Lately I have been rankled and I decided to sit down and try and discover why.
The Dallas Morning News brought on a new restaurant critic from the limping L.A. Times who was reputed to be not quite so generous in their reviewing, and as a matter of fact, had a tendency to be rather personal.
I pooh-poohed it to myself, until they reviewed the new restaurant of our former chef and raked her across the coals. True, we never got along for whatever reason, but I took no pleasure in the ember-rustling she received by the new Poison Pen.
Maybe it was just a one-off, bad as it was. Surely nobody meant to be hurtful or mean. But then another review appeared that even trashed another critic by association. And then another. Wow, this person was out for blood, and not the kind that seeps unctuously from a perfectly cooked steak.
But then a review actually glowed for one of those places with a sexy chef that charges for a compote of fruit what others pay for a black market pancreas, and which the kicky crowd will drop like a hot potato after ten months for something new.
Was I threatened? Was I thin-skinned? Could I be provincial enough to throw up a crenelated ten foot thick wall against any hostile encroachment against my fair city?
And then they wrote an in-depth article presuming to give Dallas tips on what it would take to be a great restaurant city.
CUH-mon.
Most people can't find their way around town without a Mapsco after six months, let alone prescribe ways to improve the city. How can anyone after so short a time have the slightest comprehension of what a place has to offer? How is that possible in any business?
And nowhere in the article was there any casual indication that the surface of what this city has to offer was even scratched. So many things would never have been said if it even had been.
And then it led to what I feared most: the article was suspiciously picked up by The New York Times at a time when their chief restaurant critic was leaving the paper. Now every snoot on the Upper West Side who'd never seen Jersey was gonna weigh in on the yokels. Boring.
The Morning News blog then had a cutesy squib asking if it was weird to trumpet being picked up by the Times. Weird? No. Self-Servingly Narcissistic? Definitely.
I had run into this phenomenon before during the first year I went to college when some wag in the Times who had never set foot on soil called my school "an intellectual desert". No big donors that year.
I subsequently had dinner with a local legendary restaurateur who told me, "Nobody deserved a one-star more than [redacted], but it was still unnecessarily hostile. I hope they never come to my place. Who needs the hassle? My customers come because they like the food."
And there lies the rub. Sixty percent of a successful restaurant's business comes from repeat customers. If you can get them to come eight times a year you are batting a thousand. But diminishing returns naturally set in, people move, some casually drift elsewhere out of convenience, and you need to keep refreshing the crowd with new visitors. A vicious review can kill walk-in business.
Knowing the earnest work that goes into making a place successful, there is a helpless feeling when you know that you fate lies in the hands of the newbie leading the newbies. Your horse is a loser before it leaves the gate.
The most useful reviews, to me, come from the blogs. That's where the action is. People pay their own money and say what's-what way more readily. They enthuse as well as don't pull punches when a good right-cross is called for. On the whole, they're pretty accurate. You can read a whole section of diner's reviews on any one subject and get a great comprehension of what lies in store if you decide to sample a place for yourself.
So it points to a greater divide. Newspapers are the old paradigm, like when I was on the radio, where a few, yes, annointed folks get to control the arguement. It was fun while it lasted, but those days are so numbered.
So maybe dwindling circulation and even lower readership of the dead tree editions sort of make it all a moot point.
A cabbie who drove me home one night told me that our restaurant actually was a part of the "Dallas Reputation for food". That was quite a statement, and I kind of nodded and said, "Oh, that's nice." I mean, it seemed a little grand to say the least, until he said, "And I should know, I drive a cab from the airport and I hear people talk!"
That was the best review ever.
