August 1984: The Wrong Stuff in Four Parts

Part 1. No secret: a lot of newspapers can’t afford a legitimate (I use the adjective advisedly) restaurant critic (below right). But that doesn’t stop them. They think their readers want restaurant reviews. They think if they print restaurant reviews, the restaurant ads will follow and they will sell more papers. So, they search the staff for someone to write restaurant reviews. Would you like to know how someone on a newspaper becomes a “restaurant critic?” This is how: from a pool of wordsmiths, the publisher selects a beat reporter who eats out a lot.  Usually (don’t ask me how I know this, I just do) it’s a single woman who knows exactly what goes into a BLT. Now, naming someone “restaurant critic” just because she eats out a lot is like Ronald Reagan naming Mick Jagger Secretary of State because he’s been everywhere, met everyone, and logs more air miles than migrating Arctic terns. 

                                                             Helen Adamova

Unfortunately, hand-picked beat reporters who eat out a lot don’t know much about dining out (just read their reviews), have no idea how cooks prepare a meal or what goes into it. By the way, when they review a meal and try to decode what’s in it, they don’t take the time to ask the chef—afraid to blow their cover or too embarrassed to ask or both—so they make things up. Furthermore (and this may be most important) they sadly lack a perspective of gastronomy and its history. I know of one critic—she remains nameless—who thinks a beef Wellington is what Napoleon dined on before he was exiled to Saint Helena. Other writers—the real restaurant critics (those hired and paid to do just that)—aren’t much better than the beat reporters doubling as restaurant critics. By the way, none of this deters restaurants from advertising, even those that have yet to be reviewed. As regards the latter, the newspaper promises it will review their restaurants. Eventually. But, I digress.

Part 2. Here’s a travel columnist, who fancies himself a restaurant critic, writing in a Midwest city magazine about how terrific dining out in San Francisco is. Among his reviews of restaurants, we bump into this amusement: “I stayed in . . . Campton Place, a new 126-room gem just off Union Square whose kitchen just may shatter the myth of wretched hotel restaurants forever.” If the critic’s specialty was the absence of pentameter in Albanian poetry, I would forgive him, but this guy’s a travel writer who, I must assume, has been around.

The myth of the wretched hotel restaurant was shattered years ago, dating at least to 1967 and the opening of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and its revolving rooftop restaurant, a design departure so revolutionary it became, in and of itself, a tourist attraction. Up until then hotels didn’t have restaurants; they had dining rooms. Hotels with great restaurants were a rarity. Hyatt said “nonsense,” decided enough was enough and, in its spectacular John Portman-designed hotel—the first of several for Hyatt—announced the time was ripe for hotel dining to come of age: to offer guests dining as good as what they might find in classy independent restaurants. Other hotel companies took notice.

Now then, unless our lovable travel critic had been hanging out all these years at The Welcome Sailor Arms and its hundreds of hourly-rate renditions throughout the country, I’ve got to believe he ate decent, even great, hotel food long before Campton Place.

(That Hyatt fell short of its objective isn’t the point here; that it tried, is; and in trying acknowledged, however indirectly and indelicately, that hotel dining was in dire need of an overhaul; and that if it were ever to reclaim an aura of respectability, would have to dump its dreary image and replace it with one to suit guest tolerances for quality; and in the process demonstrate to its competition—other hotel chains and independent restaurants—that hotel dining was alive and well. The travel writer/ columnist/critic mentioned should’ve known that.)

A complimentary restaurant review about Nick’s Fishmarket in Chicago magazine opens by slurring owner Nick Nickolas: “Despite the owner’s flamboyant public persona, the restaurant is a model of good looks.” That’s as much a non sequitor as this: “Despite the fact she’s been in more beds than an American Beauty Rose, Elizabeth Taylor’s performance was Oscar-worthy.” I mean, who needs this nonsense? OK, writers don’t like Nick, they don’t like his flash . . .his flamboyance. What the hell does that have to do with running a restaurant and the food and service in it?

Part 3. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was an 18^th Century politician who loved to write about food. Just before he died, he wrote a book, La Physiologie du Gout. He is remembered for the book, not his politics. Along comes Amie Brillat-Savarin. I assume she’s related. In one of those glossy hardbound books you’ll often find in a hotel room (the ones you’re asked not to steal) is an article she wrote: “Things That Can Ruin Your Digestion,” subtitled, “Whatever Happened to Dining in Style?” In it she takes some incredibly tired potshots at the state of dining out in America today, each of them, she reminds us, “a universal complaint.” No kidding: that’s what she wrote: “a universal complaint.”

B-S beefs about menus printed in one language only; having to buy tables from maitre d’s; pompous waiters; dimly-lit restaurants; noisy restaurants; interminable waits for the check; and—the final straw: the checkroom scam. As regards the latter (the weakest and most nonsensical of her beefs) B-S writes, “If your ‘host’ has no place in the dining room to hang your coat and hat, the checkroom service should be considered part of the amenities of the house.” Sounds about right. Here’s my solution should no checkroom be available as “an amenity of the house”: hooks throughout the dining room for guests’ hats and coats. Who needs a checkroom? Also, I’m not sure why the word, “host” is in quotation marks. But that’s not my problem.

