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by Courtney Watson

“It means depraved.”

The word on the editorial chopping block was “decadent,” which I had used to describe a rich, seven-layer chocolate mousse truffle cake, drizzled with chocolate ganache in a restaurant review that I submitted to a local magazine publisher for whom I regularly freelance. The cake was perfect, and my palate still tingled with the memory of the confection, which featured a flawless balance of sweetness mingled with bitter dark chocolate and the merest suggestion of hazelnut. It was one of those rare occurrences where high-quality ingredients met with a great recipe in the hands of a skilled pastry chef. The result was sublime, heavenly, and, I can assure you, positively decadent.

Copy Editor was having none of it.

Like almost all of our conversations, this one took place over the phone, probably while I was driving or on the treadmill, likely watching that elfin waif Giada on the Food Network while attempting to power walk off the previous evening’s caloric catastrophe. I could almost hear Ed grinding his teeth into the ether, breathing deeply in an effort to quell a self-righteous sigh.

“It’s exactly how it tasted. It’s the first word I thought of.”

“But that’s not what it means.”

Ed and I had these delightful little chats once every three weeks or so, going back and forth until I couldn’t stand listening to him any longer, usually for about 45 minutes. But not this time. This one mattered.

“Word meanings change.”

I could picture Ed, Golem-like, hunched in the cave where this particular publishing house locks away all of their copy editors (with good reason), his ragged talons digging into tufts of hard copy that feather his desk like downy snow drifts, preying on articles crippled by grammatical errors and oversights. This was a man who once gave me a 25 minute lecture on the difference between button-up and button down. He was a veritable martyr for appropriate usage. And now this—the irreverent hijacking of a word for dubious purposes. On his watch, no less! It was enough to burn any gatekeeper of the etymological congress.

I remember hearing him mumble something about an orgy before hanging up. I imagined Caligula in the kitchen with that British culinary vixen Nigella Lawson, stirring up a saucy batch of choco-hot-o pots and licking each other’s fingers and the true meaning of the word didn’t seem entirely inappropriate. The way Ed saw it, he was the only thing standing between me and the gradual erosion of the English language—food writers the world over be damned. It was a losing battle, and he knew it. Taking an argument about a decadent dessert to the editor-in-chief, who never met an alliterative pairing he didn’t like, was more trouble than it was worth. The inappropriate adjective would stay, and then who was to stop me from urging readers into naughty romps with seductive soups and luscious leeks and soon everyone would be diving headfirst into honeyed pools of sin.

Though my review of the restaurant, a beautiful old place overlooking the polo fields in the village where I live, will be quickly digested and forgotten by the magazine’s readers, the taste of that cake will remain on my palate for a long time. I am always intrigued by the way some people talk about their memories as though they can be revisited at will, like glimmering gossamer threads that can be drawn from the cerebrum and placed in an internal Harry Potter-esque Pensieve to be viewed like an old home movie. My mind doesn’t work that way. My memories come to me in unbidden sensory bursts, triggered by a familiar taste or smell; flavored recollections that are sweet, sour, salty, savory, and, yes, sometimes even decadent.

I was 19 and majoring in journalism when I got my first food writing assignment, a travel article for the Key West Citizen, which was running a series about local treasures that didn’t get a whole lot of traffic. The piece that I was assigned was about the No-Name Pub, a former brothel at the end of a dirt road on one of the lesser known Keys. The tiny bar was grimy and dark, a cult tourist attraction papered with decades worth of dollar bills. From the outside, the rundown clapboard house looks like the sort of place that if you saw it, you’d never stop. If you did stop, you certainly wouldn’t eat there. Well, I stopped, and I ate there, and it was fantastic.

When I told my editor that I ate pizza at an island restaurant known for its seafood, she gave me a look that suggested I surrender my flip-flops and Florida ID card immediately. A moment, please, before you judge me; the second I walked through the door of that dirty little restaurant, the hot scent of cheese and sauce and rising dough rendered me completely incapable of ordering anything else. The pepperoni crisped and the sauce bubbled and suddenly there was room in the food-writing universe for a new kind of logic, the sort that made pizza a rare delicacy on an island surrounded by fish. Who needed fresh mahi-mahi that had been swimming just hours earlier when there were slicks of bright orange pizza grease to be tended to?   The cheese was thick and the tomato sauce slightly tart, the whole thing perfectly complemented by a crispy and chewy (at the same time!) pan crust sprinkled with microscopic crystals of sea salt. I loved the restaurant and, more importantly, I loved writing about it.  Though I had been vaguely aware that people actually got paid to go to restaurants and write about food, that day marked a revelation.

