Chowhound is a weekly column about what’s trending in Detroit food culture. Tips: [email protected].
Critical mass: Food and restaurant writers are afforded a bully pulpit. Preaching from it is sometimes hard to resist. After all, the job typically comes with a “critic” title that’s essentially a license to do so. Even so, the trick of this trade is to engage without giving sermons. They’re snooze-worthy. We lose people when we pontificate. They just stop paying attention. To gather and hold an audience, I work at drawing interest by sketching caricature studies we all see ourselves in. Bar and restaurant scenes offer parable portraits of who we are as social animals. Food writers have ringside seats at that societal circus, yet our reporting from that vantage point often reads like more distanced views from way above it all.
Some better bits of advice I was offered as an aspiring food scribe came compliments of two of my fellows from the Phoenix market: Nikki Buchanan, longtime restaurant writer whose work still graces the pages of Phoenix Magazine while she further informs on the state of dining in Arizona via her radio show and regular appearances on morning news TV, and Howard Seftel, venerated voice of epicurean authority for The Arizona Republic and Phoenix New Times, now retired.
“You have to put that Satan behind you,” Seftel demonized sarcasm, for his part, in answering a question posed during a roundtable Q & A on the craft of restaurant reviewing, which I mediated in a trade publication piece years ago. The question concerned making light of perceived shortfalls in restaurants’ performances through humor. “I subscribe to what’s been said of sarcasm,” Seftel seconded. “We needn’t go so low to make points.” In a 2015 exit interview with a reporter from his own paper, Howard — lifelong culinary explorer the world over — summed up what separates essential credibility in restaurant reviewing from the prandial pablum posted in review forums across the online universe:
“Everyone has an opinion.” He observed. “Not everyone has an informed opinion.”
On the topic of judging vice and virtue in victuals, Buchanan spoke to credentials as well.
“The measuring sticks become comparison and consensus. A professional eater, I’ve sampled so many offerings of all kinds of cuisine, over and over again. Any authority to what we say is earned through experience. I’ve had cassoulet enough times to know what’s worked well and what hasn’t in contrast. The next time I order it, I’ll measure the effort then weigh-in in that context. People might think we’re just making subjective pronouncements, but that’s not what I do.”
Since taking Nikki and Howard’s standards to heart, I’ve come to practice my own writer’s credo religiously. My belief is that talking about who we are through what, how, and where we choose to eat tells much of the story of us, from both the working and consumer sides of the table. I have profound respect for those in business who make the sometimes soul-sucking efforts it takes to serve one’s heart on a plate to a hungry/hangry public, day-in, day-out. Anyone who can come to work at 4 a.m. and cook eggs to order for hours on end has my admiration. Dining room crews dealing with demanding customers who routinely demean their efforts by treating service professionals like indentured servants deserve better and their fair due in my purview, along with chefs and owners who open themselves daily to the slings and arrows of outrageous attacks by social media vigilantes left butt-hurt over perceived slights that didn’t return effusive enough apologies and a complete meal comp. On the other hand, as a kid raised by three women who cooked their asses off for everyone they knew and loved, along with everyone else they fed from the neighborhood (my grandmother served our mailman hot lunches and shots of Old Grandad during winter), there’s nothing I have more appreciation for than a place at the table among others seeking the purist pleasures of breaking bread and making merry in simple, communal bliss.
Bottom line: What I hope most to communicate through my craft is what we all crave when we sit down to eat socially; an experience that nourishes us a bit, body and soul. That happens here in the Detroit area every day. My job is to ferret out the vibes and vittles in the coffee shops and fine dining cathedrals all across town that folks like us frequent for one reason or another. As an advanced scout, I provide lay-of-the-land perspectives on, yes, the most pertinent particulars (food, service, and ambience), but more, samplings of the virtual flavor as I saw it; the crowd, their conversations (both overheard and eavesdropped), and all the other first impressions we love to take in a little wide-eyed during evenings out over dinner and drinks. Again, I pick places and paint their portraits. You decide where to go from there.
There’s nothing more subjective to us than our tastes. When I started as a food writer 25 years ago, I had a dozen years of food and beverage work under my belt and one regular customer who wanted to put me to work reviewing restaurants for her magazine. These days, I’m still plying two trades. That doesn’t make me qualified to pass judgment as either a foodie or a writer. May I never become so professionally arrogant as to consider myself someone’s critic, let alone anyone’s judge. At the risk of going all-in Jerry Maguire here, I’d like to submit to my publishers and all my peers that we drop that pretentious job title once and for all. Unlike Jerry did, I won’t suggest that indulging me might result “in a few less clients.” To the contrary, it could earn us measurably more respect from an industry that’s long questioned what qualifies us to subject its goods and services to our scrutiny. I can’t argue. Card-carrying culinary critics should bring more to the table than mere press credentials.
That’s my say. I’m done preaching. It’s time to move on. Who’s with me?
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