Elvis and I at the Barfly Awards
Elvis and I at the Barfly Awards
  • Elvis and I at the Barfly Awards

With my last food review officially out in the world, I thought I’d say a few words about being a food critic in PDX. So I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts about it over my last few days here at the Mercury. Are you curious about something? E-mail me and ask a question (there are some things I’ll probably not answer). Whether you give a shit or not, I talk about anonymity after the jump.

On Anonymity:

I believe, based on almost zero evidence, that anonymous food critics are becoming a thing of the past. Frankly, I can understand why. With the increase in rabid foodie-ism and chef celebrity, the dining culture has begun to place more emphasis on breaking news and gossip than on in-depth and readable analysis of what’s coming out of the kitchen. Huge amounts of buzz are created around who’s moving where, and “what’s opening right at this very second that I can’t wait to wait in line for”. If you’re in the know, and breaking stories, then you’re getting eyes on your content. This is even truer in a city with a food scene as lightening-hot as Portland’s.

Trying to be anonymous and break news is a crazy difficult task. You break news by developing contacts. You develop contacts by schmoozing (or in the case of Food Dude, being around for a long while). Who do you schmooze with when wanting to get the scoop about what’s happening in the restaurant industry? Well, for a food critic, it’s exactly the people he or she would like to avoid most: servers, chefs, and restaurant owners. And there’s the rub.

Very early on in this gig, I stopped attending those all-important networking sessions known as media preview dinners. They just felt too icky to me. Too many PR people saw my face; too many chefs could mark me as the Mercs food editor. So, I stopped going. And the places where I did attend a media preview, I never reviewed. I honestly don’t see how any food critic could attend a media dinner and not be biased when approaching the review months later. Maybe those that do are just better souls. Who knows?

Anyway. I’m not trying to put down people who are breaking the food news. I desperately wish I could have been better at it. But let’s face it—I had stiff competition. Am I just being a whiny bitch and making excuses? Sure.

But why was I so stubborn with trying to keep my identity secret? The fact is there are plenty of things a restaurant can do to change the experience for a reviewer. They can give the table a dedicated server who is focused only on the critic, they can pull fresher product, they can juggle orders to make sure the critic is served promptly when the food is perfect (perhaps at the expense of other diners), they can fix soups, send out better flatware… etc. Seriously, this shit happens. Did it ever happen to me? Honestly? I don’t think I was ever “made”.

At the same time, I didn’t exactly do that much to remain anonymous. Over the course of a review I’d switch out headwear and glasses, and try to change my style of dress significantly. I’d have my wife pay with her card (with a different last name) or use cash. I’d go at different times in the day to get different servers. I wouldn’t sit facing an open kitchen.

My lovely wife is really the hero of my reviews. I’d make her ask to keep menus, take notes for me by pretending to text during dinner, make reservations under assumed names, ask questions for me so I wouldn’t seem too curious… The list goes on, and she didn’t have the luxury of getting paid for her work.

But I did all of this because I wanted the experience I was writing about to be authentic. I wanted it to be unbiased, and when my readers went into a restaurant, I wanted their experience to match mine as much as possible.

I’m going to be an asshole about this and say I don’t think non-anonymous or well-known reviewers can give an unbiased, authentic review. I’m sorry Yelpers and bloggers, that’s just the way I feel. You can’t be a restaurant critic when everyone knows who the fuck you are, or if you announce your intentions when you walk into a joint.

I know the Mercury isn’t the New York Times, but goddamn it if I didn’t want to write columns that had a New York Times level of credibility (that’s why I wore a luchadore mask, natch). Assail my writing style and opinion all you want (and oh so many did, oh so vocally), but not my credibility.

If I sound like I’m being defensive, I am. My anonymity (or assumed anonymity) was honestly the most contentious issue I had to deal with as a food editor. The fact is I will likely never be a food critic again. My new gig will involve waaay too much schmoozing for me to ever justify walking into a Portland restaurant for critical purposes again. In another city? Maybe. Don’t think I haven’t already thought about saying I’ve given up reviewing and then writing under an alias. Oh, I have. But I won’t.

I’ll just watch sadly as anonymous food critics become a thing of the past.

19 replies on “My Life as a Food Critic: Anonymity”

  1. Let’s say you proceeded non-anonymously. What are the chances any particular restaurant you walk into would know your identity?

    Just seems there’s lots of gray area. Lots. Busy places, tons of people filtering in and out. You could be “known” and never really be identified depending on the circumstances. Can you merely be either inconspicuous or “outed?”

  2. It would be interesting to hear from someone who actually works in a restaurant on this one–I could never take the anonymity thing too seriously when I was doing the job. it just never seemed likely that anyone would 1) know who i was or 2) care.

  3. @Alison

    Yeah, I began to feel that people didn’t really give a shit. But by then it was something I’d internalized. I would have felt less credible, even if it never affected my reviews.

    @TSW

    That’s exactly why I never had to go to Bruni or Riechl (both NYT critics) extremes when I was on review. The measures I mentioned are seriously, like, low end for a high end reviewer. I mean, were talking false noses and shit.

  4. Having grown up in Portland, I occasionally get recognized by people I went to elementary school with and haven’t seen since. It’s a small ass town, and if someone had a vested financial interest in recognizing me (as opposed to just wanting to point out that my haircut hasn’t changed since 1998)? Yeah, it’d happen in a busy restaurant.

  5. I always thought the most contentious issue you had to deal with was me correcting your spelling and grammar.

    Oh, “lightning.”

    (might be the last chance I have to do that!)

