Fat Guy

Of course, critics can be liked or disliked, by their subjects or their audiences, for good reasons or for bad reasons. And every critic will be loved by someone and hated by someone. But when the core of knowledgeable, reasonable, experienced readers lose confidence in you, you have failed. I happen to disagree that "nobody likes restaurant critics" but I do believe restaurant critics, with a very few exceptions, have failed to earn the kind of respect that the best critics in the arts have. And it can be no coincidence that, having essentially made their beds as consumer reporters rather than arts critics, restaurant critics have to lie in them. The ideal critic should be a leader and an educator -- almost a parental figure for both the consumer and the industry. That requires integrity, boldness, wisdom, expertise, honesty, independence, skill, stature, and a platform. My advice to the new critic: be loved for the right reasons, and be hated for the wrong reasons. Be loved not for pandering to the audience (such as by ridiculing Ducasse's unprecedented luxuriousness or by disingenuously and selectively playing the anonymity card) but, rather, be loved for enriching the audience through your writing and through the knowledge you convey. Be hated not for being petty, under-informed, inexperienced, and free of context but, rather, be hated for telling it like it is. (Edit: Oops, this isn't the advice-for-the-new-critic thread; I guess there's some crossover!)

Yep, that's exactly the straining device I've got. This is fun.

Certainly there have been restaurant critics, like Ruth Reichl, who have been widely loved. Although being liked isn't a useful goal for a critic to pursue, if people in general don't like restaurant critics then it probably indicates the critics are doing something wrong. People like film critics, literary critics, theater critics, music critics, art critics . . . if they like every kind of critic but food critics, that's a problem. If nothing else, restaurant critics should earn the respect of the public -- being liked can surely follow from that. But the current narrowness of vision and plodding repetitiveness in restaurant reviewing isn't likely to earn much respect at all. I wonder. When I step outside of my small circle of food-obsessed friends and interact with normal people, I find that they have no idea what restaurants have been reviewed in the New York Times. My mother has been reading the New York Times every day since sometime in the 1950s and I can virtually guarantee you she couldn't tell you what day the dining section comes out on or who the reviewer has been for the past several years. The Times happily deludes itself into thinking that 10% of its audience reads the dining section, and therefore believes that 100,000 people read the weekly restaurant review (this is what a past reviewer told me was the paper's operating assumption). I highly doubt that. But even assuming it, that's the same 100,000 people every week. Meanwhile, Zagat is selling, what, three-quarters of a million copies of the New York guide alone? Every year. Meanwhile, I would just love to know how many dozen copies of The New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants 2004 have been sold.

I don't think there's such a thing as farm-raised tuna. But presumably almost all salmon used for sushi is farm-raised, with the exception of super-premium stuff served at the very top level of sushi restaurant. What would be the other most popular species used in sushi? Yellowtail? I don't think you can farm that. Uni is always wild, right? Shrimp would be mostly farmed (and cooked). Squid wild. Etc. The fake crab stuff comes from ocean-caught things, I think -- though that's not raw. Eel is also always cooked. For the purposes of this discussion, I think we're talking about raw fish only.

Okay, so just to be clear: should I be nudging the glass against the edge of the counter or should I be nudging the metal? Or does it not matter? And while we're on the subject of proper utilization of this contraption, do I build the drink in the glass or in the metal? When you shake, are you aiming to have the glass or the metal part on top? And at the end, am I supposed to be pouring the finished drink out of the glass or the metal? I imagine none of this makes a damn bit of difference to the taste of the final product, but I don't want to look stupid.

Yes! That photo is almost exactly the same as the one in Food Arts. The only difference is that in Food Arts the glass is taller, narrower, and straight-sided, so the effect is even more dramatic.

Okay, doc, I'm glad you're here. I've got one question: HOW THE HELL do you get the glass and the metal halves of the shaker separated? I have to bang that contraption against the sink like 20 times before it comes loose. Is there a better way?

On page 42 of the April 2004 issue of Food Arts magazine there's a photo of a really cool looking "layered espresso" created by some guy named Alan Miguel Kaplan. It's in a tall clear glass, and it appears that the drink has milk on the bottom, espresso in the middle, and foam on the top. All it says about how it's made is "By expertly and delicately adding the steamed milk with certain precision, we created the illusion of three different layers."

Two more notes: 1) this is served in a martini glass, and 2) I'm currently a partisan of vodka poured from the freezer -- it seems to make the drink better somehow.

Okay, so, here's where I'm at right now: A good friend and fellow eGulleter got sick of my incompetence and bought me a small bartending starter kit consisting of a jigger, a cocktail shaker (the type that's a metal half and a glass half), a straining unit (the kind you press into the top of the metal cup), and two martini glasses. I've been working with the individual ingredients in the vodka gimlet fizz drink from above and here's the recipe I've come up with for two highly enjoyable (to me) gimlet-type drinks. - 5 oz vodka - 2 oz Rose's Lime - Juice of half a lime - Juice of a quarter of a lemon - Put in cocktail shaker with ice, shake, strain-and-pour, garnish with lime The lemon entered the picture after I fretted at length about the lack of a certain "brightness" to the drink when made with only lime products. The fresh lemon juice totally changed the balance of flavors and gave it the bright kick I wanted. I ultimately did away with the carbonated water because I couldn't find a way to utilize it without hopelessly diluting the drink. Just made two of these tonight with ICY Icelandic vodka and served them to company, and they drew raves.

