A couple of books have arrived in the mail recently -and set me to thinking about the role of critics - Zagat's America's Top Restaurants 2008, and Food & Philosophy: Eat, Think and Be Merry, edited by Fritz Alhoff and Dave Monroe (Blackwell Publishing).
I opened the Zagat guide and turned to the Minneapolis-St. Paul section with sadistic relish, eagerly anticipating another opportunity to trash the plebian tastes of the great unwashed. Zagat's ratings are compiled based on reviews from diners, and I've been pretty skeptical about reader restaurant surveys ever since the days when the readers of one local magazine ranked Leeann Chin as best Chinese. (If my memory is correct, they also rated McDonald's as best burger.) Of course, most readers knew better, but the number who favored the Golden Arches was greater than the number who chose any other single candidate. In the latest survey, these readers ranked Big Bowl and PF Chang's in the top five for Chinese cuisine, showing that le plus ca change... - but I digress.
To my great disappointment, I discovered that I really don't have much of a beef with the top ten picks in the new Zagat guide. The highest score, 28 points for food, was a four-way tie between La Belle Vie, 112 Eatery, Restaurant Alma and the Bayport Cookery, with Lucia's, Vincent and D'Amico Cucina one point behind, followed by Manny's, Heartland and Fugaise, tied with 26 points each.
Of course, this is like comparing apples and oranges, but these are all respectable choices. You can't really compare La Belle Vie, the 112 eatery and Manny's, but these three are all best of kind, or at least very good restaurants. I do have to admit that the last time I dined at La Belle Vie, sometime around hour three and course eight of a nine-round gastronomic blowout, I found myself getting a little bored, but that's just me.
The one major omission from Zagat's Top 10 is Saffron, which I would put pretty close to the top of my list. Based on my most recent dining experience, I would also put Cosmos and maybe Wolfgang Puck's 20.21 and Little Szechuan in my top 10, but I am not sure which restaurants I would bump to make room - probably Manny's, and maybe the Bayport Cookery.
Zagat also lists ten "Other Noteworthy Places", including B.A.N.K., Chambers Kitchen, Cosmos, Cue, the Dakota, Oceanaire, Solera, Saint Paul Grill, Town Talk Diner, and 20.21. These are also very deserving restaurants, mostly, though I would drop the Saint Paul Grill and the too-noisy Town Talk Diner to make room for some sentimental favorites: the Grand Café, Corner Table, and the Atlas Grille.
By now, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with the anthology of essays about food and philosophy. Well, the connection is pretty slender, but (WARNING: SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION AHEAD!) it just so happens that an essay of mine was included, titled "Who Needs a Critic: The Standard of Taste and the Power of Branding." (The original title was Gastroporn and the Power of Branding, but that sounded a little too kinky for something that might wind up on an academic c.v.) And it just so happens that in a couple of paragraphs somewhere in the middle of the essay, I mention Zagat. I'll spare you the philosophical jargon and cut to the meat of the argument, which is that enterprises like Zagat are among the factors that undermine the authority of critics. If I may quote myself (and why not?; in the essay I quote David Hume and Charlie the Tuna):
"What we are witnessing in slow motion is the collapse of a regime of (gastronomic) truth for which the daily newspaper served as a central instrument, and the ascendancy of a rival discourse in which advertising, brand and image are central..."The publishing empire of Zagat, which invites all of its readers to rate food, service and atmosphere on numerical scales and then publishes their scores, undermines the very premises of the taste hierarchy by treating all its reviewers as "authorized knowers.""
Zagat is an interesting example of what James Surowiecki has labeled "the wisdom of crowds." Surowiecki, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, argues that the aggregated opinions of a large group of ordinary people are often a more accurate source of information than the judgments of experts.
At any rate, quite apart from the philosophical thumb-sucking, there is an interesting question here: If part of what restaurant critics are supposed to do is to serve as reliable predictors of what restaurants their readers are most likely to enjoy, and if it turns out that a compilation of data from diners can predict those tastes with greater accuracy than a critic can, what role is left for restaurant critics?
You might object that the aggregate judgment of Zagat's guides can only reflect the judgments of its middle-brow reviewers, and that consumers with a more refined or exotic sensibility will still want to turn to Iggers or Bauer, but it's really only a matter of time before the algorithms get a bit more sophisticated. Like Netflix, which can predict which movies you will like based on which movies thousands of others with similar taste profiles have enjoyed, Zagat's legions, and smart software, will soon be able to offer more reliable advice than any one critic - especially one with a fixation on hole-in-the-wall Chinese eateries.
So, what's a critic to do? Maybe a better role for us is to be storytellers - but that's another story.
I think you may have hit the nail. Reviewers now are less read for their rating of meal, restaurant, movie, etc., than how their story reveals and gives insight to a knowing palate, a considered experience, and an eye to context and subtlety. Anybody can give a rating, and a "star" count or whatever is good enough. For the timid, that's good. But if you want to read a good review, its the quality of the story-telling that counts; the "rating" is all self-referential anyway.
So don't feel so sorry for yourself. You don't really think we all read your reviews for the number at the end, do you?