The Blindspots of Mostly White, Mostly Male Restaurant Critics

February 26, 2019 6:47 AM

A Critic for All Seasons: What would restaurant criticism look like if it represented diners like me?
posted by ellieBOA (9 comments total)

That was good. Memorial service indeed.
posted by a complicated history at 7:00 AM on February 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

For real though. Although it's not just food - I feel like this applies to the job of "Critic" in general.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:15 AM on February 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

This is reminding me of Member of the Club, a collection of essays from the 1990s about being black while wanting the sort of status white people can get.

It includes a bunch of reviews of major NYC restaurants from the point of view of a black man who would like to have satisfactory business meals with clients, and the reviews are mostly very negative, though a few were good. I think at least half of them were about a level of service worse than I get as a very casually dressed white woman paying $20 for dinner, and these were famous restaurants.

I've been wondering whether things have changed, and a few years ago I couldn't find any more recent reviews of the same sort. It looks like things haven't changed much if at all.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:33 AM on February 26, 2019

Ha (that is a rueful snort, not a real laugh), there are plenty of female restaurant critics...for the free community/specialty papers, for newspapers in smaller media markets, and in publications where the food writing is required to be cheery lifestyle fluff...

Anyway, back TFA, what a fantastic job she does breaking down and explaining the language of unexamined bias and its implications. Like this:

His remark that Henry has the “appearance of a restaurant in Harlem” is meant to give the reader some context for the feel of the dining room, but reminded me of a Yelp review affirming a restaurant’s authenticity by noting the race of the clientele; it implies that a dining room composed largely of black diners is out of place in a midtown Manhattan neighborhood, even though some 24 percent of the city’s residents are black.

It's really common for white readers and writers to react to "dining while black" anecdotes with sympathy and even indignation, while nevertheless remaining blind to so much systemic reinforcement of that racism right in front of our eyeballs.
posted by desuetude at 7:57 AM on February 26, 2019 [22 favorites]

Thanks for posting this. When Korsha Wilson in the article looks at the gushing of other critics over the Grill as some kind of haven of mid-century ur-New York space, she asks what that means for these other critics' sense of what apex New York is or has been. The Robert Moses take a meat ax to the Bronx era of New York? I mean I'd be down to go to the Young Lords version of New York as embodied in restaurant form. But the Grill sounds like it would make me itchy, and I've been to some fine dining spots in my day.

I assume many if not most restaurant reviews are implicitly written with white readers in mind, even without exoticizing the other, but just assuming that the reader is of course not from culture of the "ethnic restaurant" under review. I got super excited the other day when my bag of tortilla chips had copy that read something along the lines of "the flavors of YOUR homeland," emphasis added.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:52 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is a really great piece.

I think one of the biggest issues for people with whatever privilege is the tendency to see the issues other people face as isolated incidents rather than part of the unwritten customer service policy.
posted by bile and syntax at 10:50 AM on February 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

the Grill sounds like it would make me itchy, and I've been to some fine dining spots in my day.

Mad Men was exactly all the nostalgia project we needed for this period, and no more.

I don't disagree with her larger points, but when it comes to the glowing NYT review (not just a star but a Critic's Pick)--although I understand the desire to avoid the "And then we looked around, and we realized the restaurant was ALL ASIANS! So our chow mein must have been EXTRA AUTHENTIC!" trope--surely it is worth calling attention to and praising a restaurant's attempt to appeal explicitly to a diverse audience. God knows that's rare enough in this city, and reading that sort of thing makes me want to support the restaurant.
posted by praemunire at 11:52 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

(I mean, blacks are about 25% of the city population, but as of the last census the majority race in virtually all of Manhattan south of 96th St. was white, and while that restaurant borders on two tracts that are an exception, they're...East Asian born outside the U.S. (e.g., K-Town). People tend to eat closer to home, so if a more ambitious restaurant in Herald Square is drawing a significant black audience, that's a good thing and must reflect conscious effort on the part of the restaurant's team.)
posted by praemunire at 11:58 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I remember instances of poor treatment in NYC, Le Bernardin comes to mind. The maître d'hôtel did the bottom to top scanning thing. My black waiter came over, wouldn't look me in the eye as he tried to rush me over the menu. The only friendly person was a low status white, older co-waiter who bussed my dishes (or I think he did the bread cart, I don't recall).

It very much is about white-based microaggression and implicit oppression. And socioeconomic class. The front of house has only one objective which is to maximize money spent. They are optimized to suss out which patrons are worthy of attention. Of course as a role, waiters are oppressed as well.

Would I go back to Le Bernardin and some of the other restaurants? Yes in the sense that the food is an experience of a lifetime; I was literally reminiscing about a little cake they served for dessert.

But high end restaurant staff in general are fundamentally compromised so they are not permitted to be decent and egalitarian towards guests, given the hustle of the restaurant industry. And one way that manifests is this consistent treating of poc as less than.
posted by polymodus at 12:48 PM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]