Who Needs a Restaurant Critic?

I am once again asking.

“A lot of people would probably do this job for free,” my editor says.

It’s 2016, and I’m sitting splint-rigid in a hard chair on the second floor of a Christian coffee shop, waiting to hear what I’m going to be paid. Not well, I think, if that opener is any indication.

I take another sip of my overly acidic pour-over to give my hands something to do. It tastes like a diaper, but admitting this feels disqualifying. I’ve been auditioning for the (freelance) restaurant critic beat for the last couple of months, and I feel the need to present myself as a Woman of Taste. Women of Taste love coffee that tastes like a beer shit smells.

The pay turns out to be better than the coffee—my editor offers me $200 per review, and I accept immediately. It’s more than twice what I’ve ever been paid for a column before. He starts talking about receipts and reimbursement caps, but I only half-listen. I’m nearing the end of my lunch break from my full-time corporate editing job—the one that pays my rent and gives me health insurance—and I’m already calculating how many minutes it will take for me to drive back, navigate the interminable parking garage and stairwells, and slip back into my ergonomic office chair before anyone notices my absence.

I’m already taring the stress scale. I’m already reorganizing myself around a prickly double helix of cortisol and caffeine.

Still, I can’t believe my luck. Some people would do this job for free.

—

I’ve been thinking about the business of restaurant reviewing lately—both because I’ve been doing it for The Pitch for five years now, and because I recently returned to reviewing for the first time since pandemic shutdowns began in 2020. (My first review back is a pan of a comically bad restaurant—a slow pitch down the middle of home plate for any critic—but I’m proud of it anyway, and I think you should read it.)

A lot’s changed since I started. Mostly, things have gotten worse. The Pitch has gone from a scant handful of staff writers to none, a decline that mirrors what’s happening in alt media (and traditional media) broadly. Kansas City’s food scene is now largely chronicled by overextended freelancers and compromised influencers, and sometimes the adjectives are swapped.

I’ve changed, too, mostly for the better. I made myself a student again. I listened to people yell at me and learned to sift the feedback. If nothing else, I practiced. Last year, I took second place in restaurant criticism at the Association of Food Journalists’ awards (coming for you, Ryan Sutton) and had a review included in the “Notable” section of Best American Food Writing 2020. This year, I won a first place award in food writing from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.¹ I think I’m supposed to be humble and not mention those things, but: no!!!

Two things haven’t changed:

1. I still make $200 a review (if you adjust for inflation, I’m technically making $27 less than I was in 2016.)

2. I still work full-time at the same corporate editing job. #sliving

Who gives a shit?

I’ve been trying to talk myself out of journalism for the past couple of months, and I haven’t been able to manage it yet. I still believe in the project, even if it’s a (personally) losing proposition. I still feel obligated to help create the food scene I want to be a part of.

So this week—for myself as much as anyone—I’m going to try to convince you to believe in it, too. And I’m going to do that the same way I convinced a family of crows that it was safe to terrorize a farm: by knocking down a lot of straw men.

“Why do we need you when we have Instagram?”

Well, if all you need are pretty flashcards, you don’t. Instagram is a great way to see what’s new in your city filtered through the lens of people who are being paid to aim it in a certain direction.

I’m not sure most casual scrollers realize how much food content is sponsored in a functional sense even if it isn’t tagged as an #ad. An influencer might not receive a paycheck to post about the “AMAZEballs arancini” at Heifer + Hatchet, but odds are, she’s dining for free. Restaurants flush enough to hire PR firms regularly host “menu tastings” to wine and dine influencers and food writers in exchange for free publicity.

Food critics—at least, the ethical ones—don’t take free shit from the places they’re writing about. When I joined the Association of Food Journalists (RIP), I signed an ethics pledge about as long as my mortgage disclosure.

The whole point is for people to be able to trust you as a consistent, honest voice. Even if your opinions are Bad and Dumb, people should be able to calibrate their own expectations in response. Even if people don’t agree with you, they should trust that you mean what you say.

Integrity aside, there’s also the problem of depth. A single meal at a restaurant prepared by a chef who knew you were coming is just not going to give you the same insight into a restaurant as a series of anonymous visits. It’s maybe helpful to bring in some ~methodology~ here.

RESTAURANT REVIEWING SECRETS OF THE ANCIENTS

For a standard full review (1,200–1,700 words about a single spot), I’ll visit a restaurant three times—more if it’s terrible, to give it every chance to surprise me—and vary the times. I want to see how the restaurant runs when it’s packed as well as when it’s empty. So for a classic dinner-and-weekend-brunch spot, I might visit for a Tuesday dinner, Saturday dinner, and Sunday brunch.

