Accounting for Taste

Questions to Consider When Attempting a Restaurant Review

Feb 05, 2024

Actually, Ratatouille Critic Anton Ego is the Real Hero of the Movie - Eater — Pictured: me, at the precipice of writing a restaurant review.

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This week I got some amazing feedback on several pieces of work, and was genuinely surprised to receive such a positive response. For me, self-doubt isn’t a feint at self-effacement, it’s an ongoing struggle to recognize if and when I’m doing something well. Yet part of the reason I like working in food, and the reason I’d like to add restaurant reviewing to my portfolio, is the challenge of writing from wherever you are with authority and precision. All food writers have to have certainty in their tastes, but restaurant critics have to be especially bold when they declare their preferences, and must work with the conviction that their experiences as diners provide an essential service to readers. Granted, a critic’s declarations can’t be based on mere taste—a good critic cites specific qualities, facts, details of how they came to their (presumably justified) opinion of the thing in question. However, readers may easily skim past a critic’s carefully crafted arguments and go straight to the verdict: the good, bad, the number of stars, and so on. I want to try restaurant criticism, because I love pushing myself into a critical space somewhere between aesthetic interpretation and service journalism. Yet in looking at what the best critics do, my enthusiasm is becoming tempered with a not-insignificant degree of wariness.

For fans of food writing, it is easy to imagine the critic’s job as a never-ending treasure hunt, eating prized morsels from the finest restaurants and describing them in luscious detail. The acclaimed food writer Ruth Reichl had countless fantasies of this work, as she detailed in her excellent memoir, Comfort Me with Apples:

“I pictured myself sweeping into fabulous restaurants to dine upon caviar and champagne. Maître d’s would cower before the great Restaurant Critic. Chefs would stand behind the kitchen door, trembling. ‘What is she saying?’ they would whisper to my waiter. ‘Does she like it?’ I would not betray, by word or gesture, my opinion of the meal. And when it was all over, I would throw down my card and cry ‘Charge it please!,’ then gather my retinue and float regally out the door.'“

Reichl’s vision of herself as a taste-maker is intoxicating, but the logistics of restaurant reviewing are far less dreamy. As the writer Dianne Jacob chronicled in her essential guidebook, Will Write for Food, critics are constantly on the lookout for what merits coverage, asking the hard questions about what people need to know and why they should care. For new critics, getting a foot in the door of a magazine or newspaper may require dining on spec before ever receiving publication or reimbursement. It also means lots of solo groundwork, dining at a restaurant two or three times before crafting a review to ensure that the menu has been sufficiently cross-sampled, the wine and cocktail list researched, and—perhaps most importantly—that the service of the kitchen and waitstaff has remained consistently excellent from visit to visit. And that kind of diligence doesn’t always yield delicious results. As Pete Wells, the current dining critic of the New York Times, has noted, “I actually want the bad dish on the table so I can keep tasting it until I've figured out what's wrong with it…. And then it becomes like an interesting science project for me, the forensic eating. How did this happen? How did the poor soup go so wrong?” The pursuit of excellence is only one part of the reviewing experience; it’s also a quest to dismantle some of the mystery of what makes a restaurant good, bad, underappreciated or overhyped. And though it’s fun to imagine crafting a takedown, it’s also a power to strategically wielded. “When I've done negative reviews,” Wells said, citing his infamous review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant in Times Square, “they tend to be places where there's been a lot of advance publicity with it, which costs money and where there are reputations that have been brought to bear.” In this sense, reviewing restaurants has to function as consumer advocacy, offering readers guidance on where their dollars will and will not be well-spent.

