Fat Guy

The latest thing I've heard is that Saveur recently moved its art department from New York to the parent company's corporate headquarters in, I think, Florida. Perhaps that explains the new look. I wonder if it was also a cost-cutting/consolidation measure -- it sounds like one.

Have you tried asking him a question?

I hope I made clear that, when I spoke of problems at the French Laundry, I was describing what the book says. I have no first-hand knowledge of what happened in Napa. I do, however, have first-hand knowledge of what the book says about what happened in Napa. I get the feeling that several people here are commenting about what the book says without having read it or even having a clear idea of what it says beyond "it's critical of Thomas and said the walk-in was a mess." To those who have read it, I think it would be hard to believe that the whole chapter is a lie. Self-serving? Sure, that is probable. Incomplete? Definitely. But the information that is there is too detailed, involves quotes from too many people (including Keller), names too many folks by name, was witnessed by too many people and has too much of the ring of truth to it to be written off as sour grapes. Silverbrow, at this point there's no need for me to exert any influence. Doug Psaltis is registered as a participating member here. You can even send him a PM if you like, if you think there's anything he should comment on. I'm not sure anybody has said anything to which it would be helpful for him to respond, though. In the follow-up discussion regarding his book excerpts, there haven't really been questions about the excerpts that need answering or comments that need addressing. On this topic, what were you thinking he might talk about? He may very well be eager to engage, but feel that he has no good opportunity to do so. I might suggest that those who wish to have the author of a book respond to their posts give the author something to respond to and a hospitable environment for doing so.

The pages in question are, mostly, 276-279. What the book explains is that the opening of Per Se and the expansion of the Keller empire -- and remember, at the same time French Laundry lost its long-time chef-de-cuisine and Per Se burned down -- left French Laundry with a dearth of kitchen talent and a lot of institutional inertia that made it hard to fix the problems. As the account goes, since Psaltis's job was to fix the problems, he was understandably frustrated at not being given the tools to do so. This certainly seems possible. Similar stories are common -- more common than not -- at restaurants that spin off branches in faraway places. The chapter is pretty detailed and includes direct quotes from Keller on all the salient points. Perhaps it is "self-serving" in the manner of most autobiographies, and perhaps Psaltis was not without sin (as is usually the case when two parties are involved in anything), but I've not heard of Keller disputing the quotes or the facts set forth by Psaltis. What Psaltis says also strikes me as fair comment -- it mostly comes across as negative not because it's particularly harsh (it is much less harsh, for example, than the average restaurant review published in the UK) but, rather, because it is naturally viewed relative to the long-standing media baseline of absolute unquestioning Keller-worship. There seems to be some innuendo here that something bad happened that Psaltis has not told about. I'm sure we'd all be interested to know what that is supposed to be. Doug is a friend and one of the most talented chefs I know, but if he was engaging in human sacrifice in the French Laundry kitchen and was fired for it I'll be the first to publicize it here. Innuendo, however, is another story, and tends to imply something far worse than reality. The suggestion that Psaltis took the French Laundry job in order to write about it is risible. There should be little doubt that if Psaltis had fit in and loved it out there he could have settled into the chef-de-cuisine job and been happy for a long time at a restaurant that has often been called one of the world's best (though in my opinion it is overrated). In terms of timing, as far as I know by the time Psaltis went to French Laundry the book was sold and written. I'm pretty sure the French Laundry chapter was added during editorial revisions.

People don't pay for magazines; advertisers pay for magazines. A business or trade journal might get 10% of its revenue from single-copy and subscription sales combined and 90% from advertising (well, a couple of percentage points need to be set aside for other revenue sources -- sale of mailing lists, back-issues, merchandise, etc. -- but those aren't all that significant). For special interest magazines like Saveur, the number is likely to be about 30% from selling magazines and 70% from advertising. It is extremely rare for a magazine to be supported by its subscribers. Cook's Illustrated, Consumer Reports and a few others do manage to publish without advertising and they have that signature low-budget appearance. Whereas some of the nicest magazines out there are free to most or all of their subscribers: Departures, Food Arts, Absolute. So the question isn't really "are people willing to pay for Saveur" but, rather, "are advertisers willing to pay for Saveur." I suspect the answer, increasingly, is no. Rumors of Saveur's demise have been circulating for some time. It would have gone under a couple of years ago but was rescued at the last minute by World Publications. I don't know that it has been profitable since -- it may just be a feather in World Pub's cap for as long as they're willing to lose money on it.

