Reviewing Restaurants without Really Reviewing

I’ve written 50 restaurant articles since I started in 2007. They are not reviews–I don’t give stars and I don’t trash places, both commonplaces of the reviewing biz. I write stories about the restaurant, interview the chefs or owners after I’ve eaten there, and tell you what to expect. My paper does not want negative articles and, to be honest, neither do I. There are real people behind the scenes in these places and while some are raging assholes, there are many who are simply trying to run a business. And, unlike the concerts I saw in college in exchange for a review, the restaurants do not comp my dinner. I don’t even go back for a free meal after the article comes out. I try to have standards.

My job is not to write ad copy and it is not to gloss over bad food. If a place is really bad, I simply ignore it. I have written exactly two articles I am not proud of and the reasons for both were because I really didn’t like the place or the food, but for various reasons, I couldn’t ignore the place. My job, the way I see it, is to tell you what to expect when you step into a place: what the restaurant is like, whether the readings are traditional or interpreted and why I think so, whether they are following the trends or going their own way, how the food tasted.

If I can, I get some good stories about the chef or restaurant, or, if I am lucky, I get in a good riff or two about something related to the food. Rather than say “This is expensive” I give you the price and you get to decide.  If a restaurant calls a dish by a traditional name and then veers in another direction, I tell you how it veered and if I liked it, I say so.

The best question I had from a server was “Is the steak done to your liking?” Not “Is is what you ordered?” or “Is it done right?” Instead, she asked whether I liked what the kitchen had sent out with an unspoken offer to take it back if I didn’t. No judgements about the competency of the kitchen or arguments about what “medium rare” really means. Simply, “Do you like it? Do you want to eat it?”

I’ve had more than one person call me out for not trashing a place or being “critical” enough. It’s fun to show off and trashing a place lets you show how witty you are. But you better know what you are talking about and you better be right. Because 15 minutes after you finish, you’ve had your fun, but the owner remembers it forever. How likely are they to change because you compared their stock to dishwater or their specials to what you find when you empty the walk in? Better to find someplace good and tell people about it. Better to describe a place and let your readers intuit what you really thought.

I’d like to tell the stories, sure. There is one local restaurant that gave me the worst service I have ever had (I got the wrong dish, waited an hour for the kitchen to get around to remaking it while my waitress disappeared and the stand-in waitress claimed there was no manager on duty and that I would “eat the dish and like it.”). I would dearly love to trash the place or name names, but I won’t. I got an email claiming that the new owners of a place were lascivious dogs and predicted an as-yet-to-happen immanent demise. I went to a favorite place and had a truly badly cooked meal–so much salt in one dish that we left it untouched, so much spice in another that we couldn’t tell what the ingredients were. Should I name names? To what end? Revenge? Ego? Verbal pyrotechnics? Who does it help?

No. It is more fun to talk about a place using descriptive adjectives rather than value judgements. Let the readers make their own decisions as to whether they want to try the place. Let them decide from my description whether they are going to like a place or whether they should risk some hard-earned cash on it. What I like is to find places that offer something interesting, tasty, or simply, worth the money and then go out and tell people about it. That helps everyone and God knows, we can all use some help these days.