Reichl's Times

I had a weird confluence of reading material sent my way last week. One former coworker sent me the new Ruth Reichl book, Garlic and Sapphires, and another sent me an interview with William Grimes that was in Newsweek when Grimes resigned as restaurant critic (the coworker ran across it while doing some research). Then there was an article in the Times about the loathing restaurant workers feel toward diners. They just all drove home to me the weird interaction between diners and the restaurants they go to.

When Reichl was offered the job as the New York Times’ new restaurant critic, she said the Times should be writing reviews not for people who will go to the restaurants but for those who may never set foot in them. Yet throughout her new book is evidence that she does feel responsibility toward the more disenfranchised of the dining public to portray an honest picture, because they will act on her advice. No doubt her ability to write food porn would have been better if she had shown up to restaurants as herself and let them lavish her with their best efforts. Instead she became the kind of characters who often receive servers’ scorn.

It makes sense, but I never realized high-profile reviewers would go to such lengths to disguise their identities. One of the pleasures of the book is Reichl’s exploration of how her various disguises affected her. I ate it up.

But it strikes me as odd that restaurants are willing to create such an artificial experience for reviewers, and therefore artificially high expectations for their diners. In her book Reichl describes an instance when one of her guests paid the check for the couple sitting next to them, who obviously had saved their money to go to what reviews had called one of the most romantic restaurants in the city. It also served about the worst food and had treated the young couple very badly. That's a familiar scenario.

It's kind of terrible that eating at a great restaurant is for a lot of people an entirely uncomfortable experience that they're paying a huge amount of money to have.