Reviewing Restaurants (In Your Head)

Welcome to a new chapter also called: talking back to the Chef

As we are not paid for it, we should not give out ideas for free.

I always say: “let the restaurant owners to their devices, free to spend their money on consultants to address and readdress their business”.

This does not mean you (or I) are not entitled to your opinion, of course.

However, not every foodie should feel the compelling need to become a gastronomic critic. First of all, most foodies are just interested in feeding their ego through restaurant food prepared for them.

Secondly, to be a gastronomic critic is not an easy walk in the park - it is not about taking pictures of the food and receiving likes in exchange for having submitted them publicly.

No wonder that in many cases, gastronomic critics are to some extent invisible or use a pseudonym. Lastly, because it is hard to write meaningful criticism, and is generally badly paid - this is why some of the best ones in Europe switched to become consultants so that they can still make gastronomic criticism, but at a lofty fee, and with the knowledge that their words feed into the cycle of improvement of the restaurant’s operation, not into a newspaper column nobody reads.

But for ourselves and our circle, we can be critics - it is fun and interesting, from time to time, to step into the role of an analytical customer, sitting at a table to analyse every aspect of a meal and draw conclusions, recommendations, and ask questions.

The following could also be used by the plethora of gastronomic communicators or whatever they want to be called nowadays, to avoid them just copying verbatim the carefully crafted press releases that the above-mentioned consultants craft for them so that they can just repackage the words for their readership.

Sharpen your mind! And your tongue!

First Things First: 5W

let us start from the basics.

As we aren’t unaccultured swine, and I am personally a daughter of Aristotelian descent, I (and you) should abide by Aristotle's voluntary and involuntary action as expressed in his Summa Theologiae - also, I have briefly but significantly worked as a journalist and reporter for the local page of Il Corriere della Sera and my Caporedattore was quite strict on the same principles as well, even without being a white-clad philosopher.

Who

For the love of your reader, say where you went - like the full name of the restaurant. I do not want to guess. Say who fed you. Spell it out, immediately. I do not want to discover the name of the restaurant, or its basic details by having to scroll to the bottom, or have to fish for information like this outside.

Bonus: tell me who owns it. It may be a bit of work, but it makes all the difference to your readers knowing whether the restaurant they may be considering is owned by a large investment fund (and in that case, from which country) or it is a mom-and-pop shop. For the extra mile you could see whether the restaurant ownership is walking their talk: if they claim sustainability or some other positive buzzword, see where the fund or ownership invests. If it is into weapons trade or African mines, you can present this information to your readers - they can draw their conclusions.

Extra-EXTRA mile?

Tell me who your servers were, how many people work there, their nationalities and backgrounds, their names, their favourite things about working there - and least favourite too, dutifully anonymized. Tell me everything there is to know about those people who, behind the Chef and Sommelier, really run the place.

And what about Chef and Sommelier? Well, be creative. Ask them about interesting things.

How does the Chef or a meat-based place, who has a dog, reconcile his love for animals to his work on dismembering edible animals that are not to be considered pets? Does the Sommelier know what is the internationally agreed amount of alcohol that is safe to consume?

Where

An important, and often overlooked fact is where the restaurant is located. Not just for a purely practical need of actually finding said restaurant on, for instance, GPS maps such as Google Maps.

I am always surprised when restaurant critics in their pieces place this information somewhere hidden at the bottom, while the place matters - and not just for being able to reach it.

You could go for a bonus: you can inform your audience about the social impact that a restaurant has on the location where it is inserted. Restaurants act as transforming and shaping forces for their surroundings.

The extra mile would be seeing the extent the restaurant is, or is not, involved in shaping the politics of their neighbourhood. You see, a restaurant has to have a physical location: it is inescapable. They cannot WFH - location, location, location. But what do they do to this location? Do they draw an exacerbating influx of tourism? Do they push away poorer residents? Do they have a virtuous cycle of neighbourhood support? What did their owner vote for - did you see them with a particular political party at public events?

When

It matters quite a lot to say when you have visited the restaurant. Even if the menu remains the same, it makes quite a difference whether you have visited the restaurant at lunchtime or for dinner. And at what time too: peak hour may be crowded, and off-peak hours may seem desolate.

Every season is different, and it matters a lot the time of the year you visit the restaurant - not only in the case of seasonal locations such as mountains or seaside towns. Quite an important piece of information that is often overlooked.

The bonus would be matching the season with the products on your plate - did they serve you strawberries in December, and if so, how and why? Maybe they have a reason - they have a garden and their strawberries are frozen, or preserved: it is a whole story in itself.