                                                  Everett Collection

Look: My raincoat has been through hell: it ain’t fancy, but I’m still happy to tip a checkroom attendant to watch it for me (I think the tipping part is what bothers B-S). I’ll bet my next car payment that B-S owns a fancy fur coat. Maybe the next time she’s in a restaurant, she can wad it up and shove it under her chair instead of paying someone a buck to watch it. Or, maybe she can find a “place in the dining room [a hook, perhaps] to hang her coat and hat.” 

B-S’s list of amenities she expects restaurants to provide in addition to what, routinely, they do, was far from complete. The checkroom scam brought to mind others. I list them here as contemplations B-S forgot to contemplate.

The Parking and the Valet Parking Scam. Like the checkroom scam, this is an easy one: the restaurant pays for the former, doesn’t charge for the latter or, better yet, gets rid of it altogether. Valet parking is an insult to every guest, infirm or handicapped excepted; it implies you can’t do it yourself. Parking slots in the parking lot are like coat hooks in the dining room: they are there for you to use. Go forth and find one. Even when the weather is foul? Sure. Who told you to go out on a night like this?

The Getting to the Restaurant Scam. For every time you dine there, the “host” gives you a coupon redeemable at a local gas station, the amount based on the number of miles from your home to the restaurant, the EPA’s Fuel Economy Guide, and the grade of gas used. You took a cab to the restaurant? Present your receipt and the restaurant deducts the amount or a percent of it from your tab. This is known as the “Off-Premises Amenity.”

                                                  Trudy Wilkerson

The Charging for Service Scam Otherwise Known as Tipping. Tough amenity to fault, but I’ll give it a shot. You’re at a restaurant. You sit at a table to eat. What you eat is prepared in a kitchen, located near to or far from where you sit. A waiter comes to your table and asks you what you’d like to eat. You tell the waiter what you’d like to eat. He or she scribbles what you’d like to eat on a piece of paper and then hands the piece of paper to someone in the kitchen. Once prepared there, someone in the kitchen hands the food to the waiter who brings it to you. The livelihood of the restaurant depends on how well this system works. The delivery system back and forth is critical to the survival of the restaurant. Is this so hard for the restaurant to comprehend? I guess it is. Because what happens next is beyond the pale: the restaurant asks you to reward the delivery system for doing what it’s supposed to do. Can you believe that? If that’s not a “universal complaint,” I don’t know what is.

The Why is the Restaurant Open Scam. The ultimate solution. B-S complains about restaurants that print menus only in one language; about restaurants where you buy tables from maitre d’s; where you suffer pompous waiters; where restaurants are dimly-lit and noisy; where there are interminable waits for the check; and, lest we forget, the checkroom scam. B-S doesn’t need any of that. There isn’t much about dining out that pleases B-S. Solution? She should make a list of all of the restaurants that displease her and not go to them anymore until they shape up.  

As for the rest of B-S’s bellyaching, it’s not worth debating. Yes, it’s true, there are restaurants that serve bad food badly, but they don’t last very long. You have to wonder why they opened in the first place.

Part 4. About reviewers who shouldn’t review. Patricia Weitzel writes restaurant reviews for Cleveland magazine. Her column is called, for the sake of cuteness I suppose, “The Edible Index.” It lacks not only index, but content. It’s not edible, either: trying to digest what passes for content can cause stomach distress. I’ve taken Weitzel to task before in this column because I think she’s sloppy and careless. A recent review of hers hasn’t convinced me to change my mind.

It begins by decrying the absence of fine cuisine in the city. This conclusion, incidentally, is based not on her observations—as you’d expect—but on those from conversations with a local chef. It’s “a meat-and-potatoes town,” grouses Weitzel, parroting, no doubt, the grouse of the local chef from whom she cribbed that wisdom. “No dandy cuisine in spare settings,” she says, as if food suddenly would attain gastronomic intensity if served, say, in a padded cell. Just meat and potatoes. 

Notes Weitzel, “While diners in Cincinnati and Denver demand California cuisine . . . Clevelanders remain enamored of restaurants with ‘atmosphere’ and mediocre kitchens . . .content with steak and ‘French’ onion soup.” “Cincinnati and Denver”? That’s it?  Did she omit Newark on purpose? Furthermore, she doesn’t bother explaining what California cuisine is.

The fact that none of her criticism is accurate bespeaks a dishonesty that Weitzel, with annoying regularity, loves to wallow in. But, her wallow-dithering doesn’t stop there. To buttress her argument (“no dandy cuisine, just a meat-and-potatoes town”), she reviews a restaurant whose ambitious continental menu offers well over 100 items, nearly 25 of them fish and seafood. Of the four entrees she chooses to write nasty things about, three are meat dishes, one’s duck. That’s sick. It’s also, as noted earlier, sloppy and careless. Weitzel writes that she visited the restaurant twice before reviewing it. Really? And sampled only four entrees, none of which was seafood? Right: sick again.

A conscientious critic would have invited to dine with her at least three other people so she’d have a chance, after two or three visits, to sample at least eight or twelve or more different courses.

Now, if the magazine can’t afford to subsidize quality reviewing (see opening comments), it shouldn’t pretend that it does. It is one thing for a critic to write vituperatively about a really bad meal in a really bad restaurant, but only after he or she has sampled enough of the menu to conclude that vituperation is the only way to describe the experience (I give you New York magazine’s Gael Greene), quite another to be scheming and shallow (I give you Cleveland magazine’s Patricia Weitzel). Weitzel and, it follows, the magazine, perform a disservice to readers. The editor ought to can her. But he can’t: she’s his wife.