Turns Out, Nobody Needs A Restaurant Critic

The Haterade diss track

Note: this is a companion piece to an essay I wrote about restaurant criticism in 2021. You don’t need to have read that one first, but if you’re curious, you can find it here. 

“We can’t pay anyone else to work like that. If I’m honest, we can’t even really pay you to work like that,” my editor says.

It’s 2023, and I’m slumped in a hard-backed chair at a coffee shop across the street from the alt-monthly I’ve written for for the last eight years, waiting to hear if I’ll make it to nine. Outlook: not so good. 

I take another sip of my watered-down cold brew, waiting for someone to draw the obvious conclusion. My editor and two other staffers are arranged across the table from me like a firing squad, which I suppose they are. They asked to meet in person after I sent a couple prickly (for a Midwesterner) emails about perceived ethical lapses in the paper’s food coverage. 

I’ve been the paper’s restaurant critic since 2016, and have strong opinions about how a critic should approach a review. Specifically: three visits minimum to get a thorough sense of the menu and how the restaurant operates at different times. No review until the restaurant’s been open at least a month. No soft openings. No media dinners. No comps.

It’s an expensive way to work. It’s also a way of working that the paper’s newer reviewers, who stepped in when I took a few months off for a painful divorce, haven’t adopted.

“I’m not territorial,” I say. “But ideally, we’d be working under the same set of editorial standards.” 

A small, naive part of me is hoping my editor will ask me to recommit to the paper—that he’ll urge me to stay, and adjust the terms so I can. A larger, wearier part of me is ready to walk.

The weary part wins. No one proposes any compromises. No one proposes anything at all. We end on the same false choice we started with: I can accept the status quo or I can move on. 

There’s a third option, of course, one I want to shout into my cup: Stop publishing restaurant reviews.¹

I’ve been thinking about the business of restaurant reviewing again while I process the loss of my professional identity for almost a decade. It hasn’t been easy to write about, in part because it isn’t all that significant to anyone but me. I filed my last restaurant review this October to little fanfare. The paper didn’t formally acknowledge my departure, and I didn’t really, either. 

As a first step toward closure (#healing), here’s more fanfare than I deserve: an EP of my Greatest Hits. My hope is that these might be entertaining even if you’ve never heard of the restaurants.

1. Guy Fieri’s Dive and Taco Joint has arrived, and here is our review of it

2. They serve food at the Midtown Home Depot now. You will want to read the menu carefully. 

3. We live in a Society. 

4. Taco Bell Cantina welcomes Westport to the Hoobastank of nightclubs. 

This essay isn’t about my former employer. I will always be grateful for them and wish everyone there the best. The people were friendly, they paid more or less on time, and they almost never pushed back on my ideas (though this was perhaps more concerning than reassuring). It was a natural end to a relationship that I likely hastened with my own obstinacy. Over time, the paper started to engage with me the way one might engage with an exotic and expensive bird—a bird that might also, possibly, be a little bit violent? At any rate, they seem to have concluded that it was safer not to approach the cage.

I would now like to invite you to approach the cage. 

We still need (responsible) restaurant criticism…

In November 2022—about a month before my marriage imploded and I entered the Era of Complication—I gave a talk about restaurant criticism for the KC chapter of “Creative Mornings.” More specifically, I talked about what I saw as the role of criticism: 

I do believe that criticism, when practiced responsibly (and that’s a big caveat), is a form of love. Because you have to love something to meet it with honest curiosity—to take at face value what it wants to be or do and evaluate how close it’s getting. You have to love something or someone to spend hours studying it and engaging with it and giving it chance after chance to disappoint you. […]

True criticism always has to start from a place of sincere engagement and love. And that doesn’t mean it has to be gentle. Because when you love something—when you believe in a mission and the people tasked with achieving it—you feel the gulf between what’s promised and what’s delivered as an existential threat. When you care about something, the stakes are too high to sit back and watch it fail–or worse, to watch it cause harm.

At the time, I think a lot of people took it as a defense of negativity, which it was. I was worried about the peppy boosterism of Instagram sponcon and the ways it was priming us to conflate mild critique with censure. But I’m tired of writing about influencers. It’s gotten boring, the journalistic equivalent of the old-guard comedian pinning the death of his industry on “woke.”  