It's a pretty standard question for a server to ask. It doesn't bother me. I just answer yes or no.

When Bryan Miller was the New York Times restaurant reviewer, he had the power to close a restaurant. Simple as that. Today, almost every restaurant can easily withstand a bad review from the Times, and most restaurateurs will tell you that Zagat ratings are more important to them than Times reviews. They will also tell you that all the other newspaper and magazine reviews combined have hardly any impact whatsoever on their business. So I really think the "they're still around" standard is not the one by which we should be judging the success of newspaper and magazine restaurant reviews. I think it's far more telling that in the couple of decades they have been eclipsed by a new product. So now the mission is to distinguish themselves from that product. Restaurant reviews need a unique selling proposition. And there's one area in which it's impossible to make a dent in Zagat's armor: Zagat is the voice of a gazillion average Joe restaurantgoers; it controls the populist-consumerist end of the market. Real restaurant reviewers should be offering expertise, not populism and consumerism. That's the way they can distinguish themselves. By attempting to move in the Zagat direction, the critics guarantee they will lose to Zagat. They should carve out their own territory -- the expert territory -- and take control of it. That's a thin reed for newspapers to hang on to. Zagat has already started up with the ZagatWire and will slowly become more and more competitive on the news and timeliness fronts.

For someone who has already been on television and whose photos can be found with two clicks on Google, the train has already left the station. Bruni should learn to be a good non-anonymous reviewer rather than try to live the lie.

New York Times restaurant reviews are already "My Reviewer's Dinner" half the time, or more. It's just that under the cloak-and-dagger system everybody feels compelled to be dishonest about it: you get into this bizarre double-secret cycle of wigs and fake credit cards and restaurateurs pretending not to recognize critics even though they do and the critics sweeping it under the rug in their reviews even though they know they've been recognized. And the end result is that something like half the reviews are still "My Reviewer's Dinner" while the other half are divided between "Average Joe's random experience gets used to rate a restaurant for a decade" and "Reviewer got fooled, thought he was anonymous but wasn't." I've got news for you, Bill: Zagat has already marginalized newspaper and magazine restaurant reviews to the point where, under the current system, it's only a matter of time before they start replacing them with excerpts from Zagat. And that will be the fault of the critics and editors who engaged in the long campaign of self-marginalization represented by the shallow consumerist view, as opposed to treating restaurant reviewing as a form of arts criticism. I also think you're making a big jump from non-anonymity to "pure entertainment" and "little news or consumer value." There is tremendous consumer value in an insider's look at a restaurant, one that really explains the cuisine and how to get the most out of the place. And it extends beyond entertainment, to actual education. Whereas, on the more lowbrow consumer-protection front, Zagat does a much better job than a newspaper critic can. As for news value, every other writer in a food section is known to the chefs and restaurateurs being written about and it doesn't seem to detract from news value. In fact, the non-review pieces in newspaper food sections tend to have a higher news value than the reviews, which are news only in the sense that they are usually reviews of new restaurants -- something that wouldn't change under a non-anonymous system. David Rosengarten wrote reviews for Gourmet for years and was -- as a major Food TV personality -- always recognized. Yet his reviews were some of the best restaurant reviews ever written: witty, informed, and unfailingly precise. Ultimately, all this speculation about the theoretical problems with non-anonymity collapses under the weight of the actual evidence: we have seen non-anonymous restaurant reviews, and they have been excellent.

Same here, come to think of it. They must be operating out of a different office.

I received two previous number-unavailable calls this week. As is my standard practice, I ignored them and waited for messages. When no messages were left, it slowly dawned upon me that this was Per Se's modus operandi: no caller ID, no messsage. So I resolved to pick up on the next one. And indeed it was Per Se.

I make cappuccinos and lattes at all times of the day and night because I'm not good enough at making espresso to drink it straight. And I think the American preference for the milk-based beverages over the straight stuff may in part be connected to the near impossibility of getting a good shot of espresso at any restaurant in America -- whereas you can often get a passable cappuccino or latte. In any event, what mags has written reminds me of this comment from the Publishers Weekly write-up of the Mr. Latte book:

I finally decided to pick up the latest number-unavailable call that came in today, figuring it had to be Per Se. My rescheduling call, which took 1 minute and 40 seconds according to my cell-phone's call log, was very pleasant. "Jill" reassigned me to the same day-of-week and time-of-day as my previous reservation.

