The restaurant business' communal table

Though I can't speak for the world, at least I'd be grateful if a few UFO/Bigfoot obsessives would devote their energy explaining to me the vast chasm between what food writers scribble about restaurants and the actual experience of eating at those restaurants. As a rule, the precious, ornate descriptions given by food writers are more congenial than the food turns out to be. I tend to leave restaurants wondering whether I'm simply a grump or if it's possible a place had been overtaken by squatters the day after its review ran in Eater.

Personal experience number 14,934 of this sort happened in Venice last week - and, yes, good for me I was in Venice - at a place called Enoteca Al Volto, which claims to be the oldest wine bar in La Serenissima. Time Out rhapsodized the restaurant "has charmed locals and travellers with warm service and hearty Venetian cuisine as well as the classic cicchetti bar snacks." Burrowing in, the writer asserts that "fans of baccalà mantecato, the storied Venetian cicchetti of creamed codfish served on polenta, will swear that Al Volto makes it best."

Okay, fine. My wife and I roll in at 7:30 p.m. to give it a whirl, and as you may have already guessed, it sucked. The "baccala mantecato" seemed to be codfish dip from a plastic container at Trader Joe's dumped on top Cream of Wheat, the effect of which was like a demonstration of mayonnaise as it makes its journey from condiment to curdled rot only without anything that could be confused with flavor. The fritto misto entree - a seemingly un-fuckupable dish of fried fish - was FUBAR; soggy whitefish and squid fried in water, along with scallops in the half-shell baked in a kiln situated under Mount Vesuvius.

Poor me, I know, but that's not the point. The point is I suspect most normal people have encountered an abyss, a delta!, a lacuna!! between writing and reality and, goddamnit, I want to know why. And I think I do! (Any UFO/Bigfoot obsessives may continue their obsession uninterrupted by my previous appeal.)

Quickly, let's dispense with the usual explanation, which was big 40 years ago, that restaurant owners know who the local reviewers are and make them queens for a day. That may have once been the case - there are funny stories of Ruth Reichl, the New York Times restaurant critic of yore, showing up to the latest West Village Italian place wearing Groucho glasses and a plastic moustache - but food writing has grown like topsy, so it's difficult to imagine any restauranteur maintaining a database of the 3,000 food writers in, say, Los Angeles.

So what gives? My guess is the reason food writing is so rapturous is there is no incentive at all to write something negative about a restaurant. Readers don't want to read it, writers don't want to write it, editors don't want to defend it, restauranters don't want to take it, and advertisers don't want to support it.

While there may be some juice to be squeezed from a bad review of a Guy Fieri place - Fieri exists as a foil - the usual audience for food writing, a highly motivated group of maniacs, isn't interested in reading there's one less option on the menu. To be a foodie is to stare awestruck at an ever-expanding galaxy of possibility, from the hut on the other side of the tracks that serves Cambodian half-hatched duck eggs to Jose Andres's new 14-star restaurant at a bougie hotel that allows dogs. It's a state of affairs that must be celebrated with demonstrable zeal. Anyone who tells them otherwise is just being a dick.

It's not clear whether food writers created this situation or are reacting to it - as usual, likely a little of both - but they're on board like Leo and Kate in Titanic. They view their mission in evangelical rather than critical terms. They're part of a team, you see - a continuum that starts at the farm, rolls to the restaurant, and ends with the customer saying, "oh, marvelous" once he's swallowed. Food writers make this magic happen by getting foodie butts into restaurant seats. There's only one way to create that demand!