I don't think the idea here was to write a how-to manual; it was to introduce people to someone and something they're probably not all that familiar with. Specifically, it was to generate interest in the upcoming roundtable discussion, in which Mr. Wolf will be participating. As it says above, "Clark Wolf will be a panelist on the upcoming eG Spotlight Round Table on The Future of Dining, 26-30 September 2005." That there is so much clamor for more information is a good thing. I hope it means you're all going to ask him questions. But I also think a careful reader can learn quite a bit from what Mr. Wolf has said above. No, he's not going to spoon-feed all his trade secrets, but, for example, if every aspiring restaurant consultant would take to heart the statement that "I have to be able to help nurture a business, acting as if it’s my own and never forgetting that it’s not. I help people learn and help them keep learning. Education allows you to succeed," then the entire profession would be elevated immeasurably.

The testicle comment strikes me as, simply, colorful use of the English language. To obsess over it, howl about it and call it sexist is, shall we say, premature. Nor do I think the idea here was to teach anybody how to "recognize magic" or be a restaurant consultant. It's a profile, not a how-to. While I didn't, and wasn't supposed to, learn how to do Mr. Wolf's job, I did gain as much insight into who he is and what he does as one could reasonably be expected to gain in a short profile. And I enjoyed reading it. Perhaps a more productive avenue of discussion would be to engage the piece on its substance. The whole concept of the restaurant consultant is a relatively modern one. There was nobody like Clark Wolf available to help you open a restaurant in the 1950s. The proffer is made that "Wolf is not your average food and restaurant consultant." This is certainly the case, as he is perhaps the most or at least one of a small group of the most sought after restaurant consultants out there. But what struck me most about the statement was the idea that there is such a thing as the "average food and restaurant consultant" -- that restaurant consultants, who didn't exist half a century ago, are now a given in the industry. It underscores how much the business has changed. Restaurants, even those that appear to be artisanal, individual and personal, are increasingly adapting to the way real businesses do business. They retain the services of consultants, publicists and other advisors. At the level of a place like the French Laundry, they even utilize the services of a psychologist. The concern, for me, is that if the same consultant helps set up 500 restaurants then those restaurants will not be as unique as 500 restaurants that had been set up independently. There's the potential for sameness. I get the sense from the way he talks that Mr. Wolf understands the need for balance here. Still, I wonder if the "average food and restaurant consultant" gets that, or understands that "I have to be able to help nurture a business, acting as if it’s my own and never forgetting that it’s not."

It's unnecessary and irrational. But having been in the position of being an author (and a lawyer) having his manuscript reviewed by a publisher's legal department, I can tell you that your choice is to do it their way or not have the book published -- there is very little room for negotiation, even if you're a literary agent like Michael Psaltis is (he is my literary agent). So some lawyer at Random House mistakenly thought it would make some sort of difference not to name Chodorow, Blue Hill, etc., and the Psaltises surely had no choice but to comply. Since it's pretty easy to figure out what's what, I guess it doesn't really matter.

All other things are not equal. Anonymity reduces access and therefore the ability to acquire information of relevance to a review. Not a reported piece -- a review. In addition, the theoretical ideal of anonymity is never achieved in practice. What is relevant to the real world of restaurant reviewing is how these things actually work, and in actuality the reviewers who claim to be anonymous are recognized anyway. And the general attempted use of anonymity in restaurants establishes a negative dynamic between the press and restaurants, and sends the wrong message to the public. Moreover, the requirement of the pretense of anonymity also negatively impacts the quality of writers who will be hired to write reviews in the first place, e.g., David Rosengarten, Jeffrey Steingarten and Alan Richman could never get hired to write New York Times restaurant reviews because all three have appeared regularly on television -- yet all three are far superior writers and would be far superior New York Times reviewers to Frank Bruni.

