Everyone's A Restaurant Critic
Written By: David Snyder on Fri, Jul 6th 2007
Or, How The Cream Rises
It was not too long ago that it was a privilege to be published. Whether it was a book, a newspaper article, or even a letter to the editor, being published meant that you had distinguished yourself. It meant that your work was selected, ostensibly, for its superior quality.
But the Internet has changed all that. And today, all you need is a keyboard and an opinion and - voila! - you're published. Whether it's a message board or a blog, an electronic soap box is not far from anyone's reach. And nowhere is this more prevalent, it seems, than the world of restaurant reviews. Indeed, there appear to be more sites dedicated to restaurant criticism than there are restaurants to critique.
There's no denying that food blogs are playing an increasingly important role in determining where we spend our dining dollars. Our incurable hunger for a never-ending flow of information often outpaces the speed at which the traditional media outlets can serve us, which has given restaurant blogs a surprisingly important place in the food chain. The downside of this, of course, is that, without the vetting and editorial standards of the mainstream media, many cyber restaurant critics have been accused of being shoddy, ill-informed, and unaccountable.
Which leads us to the big question: Aside from a keyboard and an opinion, what does it really take to be a restaurant critic?
A Database of Culinary Experiences. To be a restaurant critic, it is absolutely necessary to have amassed a rich database of dining experiences. In other words, you have to have dined out a lot. And not just at one or two types of restaurants, either.
The database has to be broad as well as deep, which requires one to have a bold and adventurous palate with very few boundaries (if any). This database is the metric against which a restaurant critic compares his or her restaurant visit. For example, it's difficult to gauge whether the pappardelle at a particular restaurant is authentically prepared if you haven't eaten enough authentically-prepared pappardelle to tell the difference.
Do you need to have slaved away as a line cook in a four-star restaurant? Do you need to have dined throughout Italy and France? Not necessarily. But these types of experiences do help to round-out your database, and a serious restaurant critic should try to incorporate them whenever possible.
Analysis, Analysis, Analysis. I see this happen at the table almost every time I go out to eat: Someone takes a bite, reflects for a second, and then announces - conclusively, mind you - that the dish is "good." Such a simple, straightforward conclusion, however, tells you nothing meaningful about the dish, and a serious critic will generally try to avoid such blanket assessments.
For a critic, analysis is the table on which the opinion of the meal is served. It is the heart of food criticism and is what drives the review. Asking yourself "how" and "why" and comparing the dish against other similar ones in your database informs you where it falls on the spectrum and, ultimately, whether it's worth paying for.
To be a critic, thinking about a dish, deconstructing it, and working to understand it need to be as natural as eating it.
The Write Stuff. Having a principled opinion about a restaurant, though, isn't enough. You have to be able to convey it in a way that's engaging and responsible. Often, this is the hardest part of being a food critic, and the area where many online critics fall short.
Stringing together a grocery list of items eaten with an opinion tacked onto the end just doesn't cut it. A good food writer is a storyteller, weaving details of the meal into a compelling tale without losing the essence of a review. It is a skill you can't learn in a kitchen or by eating expensive meals at the best restaurants in town. But without it, a critic has no voice.
The cream, as they say, rises to the top. Those online restaurant critics who have these skills will continue to separate themselves from the pack. And those who don't... well, at least they can say they're published.