And there's more fun to be had at a restaurant than covering a motley array of creeps camping out on a college campus. The prose should reflect that. And if the prose should reflect that, the image should be as vivid as possible. Thus the adjectives. Lots and lots of adjectives in food writing. Positive, upbeat, flattering adjectives. Some are clear; everyone knows the flavor of a lemon. Others not so much; if anyone can tell me how a dish can be "lapidary," I'm ready for the lecture. Adjectives are weapons and there's an arms race to be as ornate and prolix as possible describing eggs benedict. You can frontload those bad boys - "(adjective) (adjective) (adjective) saffron-infused chicken cacciatore" - or follow up - "saffron-infused chicken cacciatore, an (adjective) (adjective) (adjective) dish" - but they have to be there in bulk or else you're just a chump who digs his cheeseburger at Chili's. Whether the consequence is intended is anyone's guess, but the consequence is every piece of food prose tends to be at least as, if not more, hyperbolic than the last - and this hyperbole is rewarded.

Woe betide the editor who publishes something less than a rave. As anyone who's had the misfortune of reading Yelp knows, restaurant owners are a splenetic lot, almost to the point where they make the proverbial women scorned the Dalai Lama. The worst part of being a features editor at The (Jackson, Miss) Clarion-Ledger, other than everything else that came with working at Gannett, was the outraged phone call I'd get whenever I had published a review that didn't contend Ceres herself had bestowed upon the Mississippi capital the bounty of earth as fashioned by its high priests in the kitchen at Clappy's Steak and Surf on West Fortification Street; thunder, lightning, etc., etc. Anything less and these guys'd get pissed off and the second I heard "Mr. Moore, this is Jake Stewart* and I own Clappy's Steak and Surf on West Fortification Street," I knew the next 45 minutes were kicked in the ass. They were relentless, too - a combination of close reader - I once spent 10 minutes debating the definition of a black and blue-cooked steak - and lawyer; there were always vague allusions to the repercussions of running such slander. And what had I done? I hadn't hired assassins. I paid some fucking guy fifty bucks plus expenses to tell me if a new place was good. Now I'm his Secret Service!

It's not like I didn't understand what a bad (or good) review could do. While I didn't agree that a review "will destroy" a restaurant's prospects, I was acutely aware it made a difference. The restaurant business is a tough one where even success can seem a mixed blessing; there are few who wish failure on someone with the balls to start one. But I do think it's a reviewer's job to give a clear and fair opinion of the object under perusal. My job as an editor was to make the opinion clear and, as much as possible, fair. What I couldn't do was change the opinion.

Since then, editors have decided such conversations aren't worth it and have changed course in two ways. One, run nothing but good reviews. Two, which was the Clarion-Ledger's approach, fire the reviewer and replace reviews with "articles" about the restaurants themselves. (Sample lede: "It's been Jake Stewart's dream to combine the cattle of the earth with the fish of the sea...") Ninety-nine percent of editors have gone with option one.

Option one suits not just editors, but advertisers. It's all fun and games until a publication develops a controversial reputation for having anything other than, at the very least, anodyne opinions. (Music criticism is exhibit A.) Though I can't state this as a fact, I'm confident many, if not most, advertisers want unicorns and flowers and pastures and angels. What they don't want is Christopher Hitchens. They don't even want Pete Hammond**. They want bliss, lest by osmosis a strong opinion might corrupt their brands. Food writers deliver bliss in meretricious fashion so Shen Yun can deliver a battery of web ads the next time it somersaults into town.

All of this would be nothing to me outside of professional curiosity if I didn't eat at restaurants, but I do. And more often than not, restaurants fail to deliver. I've seldom had as bad a meal as I had in Venice, but I've often had so-so meals that left me wondering if life wouldn't be more efficient spent attached to a feeding tube. In a sense the restaurant business is like the movie business, where the product generally isn't bad but seldom good, with the entire edifice defended by reviewers who think they're part of the team, an illusion that unduly flatters a reviewer's sense of her own importance. This may be a sustainable edifice. I suspect it's not. Until it changes, I'll wonder why Saturday night isn't better spent with a sandwich and a book.

*Jake Stewart is a composite.

**Pete Hammond is a film critic for Deadline Hollywood renowned for his pie-eyed reviews. If George Clooney starred in a snuff porn flick, he'd give it FIVE STARS!