The Two Sides of Taste

A brief look into the gap between food coverage and restaurant criticism

Sep 10, 2024

This week, I was fascinated by Melissa Clark’s first review in her interim role as co-restaurant critic of The New York Times, a review titled “Home Cooking So Good, Only a Restaurant Could Do It.” In it, Clark praises the restaurant Lola’s in Chelsea, and offers her verdict on a plate of egg noodles in a Japanese curry sauce, calling it “the kind of dish any home cook could relate to, with its homey noodles and farmers’ market vegetables. It’s just that most of us could never reach this high.”

I’m fascinated by Clark’s inclusive use of the pronoun “us”, presenting herself—and a presumed portion of the review’s audience—as a home cook who is capable, but rarely capable of achieving restaurant-quality cuisine. In that short phrase, Clark highlighted what has long seemed like an irreconcilable divide in food criticism: between the so-called “women’s pages”—historically the home of most food coverage, primarily authored by and targeted at women, from the nineteenth century to the 1970s—and the purview of the restaurant review, focused on the professionalized craft of cooking, and more often than not authored by a man. (I touched on this briefly in my post when Pete Wells stepped down, but I think it’s worth going into a bit more depth…)

For almost a century, women were tasked with handling food coverage in most newspapers and magazines, sought out by their employers to educate readers on how to use new products in their everyday cooking and cleaning. Women were then, as they often are now, viewed as commodities as both readers and writers, whose attention and pocketbooks could be easily bought if catered to in the right way. Though women journalists rarely received the same opportunities as men across mass media, their meaningful exchanges with their readers produced a living archive of American tastes. From the 1880s through the early 2000s, the “Confidential Chat” section of the Boston Globe overflowed with recipes and tips generated by both its editors and its readership. It was a rare moment in which the food writer and reader were on equal footing, with knowledge ot be shared on both sides. As the historian Kimberly Wilmot Voss notes in her essential volume, The Food Section, even as they focused on the four F’s —”family, fashion, food, and furnishings”—women writers also advanced the form of food writing into the public sphere, making it visible for all readers and establishing women home cooks as authorities on all matters of good food. Expertise was grounded in establishing confidence among one’s readership; the fictional persona of Betty Crocker served, rather than judged, her listeners, and shaped her advice to their perceived needs.

Yet even as women dominated early American food coverage, serious food criticism in Europe during the same period was exclusively the purview of men. After the fall of the French aristocracy came the birth of modern gastronomy, and with it an invitation to the general public to participate in gastronomic discourse. (It also helped that the hired staff of the French aristocracy needed a new means of employment, which in turn shaped the early restaurant scene of Paris.) The leader of the new public appreciation for gastronomy was Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, a writer and lawyer whose decadent dinner parties made him a key tastemaker during the time of Napoleon. Grimod’s magazine, L’Almanach des Gourmands, featured some of the earliest restaurant reviews, describing the decadent feasts of the French elite to the masses, and articulating objective standards for what constituted culinary excellence. Grimod spoke of the “care, knowledge, and studies one has undertaken in all aspects of dining” in order to facilitate a decent feast, and asserted that true gourmands needed not just a “fine education, [but also] an understanding of human nature as deep as that of fine dining itself.” Rather than offering affable asides to fellow home cooks, Grimod spoke directly to the consumers of fine food, asserting that they could eventually develop knowledge and tastes as refined as his own. Cooks were no longer worth addressing; it was the hosts and guests of great dinners who would judge true culinary excellence.

Which brings us back to the New York Times, and its strange place in the evolving status of food and restaurant criticism. In 1957, Craig Claiborne, the son of a Mississippi boardinghouse owner who had trained at the famed École hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland, parlayed his brief stint as a writer for Gourmet into a role as the Times’ food critic, a role usually reserved for women. He replaced Jane Nickerson, the paper’s first food editor—and originator of the term “food writer”—who had cut her teeth at magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and followed a similar trajectory to the legendary food reporter Clementine Paddleford, crossing the country and paying close attention to shifting market trends to shape her coverage. Yet Claiborne brought a distinctly European sensibility to the paper, as well as a new emphasis on hospitality as crucial to culinary excellence. (In many ways Claiborne leveraged similar criteria to the anonymous critics of the Michelin Guide, who have assessed restaurants with a view to their travel-worthiness since the 1920s, a novelty to many American diners even in the late 1950s.) While Claiborne’s mastery of the critical form redefined the work of restaurant critics for generations to come, it also drew an unmistakable line in the sand between culinary connoisseurs—the “gourmands” of Grimod’s set—and the chatty housewives who swapped recipes and knowledge across their local food sections.

While Clark’s intimate aside to “most of us” brings to mind the winking warmth of Aunt Sammy, the begrudging musings of Peg Bracken, and of course Julia Child’s unforgettable dedication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking to “the servantless American cook,” it’s also a far cry from the tone struck by Claiborne, and generally the tone with which we talk about great restaurants. Even critics of “cheap eats,” including the great Jonathan Gold, have generally avoided positioning themselves as home cooks within the contexts of their reviews. Why, I’m not sure—maybe it’s in pursuit of a certain kind of critical distance, a degree of gastronomic objectivity that exists in theory, if not in practice. And perhaps it’s a reminder of how far food writing has come from its origins, that so little of what is written in the food sections of major newspapers caters to the everyday cook. (Case in point, NYT “Food” is now separated from “Cooking”, with the latter positioned as a “product” channel rather than for editorial coverage.)

This may seem like insider baseball, but I think it indicates a continuing belief in two audiences that only rarely overlap, and the need to silo content rather than productively blur the boundaries between restaurant cooking and home cooking. Restaurants that approach the level of intimacy and pleasure that home cooking can offer are few and far between. Yet restaurants that claim to offer “upscale” home cooking also inherently denigrate the craft involved in the preparation of a beautiful, even flawless, non-professional meal. As a result, critics can too easily perpetuate the idea that home cooks and restaurant cooks are different creatures, have different culinary priorities—and, perhaps most dangerously, have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes “good food.” As Clark notes in her review, she finished her meal with a taste of one of Lola’s exceptional desserts, a stone-fruit cobbler with blue cornmeal, “so homey and comforting that my friend said it seemed like the sort of thing I’d bake at home.” But then Clark’s dining companion adds an essential aside: ‘But it’s better, of course.”

I’m thrilled that the Times has put Clark (and her colleague Priya Krishna, an expert cook in her own right) in the position of weighing in on the city’s trendiest restaurants, at least until they eventually go back to “tradition” and hire a man for the job. I certainly hope that Clark’s time in the role allows for a meaningful consideration of where we draw artificial boundaries around culinary practitioners, when a dish crosses over from something that we could make at home to something that seems utterly unobtainable. I for one would hope that the best restaurants offer us a glimpse of the possible on the other side of the pass, and inspire us to reach out for skills that are ever more accessible via well-crafted cookbooks. And I hope that Clark doesn’t feel like she has to stay in the mindset of the home cooking expert for every restaurant she visits. (I, for one, would love to see someone send her on assignment to Per Se, or any of the similarly inaccessible gastronomic temples, for an overdue takedown, DeRuiter-style.) But regardless of what she covers, I’m glad she’s on the beat, and I’m excited to see how two capable women who know their culinary work are more than up to the job.

French Fries and Martinis

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