  6. I would like to confess something here.

    And it is that I take secret pleasure in commenters correcting the spelling/grammar of blog posts.

    So obviously I got a lot of secret pleasure out of Patrick’s posts, and I will miss that.

  7. I’ve worked in some Portland establishments that schmoozed heavily with a couple of the local bloggers. These were, for the most part, good restaurants with good reputations and buzz. But it was, at times, sort of icky to witness this phony little circle jerking–special little treats comped for blogger-person, blogger person fawning excessively about the place, etc.
    I’ll add that I feel vaguely ashamed of the way some of my former employers spoke when Ms. Brooks was in the house. She seemed to be known by all. I don’t know enough about her work to know whether or not she deserved the disrespect.

  8. @Alison Hallett

    And I will miss trying not to take all the shit you all seem to enjoy giving me so personally.

    Wait. No I wont.

    @Oregometry

    Don’t worry you have ’till next Wednesday. I’ll do my best to give you ample opportunity to get your kicks.

  9. PAC, I appreciate your efforts to stay anonymous. I can identify with a nearly comic obsession to appear above-board at all times. However, if the only way to stay unbiased in a small town is to go to these kind of extremes* for years, I’d say the pragmatic answer is that reviewers should scrap anonymity and frankly state their possible biases at the end of each piece, and let the reader decide what weight to give those admissions.

    * I mean, really – that’s a lot of bullshit for $100 a week.

  10. Having worked in restaurant management… we could give a fuck about professional reviewers. But Yelp reviews mattered. But I also worked in a place that was routinely slagged by local indie-press, even though all those dicknoses came and drank in our place all the time. Wait, am I bitter about this?

  13. Isn’t this a good ploy- pretend you’re quitting…write a very public “Here’s why I can’t review food anymore”, then a little plastic surgery (paid for by “Hump” mob hush money), and then viola- “The Unknown Food Critic” (Patrick, brown baggin’ it). I’m on to you PAC, and your little dog too.

  17. Let me just say that I love that you ended your Mercury career with a review of FIN. God knows how long you were planning that.

    Also, that you were a wonderful asset to the Mercury, and I’m sure you will be missed, and best of luck with your next endeavors.

  18. A few years back my husband and I visited Las Vegas on vacation and were using a Southwest Airlines package that included airfare, hotel transfers and 4 nights at the New York, New York. I traveled a LOT on business and was a fairly savvy traveler, but got my special treatment at hotels (and I did get lots) based on establishing a relationship with a hotel and proving myself to be a desirable guest (recommending these hotels to others, recognizing good service, low use of resources and always a smile and thank you).

    Our rooms in Vegas were to be “run of house” i.e. hotel’s choice. At check-in, we were assigned a room and was getting the normal and very impersonal spiel, when as part of that the clerk passed over a mini Zagat guide for Vegas. Without thinking and in my usual friendly way I said “Wow, thanks! I love these guys. I contribute to their hotel ratings and write some reviews for them” (only done as part of my extensive travel and they just gave me copies of the books I contributed to). The desk clerk literally yanked back the stuff she had given me and got very friendly and assigned us a “much better” room. At first I naively thought my niceness had finally broken through to her and it all happened so fast, it wasn’t until I was walking away I realized what had happened. That seriously creeped me out and I almost lost all respect for that hotel then and there. I have not stayed there again and did not include a rating for them to Zagat, but did mention that they tried to buy a good review. Other than the daily maid service, they had no chance to give me any service, so I can’t speculate as to whether anything else might have been “much better.” Ewww!!!

  19. @PAC
    You’re wrong. Anonymity is one of the most over-rated features of food reviewing. There are many things above it rarely as focused on.

    eg, a food reviewer is much more hampered by their limited ability to experience the restaurant in a complete way. How many meals did you have at most restaurants you reviewed and how many dishes did you try at each meal? How many times over the course of going there did you try certain dishes? Consistency is one of the toughest things to maintain in a restaurant. Staff changes often, either because crews have varying shifts or because there’s just turnover, people get sick, etc. This is the real advantages of the internet, even Yelpers, over a single reviewer. The internet review is continually evolving, commented on, amended, and put into context along with more and more reviews. (Personally, I think the traditional media restaurant review should go away. There’s no utility in it anymore. Traditional media should focus more on what it can do well that the interweb can’t.)

    And truth is, the stuff that restaurants try to do when they recognize a reviewer don’t make that much difference, or actually have the opposite effect. Schmoozing is rather obvious and feels icky. A reviewer knows when they’re being buttered up. Comped plates don’t help — in fact they hurt — if the food’s not good. If it is good, then who gives a shit whether it was free? The reader isn’t harmed. If you fuck up a dish, or, more likely, want to make it perfect and have to re-fire it, then it takes extra time. It may be marginally better to go out late and right than to go out late and imperfect, but still only marginally so. Sure, little service things here and there. Making sure someone doesn’t wait long for a table, making sure the staff is attentive, etc. But it’s little stuff that probably won’t be able to be fully replicated for over a series of meals, unless the place has their act together anyway.

    And you can’t change the palate of the chef, the menu, the ingredients, the recipes, the concept, etc, just because you recognize the person walking in the door. And this is 80% of what the reviewer will be focused on.

    That said, I respect your opinion. One of my best friends and a food blogger, Scott at DallasFood.org and I go back-and-forth on this all the time.

    @Iceman
    I’m friends with Robb. I’ve argued against him on the subject both online and in-person. It’s worth noting that he still largely believes in that. He stopped reviewing and focuses on his books and feature writing now, plus has helped open a Tex-Mex restaurant.

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