. We’re wired to think that the one experience we have at a place will be the same every time, for everyone else, but of course that’s not true. That’s why 3 times isn’t a big enough sample size to evaluate the consistency of a service kitchen — a lousy service might easily go 3 meals without making a mistake, and a great service kitchen makes mistakes every now and then, and it might be during one of those 3 meals. That’s why I say you can’t evaluate the consistency of a restaurant in only 3 visits. You can, however, learn a lot about a restaurant and judge its intentions in even 1 visit — it’s just not necessary to be anonymous.

As for not letting film critics into movies, I don’t see any parallels between a film critic and a restaurant critic; the filmgoer is literally consuming a product, the restaurant patron is participating in a shared experience with the people who work at the restaurant.

I’ve been in both places – as a newspaper reporter and as someone who spent years running a restaurant.

I nearly stopped reading the post, however, when you went into statistical significance. Of all people, I’d expect you to acknowledge that you only get one chance to make a first impression. (I’m impressed the LAT has a policy of going three times.)

The truth is, if a customer has a bad experience the likelihood of going back a second time is statistically low – and that’s significant.

What’s next, not allowing movie critics into film showings?

Cheers,
Kara

Thanks for commenting.

I disagree about the idea that a non-anonymous reviewer would get special treatment; more to the point, I disagree with the idea that a mediocre restaurant is capable of doing good work for one guest, by trying harder at certain times. As I said in the original post:

when [critics[ assert that anonymity is essential to do their job of evaluating and writing about restaurants, it reveals a bad misunderstanding of how modern restaurants work, and what they are capable of changing during a meal…95% of the work that goes into making and serving a dish happens well before the guest walks in the door. The most a restaurant can do for a “special” guest is to pay extra attention to not screwing up the final steps..

While it’s true a restaurant might be able to hide issues with their consistency of execution, by paying special attention to one guest’s meal, the thing is that a critic wouldn’t be able to evaluate their consistency anyway in just 3 meals — the sample size is way too small.

So, I say, the supposed benefits of anonymity are illusory.

However, the downsides of anonymity and psuedonymity are real — just ask your friendly Internet troll, or look at any comment board that allows anonymous comments (your average daily paper website is a good example, or Yelp). When people don’t have to stand by their words in everyday life, or when they’re not held accountable by their peers or neighbors, it leads to lazy thought, abusiveness, and the worst of human behavior.

A good writer with good thought shouldn’t be afraid to stand by their words personally; a shoddy writer with poor thought hides behind anonymity. I haven’t read enough of the LA Times reviews to know whether that critic is shoddy or not, but Red Medicine did her the favor of removing the option of hiding.

Anonymity for restaurant critics has one overriding purpose that I don’t see you spell out explicitly. It is meant to ensure that the critic doesn’t get “special” treatment based on their position. In this age, I think anonymity is pretty much impossible for high-profile critics, but I still think serious critics will do their best to protect it (and hey, you don’t know what Naomi Wise looks like, so must still work in some cases). Add to that the fact that LAT critics eat three separate occasions and the newspaper pays for the meals, and you have a sincere attempt at giving at least the appearance of impartiality. All the other kinds of coverage you cite are great, but not a substitute. I think the great thing about our age is that professional reviews now exist amid a wealth of other information sources, and don’t have the outsized clout they may once have had. Informed media consumers shop around. I for one would miss the professional review if it disappeared, but it does have to restate its value proposition in the new age.

A couple weeks ago, I kicked someone out of the Linkery because they were being obnoxious, and I thought that the guests within earshot were having their dinner ruined. (Although, admittedly, the fact that the woman of the couple stole her champagne flute probably influenced me.) I think that showed that we value hospitality, because we were committed to making a comfortable, joyous environment for our “real” guests.

While I wouldn’t kick a critic (or a blogger or whatever) out just because I thought they were negative, I can see why another restaurant might, and I support that possible decision. For instance, it’s easy for me to imagine a situation where having a notoriously negative critic in the house made it impossible for the team to do a good job, which would impact the quality of the experience for the guests, and I could see a restaurant which values its “real” guests more than the lookie-loo visitor who doesn’t really care about the restaurant — the critic, after all, is just using the restaurant and its workers in order to further the critic’s career. Why should the restaurant feel obligated to help the critic do that?

I think trying to ban bloggers/critics/yelpers would be a stupid and pointless exercise. But I don’t think many of them are a necessary part of the restaurant ecosystem.

Generally, bloggers/critics/yelpers are of no help to a restaurant getting better. That is a myth. It’s a pretty unusual visitor who can tell me something about my restaurant I don’t know — and certainly no one can do it in only a few visits. Maybe if I lived out of town I would learn things about the restaurants I don’t know, but I eat at both restaurants multiple times per week *and* I know a lot about what goes on operationally, much more than anyone could glean from just a few visits.

If something specific goes wrong during the visit, of course, blogging or writing about it doesn’t help the restaurant at all. The only thing that anyone — critic or know — can do to be helpful if there is something not right at a restaurant is to contact the owner/manager and let them know personally. Any other action is not about helping the restaurant, but has another agenda.

While the critic/blogger isn’t going to tell me anything I don’t know about my restaurant, what the critic/blogger/reviewer *can* tell me about is their personal reaction to what were doing, which depending on the person might be interesting.