All these pleas for anonymity would make a lot more sense if there were mountains of examples of great, impartial, unbiased, deeply knowledgeable anonymous critics and mountains of examples of terrible, compromised, unfair non-anonymous critics. But the reality is quite different. For example, the statement "Frank Bruni is a better restaurant reviewer than David Rosengarten because Bruni is anonymous when he dines out and Rosengarten is not" is false for the following reasons: 1) Rosengarten's reviews are better-written, more valuable to the diner, more focused on food and more likely to predict good and bad meals; 2) Bruni is rarely anonymous at any restaurant that would typically recognize a non-anonymous critic; and 3) Bruni's reviews are full of personal biases and idiosyncrasies whereas Rosengarten's are much closer to being arms-length and objective. Anonymity is a red herring, not least because it is so rarely achieved but also because the proof is in the pudding: the important thing is what the critic writes. A non-anonymous critic who is self-aggrandizing is a bad critic; a non-anonymous critic who uses his non-anonymity for the benefit of the craft of reviewing and doesn't let it interfere with his critical distance is on his way to being a good critic. The anonymity issue has tremendous symbolic importance to the dining public, because it preys upon the worst "they fuck you at the drive-through" fears of restaurantgoers, but it is more of a distraction than anything else.

"I realized that if I wanted to cook there, I’d have to do more than check in and stare out the kitchen door. I was determined that when something was being done in the kitchen that I had never seen before, I’d be among the first in the kitchen to volunteer to help out." This is exactly the opposite of my work ethic. I prefer to check in and stare, and to do the bare minimum whenever possible. I'm the last person to volunteer for anything. This qualifies me to be a restaurant reviewer.

Fluorescent bulbs are a heck of a lot better today than they were even ten years ago, and they are cool and energy efficient. Halogen lights give better light, though. There are a lot of scientific sounding measurements out there, used to support the claim that fluorescent lighting is now as good as incandescent or halogen. But I've never experienced that. I would be fine with using a fluorescent fixture, with a modern full-spectrum bulb, to provide general lighting for a room. I lived with high-quality fluorescent in the kitchen, and it was a serviceable arrangement. But the light from halogen bulbs is an order of magnitude better, and there are two areas where I want the best possible light: for reading, and for cooking prep work. So I am now using halogen in my kitchen and office (where, by the way, I used surface-mounted wiring at a savings of about a trillion dollars over what I would have had to pay an electrician). I wouldn't go back. When I got done installing the halogen task lights in the kitchen and switched them all on for the first time, I was like "Holy crap, this is so much better I can't believe it!"

The outlet strip is great -- it really should be more commonly deployed. Even if you don't have a lip or valance, those little Home Depot fixtures are pretty attractive (as are any number of other fixtures like them). The angles are still going to prevent anyone who's taller than the bottom of the cabinets from seeing the actual wiring. All they'll see are the individual white fixtures. I've seen them installed this way in glass-fronted shelves used to display art objects, and they look quite good. Or, you can always do the wiring inside the cabinets and punch through above each fixture, so the fixtures appear to have no wires going to them.

Under-cabinet task lighting should always be installed at the front edge of the cabinets. Cabinets are half the depth of countertops, so placement at the front edge of the cabinet centers the lights and illuminates the active workspace (the front half of the countertop). If you install the lights at the rear edge of the cabinets, against the walls, you won't have task lighting. You'll have accent lighting for your walls. Most cabinets have a lip along the front edge. It may be 1/2" or 3/4", but it is usually enough to conceal a 1" light. Many people purchase expensive, difficult-to-install light valances to increase the lip, but unless you want the valance for its beauty (some people do), it is unnecessary. Remember, as a matter of perspective, the lights do not have to be shorter than the lip, because a person standing in the kitchen is looking down at the lip. In my kitchen, to anybody taller than about 4' 10", the under-cabinet task lights are invisible. At some point, of course, when the person viewing the cabinets is shorter than the cabinets, the lights will be visible no matter what. This is the setup I just installed in July: The wiring is inelegant, but so what? Nobody ever sees it, and I did it myself for free in about three hours. As for the lights, the expense was insignificant: for reference, it's Home Depot part number 161609 from Hampton Bay, "WHITE 20W HALOGEN CABINET LIGHT 5-LT KIT." For $29.96 you get five of those lights. So if you need twenty of them in your kitchen, you'll be spending $119.84 for an entire kitchen under-cabinet task lighting installation that uses existing line voltage and switches. That's $5.99 per light, and yes they come with bulbs. Many of these fancier fixtures cost something like $50 or more each, before you even get into transformers and special dimmers. And their light quality often isn't as good as the Home Depot halogens. The replacement bulbs for these units are available at minimal cost -- something like $1.99 (the Home Depot site is down right now, otherwise I'd look it up). But even if you just bought whole fixtures to use as replacements, took the bulbs out of them and threw the fixtures in the garbage, it would only cost you $5.99 per bulb!