Why (for the sake of what)

Safe for professionals who are mandated by their employer to go to X restaurant or Y, you as an amateur reviewer can choose liberally your destination. So tell your readers why you opted to dine out at this specific place.

Bonus: you could tell your readers why they should also dine here, or not. Give them a reason or more reasons to come - or not.

What

Of course, the heart of your review has to be devoted to what was on your plate. Describe it! Do not be shy - and do not just repeat what is written on the menu, especially when a dish is confused, overpowered, or excellent. Talk about the single elements of a plate and how they work in an ensemble.

For a bonus, talk about the ingredients of those plates.

Ask the kitchen whether they use additives - making the purported “healthy” meal they claim to be a UPF - ultra-processed food!

Be SPICY.

For the extra mile, ask about their waste disposal: how much food is wasted weekly? What do they do with food scraps and envelopes? Do they participate in initiatives aimed at giving away for free the surplus? Do they feed back to the community? How much do they pay their suppliers? Do they buy directly as they claim to be farm-to-fork or do we risk meeting them at the Metro supermarket early in the morning?

With

I am not just referring here to your companionship of choice, which is of course a factor to mention - an experience changes a lot whether you are alone, or with your better half, or with a group of friends or family.

I am referring also to the people who were with you at the restaurant. Are they frequent customers? Are they tourists, and if so, what is the average ratio of locals/tourists? Where do most tourists come from? Was it packed? Empty?

How (much)

How much did you pay for the meal should be a given.

You have to include this information, not try to escape with the trope of little symbols (one symbol for cheap, five for expensive). Put down the numbers. Together with the date, they will give a way better idea about the restaurant than obscure symbolism.

We ain’t reading tarots, here.

How much does the restaurant pay for rent, how much is staff paid, how much does the restaurant pay for the dishwasher, and how much does the products cost?

Bonus question?

Calculate the food cost of your plate. Once you are done with the calculation, ask why a menu, or a plate, costs what is written on the bill.

Are we perhaps overpaying for silly ingredients? Are we underpaying others? What about the human factor?

Etta bonus points: follow a restaurant through the years, through its seasons and evolution (or involutive path). This is unseen writing - being able to take reader into a time travel because you’re actually visited a restaurant many times and in different moments.

Be Yourself, and if you Cannot, at least be Like Grimod de la Reynière

Social media provides access to a platform for expressing ourselves. But even if we have been given a metaphorical microphone, we should realise that we cannot all be gifted by the Muses and perform as Maria Callas.

In prose, we all can type on our tiny keyboards.

However, we should be a bit more humble and understand that most of us cannot write. And among those who can, maybe we do not have the cultural or gastronomic skills to write meaningfully about gastronomy - statistically, we cannot all be geniuses.

Just because eating a plate and writing about it is more accessible to most of us than resolving a second-degree equation, does not mean that we are, indeed, writing well.

Just because you can hold a fork and a pen, it does not mean you have the gift of writing about what you are eating - no matter how many Michelin restaurants you can visit, no matter how many restaurants you try. Either you have this gift, or you haven’t.

I laugh a lot at a handful of gastronomic writers in Italy (and some in Portugal, too) who use enormously convoluted sentences, filled with hyperboles as if they were showcasing their lexicon (and through it, they hint at their convoluted reasoning) - I use a trick for these: just translate those sentences into another language, a simpler one like English for instance.

These pompous sentences will lose their charm and dissolve into a poodle of meaningless words stitched together to hide nothing.

Grimod de la Reynière, the very first gastronomic critic in this sense, when confronted with the writings of the man whose talent would go on to shine and perhaps even obfuscate him a little, who was his predecessor, said: “This is a haute gastronomy book, against which my own Almanac des Gourmands is just a sad rhapsody. How come the author’s talent took so long to unveil itself? Did the author die of indigestion, perhaps?”

He was writing about Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, of course - expression that he, Grimod, had invented first.

What if…

I have thought a lot about writing reviews in the past few years.

I never wanted to for the reasons mentioned above. This is valuable knowledge, and I think it does not belong online for free, as it can only interest a select few individuals.

Therefore, I decided to create a dedicated section on this blog called Raging Restaurant Reviews, where I do exactly what the title suggests. The restaurant reviews (or plate ones, more on this below) will be for paying subscribers only.

I inaugurate this section with this first article.

As these will be raging reviews, I’ll take the liberty to subvert my own rules from time to time and (gasp!) even write about one plate only. Or about the words in a chefs interview - this section will be a container for all things restaurant.

And of course, I will occasionally add articles like this, for free, to this section about the art and craft of writing reviews. Learning is good, but sharing what one has learned is even better.