I’ll make the reservation under someone else’s name, and order twice as many dishes as I’ll ever be able to mention in the review. I’m hunting for outliers—the incredible, the terrible—as well as consistencies. Is there a technique or ingredient the kitchen excels at or struggles with? Are they taking risks and experimenting with flavors, or doing the tried-and-true better than anyone else?

This gets us to the second straw man:

“Aren’t you just shitting on hardworking chefs and business owners?”

Yes. I will not rest until every restaurant in this city has closed and we are all forced to huddle around our televisions, eating cans of cold Dinty Moore with a hair clip.

I think this is both the laziest and most pernicious myth about critics. Good restaurant criticism starts with paying close attention, which is one way to define love.

Soleil Ho, one of the country’s best-known restaurant critics, wrote about this recently in a piece titled “Why I Can’t Wait to Get Back to Writing Negative Restaurant Reviews”:

In the restaurant world, there’s a prevalent sense that food writers and critics should be working with, if not for restaurants. In my previous life as a restaurant cook, I had many conversations with chefs who thought that way — who saw negative reviews as the work of mean-spirited critics who didn’t know the value of hard work. 

This attitude is prevalent in Kansas City, too, and I think it’s only gotten worse as criticism (and critics) have dwindled.

I do think criticism has a role to play in pushing the industry forward (in culture, in labor, in creativity). If restaurants want to take criticism on board and make changes in response to it—well, I think that’s great. But it’s not the primary goal of my reviews. I’m a critic, not an industry consultant. And critics are consumer-oriented: they exist to help diners make difficult choices about where to go and what to order.

That doesn’t mean they’re antagonistic to chefs and restaurants (though to be honest, I’d like to see more food writers err in that direction). But it does mean they shouldn’t be writing for them.

Here’s the thing: you should assume that no one in the food scene knows who you are, and that if they do, they despise you. You have to free yourself from the burden of needing to be liked. If you need restaurant owners and chefs to like you, then you’re always going to be writing toward them.

Some people can afford to go out to a nice restaurant only once or twice a year. You’re writing for them.

“Traditional” restaurant criticism still has problems.

The problems are obvious—legacy journalism is dying, and we’re all standing around poking the corpse—but I’ll touch on them briefly anyway.

Every year, there seem to be fewer jobs, fewer resources, less money, less support, fewer copyeditors, bigger asks, smaller beats, more stress, less courage. These issues are almost all related and self-perpetuating and thinking about them too much makes me want to walk into a deep fryer until I’m “shatteringly crisp.”

Remember that ethics pledge I signed to join the Association of Food Journalism? The association shut down last year because they couldn’t afford to keep going without breaking their own rules.

The number of major metro dailies with staff critics is shrinking, and the few who remain are often doing double-duty, both reviewing and reporting on the scene. In an ideal world, “critic” and “reporter” would be separate positions—restaurants aren’t going to want to pick up the phone for an interview if you brutalize them, and you aren’t going to brutalize them if you want them to keep picking up the phone.

Kansas City doesn’t have any full-time critics. Our paper of record, the Kansas City Star, hasn’t employed a restaurant critic for years and devotes little space to food coverage beyond openings and health inspections. Although the paper’s leadership recently announced plans for a “reimagined” Star with more journalists and pages, food didn’t make the cut.

To be clear, I think we have some great freelance writers, but it’s crazy to expect them to fill the shoes of full-time staffers. And so as much as I believe in the value of what I do in theory, I can’t say I think I’m making a difference in practice.

One review and reported piece a month isn’t scratching the surface of what’s going on in the dining scene—and without a trust fund or a rich husband, I don’t see a path to doing much more than that. I have grown soft and dependent on luxuries such as “health insurance” and “making rent.” So if I want to stay in journalism, it’s always going to be a hat on top of a hat. A job on top of a full-time job.

I’m growing tired of the hat stack. I don’t feel human most days—I feel like one of the lesser orcs in the caverns of Isengard, prodding a laundry fork into some primordial ooze and praying for someone stronger to emerge. I think I have maybe two years left at the outside before I say “fuck it” and abandon freelancing so I can go back to writing unappealing plays about infomercial salesmen in my spare time.

In sum, I’ve been having a bit of a Cher crisis lately.

Cher @cher

Whats going on with mycareer

People are always asking me to do more—write a book, make videos, start a podcast, pitch bigger outlets, investigate this asshole. I’m starting to wonder if the solution is to do less—to stop trying to make writing a career and to let it be a hobby. To do it for the joy.

There was never going to be any prestige in licking mouse tape. But there’s a lot of fun before the nerve damage sets in.

Thanks for sticking with me through my Cher phase. I’ll be back, I hope, with some unscheduled nonsense soon.

1. This one goes out to the local GM who told me I needed to take night classes at Marquette on “how to actually be a critic.” Turns out any idiot can do this!