Are xenon lights really all that much cooler than halogen? The information I got when I was researching lighting was that they are 15% cooler, which I consider to be insignificant. They are, however, quite expensive.

Let us not forget that, also, White Manna in Hoboken, NJ, home of one of the world's greatest hamburgers, uses Martin's potato rolls (in the mini size). I can't imagine they'd be terribly hard to replicate, not that I know how.

If the pool is also being shared with the kitchen crew, the potential for reduced income in the front of the house is greater. I imagine there will be a definite and substantial reduction in income. There will also likely be an increase in security, predictability and workplace hospitability. These things tend to trade off. It's no surprise that, for the current generation of waitstaff, immediate maximization of income is the priority -- the system has created that situation. But for other servers, there may be other priorities. And some people's preferences may change as they are exposed to other systems.

Bux, Pedro and the eG Spotlight team, thanks very much for setting up this roundtable. These things don't just come together magically; they require a great deal of behind-the-scenes preparation over a period of months. I think this is going to be great. Thanks also to Michael and Clark for letting me play at being their colleague. In all my mutual fund investment brochures, there’s a statement that “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” In the world of dining, this could probably be replaced with “Past performance doesn’t mean a damn thing.” Moreover, since I’m routinely wrong about what will happen ten minutes into the future in my own life, it’s not clear that I should be discussing the longer-term future of an entire cultural, economic, artistic and gastronomic phenomenon. Nor am I feeling very big on certainty these days: predictions made in July about the future of dining in New Orleans are liable to seem like dark comedy today. Nonetheless, though it cannot be ascertained reliably, the future can’t be ignored. Nor does a discussion of the future necessarily have to be limited to predictions. What we want the future to be is at least as important as what we think the future will be, and here we are in a position to do more than just talk about it: perhaps collectively we can have some limited influence on the future of dining. Discussing the future intelligently also requires the context of the past and present, though it’s by no means clear that everybody sees those the same way either. I’m not going to touch on the past and present too much in these opening comments, however. The Daily Gullet has published an excerpt from my book, Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out, that has some relevance to the current discussion. It can be found here. By the future, I mean three futures: the immediate future (what will happen in the next few years), the medium-term future (what will happen over the coming decades), and the Future (how we will dine in a century or a millennium). And when I refer to dining as a cultural, economic, artistic and gastronomic phenomenon (though I’m sure it’s more than that), I’m setting out four discussion areas that interest me. Not that there are clear demarcations among them. By dining, I'm thinking of more than just eating. While dining may occur at home or in the restaurant, it has to occur as an activity unto itself. In my opinion, grabbing a sandwich for lunch is not, except in the most unusual circumstances, is not dining. Then again, I see plenty of people in restaurants like Per Se and Alain Ducasse who seem not to be dining either. The immediate future of dining often feels like the only future of dining because it’s what we read about, think about and experience through actual eating. New restaurants open, old ones close. It’s easy to think of this as the future unfolding in front of us. But what I’ve learned over the past decade, which is the time during which I’ve been paying close attention to the world of dining, is that the immediate signals are often misleading. For one thing, the economic factors tend to be disproportionately influential in the short term. The 9/11 attack in New York, the Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast area, bull and bear markets . . . whenever anything like this happens, we are treated to a chorus of proclamations that “People want comfort food because of 9/11” or “Luxury dining is booming with the economy.” Looking back, however, it is probably unlikely that any particular economic event (short of one on the order of World War II) will fundamentally alter the dining scene over the long haul. Likewise, cultural, artistic and gastronomic trends tend to come and go with great rapidity, which is to say they are mostly fads and not really trends. If I actually accepted every proposed assignment from a magazine or newspaper that wanted me to write an article about “Ten Hot Food Trends for Summer” I could rely on such assignments as my exclusive source of income. "The future" from the standpoint of a restaurant businessperson looking to make a short-term profit may be highly trend-oriented, but that shouldn't be