But criticism isn’t solely about serving one’s audience’s bottom line; it’s also about pushing readers out of their comfort zones and taste preferences. The late food writer Jonathan Gold pioneered a new kind of food writing that championed the taco stands, hot pot joints, and food trucks of Los Angeles not as cheap eats, but as highly crafted dining spots worthy of critical appreciation. There was no corner of the city that Gold was unwilling to visit, and by treating each establishment as worthy of the purple prose associated with fine dining criticism, he elevated the experience of visiting local restaurants to an art form. As the critic Jeff Gordinier wrote, in the pre-Yelp era, Gold was “our Google — only a lot more persuasive and a lot more poetic.” In the twenty-first century, it’s more important than ever that critics not only have extensive knowledge of food, but highly flexible tastes and standards that mirror those of their community. Marilyn Hagerty, the food critic for the Grand Forks Herald of North Dakota, went viral in 2012 for her generous, thoughtful coverage of her local Olive Garden, and demonstrating that every community’s version of fine dining deserved critical attention. Though Wells, Gold, and Hagerty all found themselves on extremely different journeys to food criticism, there is innate empathy, curiosity, and humility at the core of all their work. They also understand the central function of restaurant criticism: to decipher and describe culinary craft, to uplift those whose work merits celebration, and to honor establishments that bring communities genuine joy. Local food journalism requires all of this, not an unimpeachable palate or high degree of specialization. As the journalist A.J. Liebling put it, “The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite,” and all these critics have that and more.

Yet even a good appetite is not enough to sustain a lifelong enthusiasm for criticism. When Soleil Ho left their position as the food critic for the San Francisco Chronicle in February 2023, their decision to do so was informed by the major changes that the pandemic had forced upon the restaurant industry, requiring that they change their approach to what would otherwise be “a pretty straightforward job of eating stuff and writing fun things about it. All of a sudden, dining out became literally a matter of life and death.” Ho’s reticence to continue in the role surprised many, as they had worked diligent to use their review columns to ask broader questions about the critic’s responsibility, in particular examining the critic’s complicity in the ongoing gentrification of the Bay Area. But speaking against dominant forms of taste is easier said than done, even when working outside the confines of conventional media. Elijah Quashie, aka the “Chicken Connoisseur” of the Pengest Munch, developed a full critical channel landscape around the chicken and chip shops of North London, and kept his criteria wholly focused on the communities he served. And yet his work is a novelty because, as Eater’s Naveet Alang writes, “when the public discourse around food is so overwhelmingly dominated not just by highfalutin critics, but those who are often white, middle-income, and left-leaning, the assumed standards by which food is judged tend to reflect and replicate exactly those values.” Chip shops may not reflect novelty or change, but they ultimately matter to the people to whom Quashie speaks. Yet to create more spaces for critics like Quashie to thrive, we have to reconsider which role is most important for the critic: as an aesthetic gatekeeper, or as a ambassador and advocate for change. “At root,” Alang writes, we should ask “what the object and nature of criticism should be: a narrow slice of food that represents the bleeding edge and demands the language of a specialist, or a shifting set of criteria that tackle both the highbrow and the everyday without insisting one is more culturally significant than the other.”

I do plan to write at least one or two restaurant reviews in the coming year, both to build my writing portfolio and to turn my broader passion for food into usable criticism. But even as I do so, I should continue to question what drives my interest in the form. Am I motivated by the fantasy of great dining and even greater opinion-making? Or if I review a restaurant, is it with an aim to serving the broader culinary community I live in, chefs and consumers alike? Will the criticism I write further knowledge and appreciation of many differenf food cultures? Or will it compound existing hierarchies of taste and privileged forms of access? It’s difficult to know how these possibilities will play out before I’ve written my first review, but it’s good to keep them in mind. And perhaps the only way to really know how you’ve done is after the work is out in the world. For Tim Carman, the recently departed food editor of the Casual Dining column at the Washington Post, he only hoped that his work had been “a means to “elevate restaurants and to make amends,” to connect “with those connected with those who felt neglected, whether by caregivers or society as a whole.” Though Carman said that readers would ultimately be the judge of his success, I hope that eleven years in the critic’s seat has feel like time well-served.

French Fries and Martinis

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