On Restaurant Reviews (Part 1)
Perhaps You Would Like to Read a Restaurant Review in the Form of a Shopping List This Morning?
Back in February, I asked readers whether they were interested in all the inside baseball about restaurant reviewing, the media industry, and so forth. I received far more responses than I expected indicating that, yes, at least some folk out there actually like this stuff.
Today, then, I thought I would post a Miscellany dispatch with a few of my musings on the trajectory of restaurant criticism over the past decade. Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of foolish Burnt Ends and snarky comments about Charleston restaurant bathrooms in the days to come. Food media wonks, this one is for you.
The Reckoning That Wasn’t
About eight years ago, as the #MeToo movement was cresting, there was a flurry of debate over the future of restaurant reviewing. The rumblings began in 2018, when the dining world was rocked by a series of its own #MeToo scandals involving celebrity chefs and restaurateurs like Mario Batali and John Besh. Many in food media began questioning the “food-first” focus of most dining coverage and encouraged reviewers to dig more deeply into the culture of restaurants and the character of their leaders.
These concerns coincided with an increasing uneasiness with the disparities of wealth inherent in fine dining. In July 2019, shortly after filing his final review as the restaurant critic for San Francisco magazine, Joshua Sens admitted to Soleil Ho of the San Francisco Chronicle that he had had “a Moment” (with a capital “M”) while dining at Niku Steakhouse.
“I was sitting in the open kitchen, flames leaping,” Sens told Ho, “watching what might’ve been a tech bro show off a pricey bottle of wine from the valley. And it sort of had an end of days feel to it: this massive celebration of crazy wealth around the city.” Ho’s story was headlined, “Is the end nigh for food criticism?”
A few months later, Theodore Gioia weighed in with “The Midlife Crisis of the American Restaurant Review” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He argued that it was time to “rewrite the job description for the 21st-century food critic.” He observed that three young female critics of color had recently stepped into reviewing jobs at prominent publications — Ho at the San Francisco Chronicle, Patricia Escárcega at the Los Angeles Times, and Tejal Rao as the New York Times’s new California Restaurant Critic. The trio was already discarding old norms like star ratings and anonymity and “leading a literary reformation of the field.”
The role of the critic, Gioia observed, was shifting from merely judging whether a restaurant experience was pleasing to telling “stories about the connections between people, cultures, and communities.” That wasn’t enough, though. All the old conventions of the genre needed to go.
Critics should ditch the chronological recitations of dishes from appetizer to entree to dessert. They needed to “escape the dining room” and seek out “unexpected settings such as schools, jails, homeless shelters.” They should experiment with new forms, like compiling reviews as shopping lists or job postings or even obituaries. They could even construct reviews as dialogs—taking a truck driver to the Michelin-starred Saison, for instance—or commission a Creole poet to eulogize their favorite gumbo. I am not making any of this up.
Gioia’s ideas may have been a bit out there, but they aligned with the more general feeling that restaurant reviews were overdue for change. And change they did, though not in the way any of those commentators anticipated.
The Cracks Appear
In the years since, there has been no great reimagining nor reinvigoration of the staid restaurant review, nor has the form become more creative or more socially relevant. Instead, serious restaurant criticism has all but disappeared.
Even as Gioia was formulating his prescriptions for the future, the cracks were starting to appear. In her column discussing Sens’s “Moment,” Ho noted that two other prominent San Francisco-based critics — Rachel Levin of Eater and Peter Lawrence Kane of SF Weekly — had recently left their positions, leaving Ho herself as the only reviewer regularly covering San Francisco restaurants.
Just two years earlier, Eater had announced with great fanfare their hiring of Levin as the digital publication’s first dedicated restaurant critic. Noting the cost of the investment, editor-in-chief Amanda Kludt told the New York Times, “We’re going to see how it goes in San Francisco for at least a year before considering other markets.” We know now how it went. Levin posted her last review in the fall of 2018, and Eater never replaced her.
More departures followed. In July 2019, Providence Cicero left the Seattle Times after 11 years, noting that “restaurant critics are a dwindling bunch.” Around the same time, Tejal Rao transitioned into a more general “critic at large” role for the New York Times, filing everything from recipes to profiles of food personalities.
In hindsight, the notion that restaurant critics could and should do so much more than evaluate dining experiences may have been asking a bit much. After Michalene Busico left the Dallas News in January 2020, the newspaper seemed to take Theodore Gioia up on his challenge to “rewrite the job description for the 21st-century food critic,” announcing some rather ambitious requirements for Busico’s replacement.
The newspaper insisted its new critic must “listen, not lecture, and incorporate a multitude of perspectives,” be “open and very online, with social media savvy,” and also “design and produce the digital version of each review and story, adding photography, display copy, video and other digital media where appropriate.” If all that weren’t enough, the critic must also “go beyond the plate and the star ratings” and pursue accountability. “Is the restaurant respectful not just of its customer, but of its neighborhood? Its staff? The food itself? Is that wild-caught fish really wild-caught? Is that really a local, organically grown tomato?”
How a single writer could uncover all that, much less incorporate it into a 1,500-word restaurant review, is beyond me. Fortunately, before the News could find anyone daring enough to accept such an assignment, the world was shut down by Covid-19.
After the Pause
In the aftermath of the pandemic, the cracks turned to fissures, and the departures came fast and furious. In January 2021, the Chicago Tribune‘s Phil Vettel retired after 31 years as restaurant critic. Soon after, Rick Nelson of the Minnesota Star Tribune hung it up after 23 years, and in April 2021, Patricia Escárcega, alleging pay discrimination, departed the Los Angeles Times. In June 2022, Adam Platt brought to an end his 22-year run at New York Magazine, and in February 2023 Soleil Ho gave up her restaurant critic seat at the Chronicle to become an opinion columnist.
Perhaps the biggest quake was felt in the summer of 2024. On June 24, Pete Wells of the New York Times published a Critic’s Notebook column about AI-generated restaurant reviews and how many readers couldn’t tell them apart from critiques written by humans. Less than a month later, on July 16, Wells announced that he was stepping down after 12 years. I don’t think it had anything to do with AI reviews (Wells’s health was a wreck), but you can never be too sure.
That sort of takes us up to where we are today. I touched upon how the New York Times decided to replace Wells, as well as my lukewarm reaction to the results, in my March 3rd newsletter. I have many more thoughts on the past and present of restaurant criticism, and I’ll share them down the road when the time is right.