And negativity can be irresponsible too, of course. Possibly worse than naked boosterism is the clout-chasing “criticism” that relies on autofellatic outrage to mask a lack of sincere engagement. Journalists can do just as much damage here. I’ve been in rooms with national food personalities who adopt vainglorious JuSt AsKiNg QuEsTiOnS postures that make clear they haven’t tried all that seriously to find answers on their own. 

Responsible criticism takes courage, sure, but it also takes effort and attention. Everyone wants to loudly proclaim that the emperor has no clothes. No one wants to go to the palace and look in his closet.

And responsible critics have to—not to be fair to the emperor (though that is, in fact, required), but to be a credible and authoritative voice of dissent. 

The stakes of getting it wrong are high. As a critic, I considered reporting on industry issues part of my beat, which is why I occasionally wrote exposes like this one on Port Fonda. It was miserable work, convincing 14 people to go on the record and go deep about their experiences with sexual harassment, racism, and verbal and physical abuse. It took forever to fact check. And I feel a bit like a chump, now, when I read poorly or anonymously sourced stories from local and national outlets about “toxic” or “problematic” behavior that never define what those terms mean. 

Journalists love positioning those stories as attempts to “hold power to account.” What they’re actually doing is hanging their sources out to dry. Journalists don’t protect victims with abstract, context-collapsing language that makes audiences play MadLibs with the issues at hand. Journalists protect victims by telling their stories with details that are specific, compelling, and rigorously fact-checked so that no one can doubt the severity or veracity of what they experienced. 

That’s hard, awkward, and unglamorous work. It takes time, effort, and money. I empathize with writers who aren’t given all three. But the punishing conditions of the industry don’t give us carte blanche to do our work carelessly. We have agency. We can say no. There are so many other kinds of stories to tell. 

….but we don’t need criticism at any cost

Here’s your nut graf, squirreled away in the final third: I believe in the value of restaurant reviews. I believe in the value of reporting on industry abuses. I believe that doing that work poorly can sometimes be worse than not doing it at all. 

I understand the itch to keep going in the face of system failure. Some of the work I’m proudest of has been for this newsletter, but it’s not work that commands respect. I don’t believe anyone needs institutional backing to do meaningful work, but it’s admittedly gotten harder to explain what I do to strangers. When I told people I was a restaurant critic, they looked impressed. When I tell people I have a Substack, they look embarrassed.  

And I miss the work itself. I went to a buzzy new KC restaurant last week and felt the Old Urge. An ambitious and mostly competent meal was tarnished almost irreparably by the service, which managed to be simultaneously slow and overbearing. The server spent five interminable minutes explaining pét-nat unprovoked and incorrectly to my dinner guest—a 30-year veteran wine critic for a major metro daily. He forgot to ring in a dish we’d ordered, brought the wrong check twice, then asked us to write about his band.  

When I was a critic, I could power through an experience like that with the morbid satisfaction that it would at least make good copy. As a civilian, it just made me cross. 

I want restaurant criticism to survive. But I don’t want it to survive in any form, at any cost. Missing the work—or worse, missing the ego boost I derived from it—isn’t a justification for doing it poorly or unethically. And so my conclusion, ultimately, is this: If we can’t pay people to do it well, we’re better off not doing it at all. If criticism is dead, let it die, at least, in dignity. 

I’ve weighed the trade-offs, and I don’t want to make them. I don’t want to have to post FaceTuned pictures of myself in clothes I can’t afford to build a following for my work in a non-visual medium. I don’t want to add hasty disclaimers to the end of my #content so savvy followers can suss out which of my opinions were paid for. I don’t want to taste anything that will make me bite my tongue.

Nor do I want this essay to read like a high-maintenance shriek: I can’t work under these conditions! Of course I can work under these conditions. I can work under almost any conditions. But in the words of Bartleby, the Scrivener: I prefer not to.

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1. n.b. I haven’t seen the paper post anything labeled a review in months (though some pieces still gesture in this direction), so I may have gotten my wish. At any rate, I harbor zero ill will toward the publication or its staff, who are doing the best they can to cover the city amid dire financial pressures.