confused with any sort of settled future. Still, the occasional apparent fad becomes a real, sustained, long-term trend. Such things are pretty hard to identify. I think, for example, that Ferran Adria and the culinary avant-garde are here to stay, but I can’t prove it. I’m probably most interested in the medium-term future, because it is less subject to the bumps in the road of economic crises and fads, yet it is still close enough that society has a good chance to be, at least, recognizable when the future arrives. Economically and culturally, it seems to me that the major phenomenon that will affect dining in the medium-term future is globalization. How could it not? Right now, as one travels around the world, dining is defined by local influences. The restaurants in France are different from the restaurants in Tokyo. These differences are, I think, going to lessen. Chefs and their customers are not only traveling, but also taking advantage of unprecedented access to instant and near-instant communication. Dine at El Bulli tonight, post photos in the eG Forums tomorrow, watch it on Tony Bourdain’s show, read about it in the New York Times Magazine, buy the El Bulli books (with accompanying CD-ROM). And it is now possible for a single chef-restaurateur to have multiple restaurants around the world. Alain Ducasse is surely the leader in this area, but Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Nobu Matsuhisa and several others also have global reach. This will, I think, eventually become the norm. Gastronomically, of course, globalization manifests itself as so-called fusion, either overtly (“This is a fusion restaurant”) or as a matter of fact (ingredients and techniques migrating from place to place). The overt, overly self-conscious form of fusion is in most cases a victim of access to the global pantry. But fusion-in-fact is the way of history (tomatoes are not from Italy, chocolate is not from France, capsicum peppers are not from China, etc.), and is now merely being accelerated. This can be a good thing: no matter where you are, you will be able to get the best of everything product-wise, and everybody will be familiar with the best techniques of the world's great cuisines. This access to everything everywhere, combined with the lessening of regional differences, may also be a threat to dining, or certainly to diversity in dining. But I think it is probably fruitless to cling to regional differences as the exclusive point of differentiation in cuisine. Being opposed to culinary globalization is like being opposed to the Earth orbiting the Sun. But at least, with culinary globalization, we have some choices and ability to influence how it progresses. I think, in the coming decades, restaurants in order to be memorable will have to strive for interest and quality, rather than derive their uniqueness primarily from place or imitation of place. This could be a good thing, or at least not a bad thing. I do think it’s relatively certain that dining as a phenomenon will increase over the coming decades. People around the world, especially in the major non-European industrialized nations (US, Canada, Australia, China, India, Argentina, et al.) are becoming more interested in dining out and dining in. To use the US as an example, we are now seeing upper-middle-class white kids, who when I went to college in the 1980s would have been expected to go to law school, choosing to go to the Culinary Institute of America instead. Popular television, not the food network but actual sitcoms and dramas, are slowly embracing chefs as characters. On the supermarket scene, we are seeing an explosion of gourmet products. People are more and more interested in food. Restaurants are getting more interesting in the places where they were least interesting: the smaller cities. As the audience for dining becomes more diverse, dining itself will have to become more egalitarian. I think we can look forward (or dread, depending on one's perspective) to less formal service, more accommodating establishments and an increasing merger of the way people dine in, out and at every level. Although, especially in the English-speaking world, there is a countervailing current of neo-Puritanism that may sabotage the future of dining. The view that hedonistic enjoyment of food is sinful has strong traction in some quarters, and these quarters are growing as a matter of demographic fact. I hope we will also be able to discuss where the French, the world’s global culinary superpower, will be in all this. And there is the question of the fate of the culinary avant-garde. But perhaps someone else will take the first crack at those. Finally, I wonder where we’ll be in the Future with a capital F, as in the Star Trek future. It seems inconceivable to me that we’ll still be eating the flesh of animals. Nor would I be surprised to see all food made artificially from some stem substance that can be electronically prodded into becoming a steak, a pizza, Joel Robuchon’s mashed potatoes or something so far removed from any natural product that Ferran Adria would say “This has gone too far.” I imagine nobody will cook and that restaurant service will be provided by robots. I wonder if they will pool their tips.