For instance, I am always interested to know what you, honkman, think about a lot of what we and other people do at any given time, because I know your background and I know you have a lot of knowledge, a good palate, and you like a certain style of dining that I too like — when I read your blog/reviews it stimulates my mind and sometimes provides new way of thinking about things I already know. There are a handful of food writers in town that I feel that way about — Amy T. Granite is another blogger that comes to mind.

I think bloggers have the most potential to provide meaningful insight into restaurants, both for restaurants and diners. On the other hand, Yelp is a sea of idiocy in which a few intelligent people post, certainly anyone who has anything interesting to say is wasting their time posting it there. I haven’t read Yelp in years, except to get material to make funny ads. The local print restaurant writing is, due to space limitations typically quite superficial (and in the case of the Reader, often unhinged with bizarre personal vendettas such as this) or, at best, good service journalism which describes the restaurant and its offerings.

So, I would say, yes, good restaurant writing by insightful people will always have its place, and while it’s not likely to be particularly “helpful” to an individual restaurant’s execution, it can definitely be part of making the restaurant scene in general better, by getting people to think about things differently (and, presumably, better). But I don’t think any restaurant has the obligation to serve someone just so they can criticize it — that critic is not working on behalf of the restaurant or its patrons, that critic is just working on behalf of the critic.

A really good critic, a Pauline Kael or a Lester Bangs, could be said to be beyond that, but there’s not been a critic like that in the US since I’ve been in the restaurant industry, and it’s hard to believe one is going to appear in a newspaper, given the declining role of newspapers in the US.

Honkman, I would suggest that the critic is a not a customer, in any meaningful way. Customers — or patrons or guests, whatever word you use — come to the restaurant to enjoy it, to be part of it, to share an experience and to support the project. The critic has another agenda entirely.

If the restaurant feels that 86ing the critic protects their relationship with their actual patrons, then I think they’re doing the right thing, because that’s the only thing that matters to the business.

That said, I agree with you that the circumstances of this particular event tend to suggest that it may be more of a stunt than a well-thought-out decision to protect the relationship of the restaurant with its guests, that’s really impossible to know at this distance. But I think your suspicions on that are understandable.

And, personally, I don’t think any newspaper critic is influential enough to make a dent in our relationship with our guests, so I wouldn’t 86 any restaurant critic based on their reviewing style, or what I thought they would write. We get bad reviews on Yelp all the time, and we’ve gotten occasional bad ones in local papers, and in all cases they say more about the reviewer than they do about us. We’ve been able to be successful in our relationships with our guests, even though some people don’t like us.

However, I’ll say this: a few years ago, the woman (I think it is a woman) who writes anonymously as “Naomi Wise” did, in her column, publicly ridicule one of our servers, using his real name. In addition to that being a cowardly act on the writer’s part, it definitely caused a lot of unnecessary pain and a lot of work for us that wasn’t about making the restaurant better. I would of course 86 her from the restaurant, since she has in fact used her column to make it harder for us to do a good job for our guests. I owe it to our guests and staff to make space for them to do good work and to enjoy it.

Of course, I haven’t actually gone to any work to find out who the writer is, so I apparently don’t care that much, or I should say I’m not particularly concerned about it happening again. And anyway the Internet has made her column so irrelevant that if she did it again I doubt the server would care, if he or anyone he knew even read it.

If there is anything I like more than bad ass chefs, it’s bad ass chefs who take it to restaurant critics who insist on hiding behind anonymity.

Does it put a target on their back, as you say? Yes. Do they care? No. Whether they should or not is debatable. From a business aspect, you make a great point. But what Red Medicine did wasn’t about business. It was about the art of war.

Criticizing restaurants anonymously is cowardly. And I don’t care how many excuses Ruth Reichl gives in her book for it, this is not playing fair. Restaurants and chefs don’t have the advantage of being anonymous. Neither should critics like S. Irene Virbila.

The Uptown Planners meeting was was my first attempt at getting involved as a citizen in established processes and I came away encouraged. I’m now starting to see what exactly is going on here in cities around the U.S. I like the term “guardian” used to describe our city officials, planners, developers and the like who haven’t quite seen the light – like those who think devoting valuable real estate to the automobile is in some way rational or normal. I am slowly learning that the process to get people to embrace a more humane way of living is to describe the reality that will be once they’ve gotten past the short term oh-I-need-parking-to-park-my-beast attitude. I’ve been trying to work the psychology degree on a one on one basis to see how it pans out. For example everyone has happy memories of riding their bike as a child. So I encourage them to talk it out, fantasize about it, and then…think about it becoming a reality once more.

At a recent party, I started talking with this one guy who upon learning that I had met the host at a bike ride proceeded to talk about all his bad experiences (someone he knew got hit by a car, someone else he knows wears lycra everywhere, someone else he encounters irritates him when he drives, etc, etc). I had to do some major context shifting to mention that I’m a slow poke, I ride lots so I can eat lots (bam! he loved that one), that I ride in jeans, that I won’t win any race…and then I found his hot button. He wants the city to be a city of livable small communities – not one crisscrossed with highways. I began to talk about traffic calming and how that could do so many great things, and then I asked him for his theories on how to make SD great. I can’t say I accomplished much that night but I’m hoping that he doesn’t think all cyclists are some crazy nuts out to make him feel fat, ugly and angry. And I hope at the next meeting he is an ally and perhaps speaks up on how we can make this city beautiful again.