And the follow-up review is an overwhelming demonstration of the failure of anonymity. As you will recall, she claims to have disguised herself as a complete bumpkin, yet she got great service. Le Cirque goes back to four stars. Yet it is well known in the industry that she was recognized the second she walked up the stairs and that Sirio out-maneuvered her. But more importantly, Le Cirque is a totally atypical restaurant. It is one of the few remaining totally retrograde hierarchical restaurants in New York. Were all restaurants like Le Cirque, where the restaurant is more about social status and FOSness than it is about food, that would be one thing. But that's simply not an accurate representation of the New York restaurant scene, which is full of conscientious restaurateurs acting in good faith and trying to do their best for every customer. They should not be treated as criminals -- and usually in news reporting the undercover gambit is reserved only for extreme cases of criminality, immorality, or environmental destruction -- just because a small minority of restaurateurs really are as bad as everybody imagines. And why should a random occurrence, such as a 1-in-7 chance of a critic showing up on the chef's night off, determine how many stars a restaurant is going to carry for the next decade? Of course, a good chef will ensure that the restaurant runs as well when he's out of the kitchen as when he's in -- after the restaurant has been open for awhile (of course most restaurants are reviewed when new). But unless every restaurant is going to be visited at least once on the chef's night off, how is it particularly fair to nail the few who got unlucky? I believe restaurants should be given an opportunity to serve the Times reviewer under favorable circumstances. It all comes down to the mission of the review. Some see it as a fancy version of Zagat: an exercise in consumerism. I see it as a higher level of criticism: my primary interest is in knowing what a restaurant will be like at its best. I can read the write-ins on CitySearch to find out if the average Joe isn't getting good treatment. The Times reviewer will never be anonymous enough and will never visit a restaurant enough times to develop a statistically meaningful appraisal of a restaurant's underperformance potential. I don't see it as a war where a sneak attack is necessary. By that logic, everybody on TV should be pixellated.

Score one for the Jean-Georges sycophants. Hal Rubenstein weighs in with an over-the-top Spice Market rave in New York Magazine, complete with swipes at Ducasse and "snappish foodies": http://nymetro.com/nymetro/food/reviews/re...167//index.html

The fat content of milk is easily manipulated -- you can get skim, 1%, 2%, whole, half-and-half, light cream, heavy cream, etc. at any supermarket -- so I fail to see how the high fat content of raw pig milk is an effective selling point.

I doubt it will have anything to do with the critic's perspective. It's not as though William Grimes and Ruth Reichl were such Francophiles. They gave plenty of three-star ratings to non-French restaurants. The reality at the four-star level is that there aren't any contenders that aren't at the French or heavily-French-influenced end of the culinary spectrum. If someone opens a four-star-caliber Italian restaurant in New York, and it doesn't go out of business in three days, I'm sure a Times critic would love to give it four stars. There was really only one non-French contender, at its time, for a four-star rating: Gramercy Tavern. Of course by today's standards, when you look at places like Per Se, Gramercy is very clearly a three-star restaurant. But when it opened it was possible to make a four-star argument. Still, I think Danny Meyer and Tom Colicchio chose not to pursue the four-star agenda to its logical conclusion. They wanted something more casual, they didn't want to shell out for silver instead of stainless, they wanted to do more covers than a four-star environment can easily allow (the Daniel example notwithstanding), and they chose to keep the menu somewhat conservative and mainstream.

He has been on TV, he has written a book, and there has never been any effort made to conceal his image. Any restaurateur with 5 minutes to spare can find images of him online. As with all the Times critics, most restaurateurs in town will know what he looks like and by the time he has been around for a few months he will be recognized more often than not when he goes to a restaurant. Sometimes he'll know he was recognized, and sometimes he won't. Ultimately it won't make a huge difference over the course of multiple visits and with a practiced eye. Yet the Times will continue the anonymity charade, pixellating the critic's image in TV appearances and having him wear funny hats at the 92nd Street Y. In addition to being disingenuous, this practice will simply continue to play into the myth of restaurateurs as corrupt: they're out to serve crap to us common folk, and they only serve good meals to critics and rich celebrities. Yet, while the Times feels anonymity is important enough to require hats, wigs, pixellation, and fake credit cards (something that would probably be considered unethical in standard news reporting), you will never rarely see acknowledgment in the individual reviews of the fact that the critic has been recognized. The Times should take this opportunity to rid itself of its failed and nonsensical anonymity policy.

It seems as though, at some point, the Times decided to end or dilute that franchise. The $25 and Under books seem to have been folded into the general New York Times dining guide, and there have been quite a number of guest $25 and Under columns in the past couple of years -- something that never used to happen. So I imagine Eric Asimov might be less attached now than before. It's also just a long time to be doing any one thing, and I can't see him doing that plus being the head wine writer. Although the announcement is indeed ambiguous, I imagine Asimov will be giving up $25 and Under or at least putting it into a rotation. We'll have to wait and see, though -- you never know.

That assumes they either leave a message or show up on caller ID. If they're calling from "number unavailable" and they aren't leaving voicemails, who knows how many people will just ignore the calls.