If you're planning to skip over any sort of regional fidelity and go with what tastes best with barbecue, I strongly second the potato roll suggestion. Martin's potato rolls, from Pennsylvania, make for better eating than any bread I've had with barbecue in the South. I simply can't endorse the notion that bad bread should be served with anything, no less barbecue. I rarely get barbecue sandwiches in the South, not because I don't approve of them but, rather, because the bread is so uniformly awful -- and of course when given the choice with a plate I take hush puppies over rolls. But I do agree with the soft-texture school of thought. Potato bread is the best of the soft-textured breads, in my opinion. Also good with barbecue are brioche and challah. A Martin's sandwich potato roll is 1.9 oz.

A drop ceiling makes it incredibly easy to install recessed lighting, as well as the attendant wiring. However, installing a drop ceiling is probably harder than installing lights in a non-drop ceiling. Also, remember that there's no law that says wiring has to be concealed. You can surface-mount your wiring all the way from the switch to the lights. You just get the wide flat wires and match the color and it looks totally fine. Or you can make a statement with a contrasting color. In our kitchen, we have a drop ceiling, but in another room we have an impossible wiring situation so we surface-mounted the wires and I don't think anybody has ever noticed or cared. I'll try to post some photos later. Also, for crying out loud, if you have all that great high ceiling space please, please, please put up a big pot-rack!

I'm in a position to speak about fluorescent versus halogen undercabinet task lighting, because I've had both. When we first renovated our kitchen a few years ago, I installed Hera Slimlite fluorescent fixtures. They have some advantages: they're extremely thin, which means you can usually install them behind the lip of the cabinet without the need for a light rail to conceal them; they consume very little power; they run pretty cool (they don't generate noticeable heat on the countertop, but they will soften chocolate on the bottom shelf of the cabinet); they provide extremely even light along the length of the fixture. The quality of light is not bad at all, especially if you put the warm white bulbs in. The problems with these fixtures are twofold: first, the bulbs are more expensive to replace than even obscure halogen bulbs; and second, the fixtures are flimsy. I'm sure they're great for glass cabinetry in which you're displaying art objects, but they wither when exposed to the heat, vaporized grease and vibrations of a kitchen. Over a period of just a few years, I had to replace all but two of the fixtures and all of the mounting clips. So, as everything started to wear out for the second time, I switched to halogen. I am not exactly the poster child for up-to-code electrical work. The way I wired the halogen lights was this: I bought twenty of them at Home Depot. They cost almost nothing -- it was maybe a hundred bucks for all of them. They're supposed to plug into wall sockets. I ignored that advice. I just cut each cord to length, tied them together in several groups and hooked them into the same wires that had been supplying the fluorescent lights. So the same wall switches operate them. They support the wattage, so I wasn't worried. The halogen lights have pros and cons. Pros: the quality of light is fantastic, very clear and natural; the fixtures are very slim, not as slim as a Hera Slimlite but slim enough to be concealed by the lip of the cabinets; the Home Depot lights (sold under the Hampton Bay brand) don't require any special transformers; and it's easy to group them so as to provide the right amount of light for each place in the kitchen -- for example I have them clustered closer together in my primary work area than over the rarely used narrow counter on the other side of the kitchen. Cons: they do produce heat, though not so much that I mind; they use more power than the fluorescents; and of course halogen bulbs are notoriously expensive and inconvenient to replace. However, for now at least, you can get the bulbs at Home Depot for something like $2.99. I plan to stock up. So, so far, I prefer the halogen. Even if I had fluorescent lights of a higher level of durability, I'd still prefer the quality of light from the halogens -- thought it would be a closer call.

I'm going to double check this, but my understanding is that the Shake Shack is owned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization. Therefore, whatever revenue the Shake Shack generates (after expenses) for the Conservancy must be used exclusively for the Conservancy's purposes. Some of that may of course involve paying for Conservancy expenses not directly related to park maintenance. For example, if the Conservancy has any administrative employees, they might be paid in part out of revenue generated by the Shake Shack. Perhaps the Shake Shack was financed with a bank loan -- that loan would have to be serviced. You get the idea. Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group (USHG) is the operator of the Shake Shack. I don't know if the USHG receives a management fee or not -- I assume not, but it would certainly be reasonable for the operator to be paid a fee or percentage.

The "school of thought" that says you should assign more personal value to the reviewers with whom you agree more often is known as "logic." The "school of thought" that says you should assign equal value to all reviewers no matter what is known as "random." Of course, one should keep an open mind and there are all sorts of factors that come into play when evaluating reviews. And even then you can get burned, either because the reviewer screwed up or because you hit the restaurant on an off night or because your something was not to your taste for whatever reason. But starting from a base of proven, trustworthy sources significantly improves your chances of getting good meals. And even when you're in a situation where no source has a track record (e.g., you're visiting another city), you can make some judgments about sources just by reading with a critical eye. You won't always be right, but you'll improve your chances.

I agree, and mention in the book, that it's best to rely on a variety of sources. What I would argue against, though, is treating them all equally.

Thanks very much, Angela. Patty Talorico, who has twice been nominated for James Beard journalism awards, writes for the News Journal in New Castle, Delaware. The piece originally appeared there a couple of weeks ago, and is now in syndication on the Gannett news wire. So it's showing up in other Gannett papers -- quite a few of them actually -- edited and laid out in various ways. Thanks Patty!