It was at the No-Name Pub on Big Pine Key that I found a journalistic niche that truly interested me. Day after day my peers and I sat side by side tapping out obituaries for dead celebrities and mock-ups of layout while dreaming about the articles that we really wanted to write. While my classmates envisioned themselves traipsing around caves in the latest War-tornistan, hot on the heels of Christiane Amanpour, whom I admire very much, I knew that the duck-and-cover lifestyle wasn’t for me. Duck confit, maybe, but the only cave you’ll find me in is a wine cellar in Provence that’s well stocked with vintage wines and aged cheeses. I’m not one for whistle-blowing reports on bank fraud or larceny or grisly homicide beats. I prefer to seek my place as a reporter in the fireside glow on the cozy hearth of the fourth estate.

More daring journalists can keep their gods of war and conquest—Dionysus and I will be over by the bar munching on Kobe sliders and checking out the latest innovations in foam. For me, adventures in food writing have offered the opportunity to grow as a writer in a place where the hours are sweet, the wine is flowing, and the beets are often candied.

Courtney Watson’s fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in The Key West Citizen, Black Lantern, The Florida Horseman, and more.

by John Chinnici

I’m not sure who to blame. The Food Network? The parenting techniques of the 1980s? It doesn’t matter. Somehow the saying that “everyone’s a critic” has come to be accepted without irony. I mean, I’m generally down with all the crowd sourcing and wiki-everything that makes the world go round. Can’t complain about benefitting from the free labor that paves the information superhighway. But we’re at a point where the criticism of restaurants comes to us not just in laymen’s terms, but on laymen’s terms. And that leaves me a little queasy.

You can’t google a restaurant without having to stare down its ratings in the results page. Recently I needed the telephone number to a trusted, beloved Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood, just to see when their kitchen was closing that night. I ended up wasting half an hour reading the reviews. When it comes to the comments sections of political news articles, I’ve gotten good at ignoring what’s on my screen. Yet there I was, consuming the opinions of, ugh, regular people, just because they had eaten at one of my favorite restaurants.

There wasn’t a single two- or three-star review (out of five). Every poster had decided that the place was heaven or hell, the pico of the litter or burnt tostadas. One customer complained of food poisoning she had come down with just hours later, despite that being medically impossible. Somehow her dinner of crab guacamole, chorizo nachos, a carnitas burrito, and mango frozen margaritas didn’t sit well with her. Score one for empiricism!

Just like you wouldn’t blame a restaurant for indigestion after completing their 72-ounce steak challenge, you shouldn’t become accusatory after indulging in a cumulative 72 ounces of various foods. No rational person should expect that a meal of a) seafood and avocado, b) pork cheek sausage, c) an entree of enough calories for an entire day, and d) artificially flavored booze will be greeted hospitably by the digestive system. When you gorge on every kind of lipid in the natural world and down it with booze, then wind up sick, that’s not food poisoning. That’s your own fatty acid getting what’s due.

I suppose that when a reviewer gives clues that I shouldn’t trust them, I should be able to move on with my life. Yet her one star rating pulls down the average, and for a new restaurant with maybe ten reviews, that matters. She has 10% say in telling the world whether to eat there.

The fact that having Internet access affords us the right to have a say in driving business to or away from a restaurant can’t be a perfect situation, right? Maybe if everybody’s user profile contained more contextual data, such as how many how many Scoville units they can handle and whether they think Olive Garden qualifies as fine dining, then we would have more usable information. But even then, we would need each person’s review to count unevenly – we’d need weighted scores where some people don’t get to vote. Undemocratic, I know. I know.

I used to complain about professional reviews for a few reasons: casual and neighborhoody joints often don’t get a fair shake, and the standard practice of estimating the price point by using a meal of appetizer, entree, drink and dessert can make those figures unusable. But you know what? We don’t need to be reading reviews of every falafel joint and pizza parlor anyway. We all have our favorites, and we’re too busy to be driving across town or transferring subway lines just to get a different, random, five-dollar lunch. We need reviews for the restaurants where we’re spending special occasions, the places where we’re dropping half a day’s wages.

Everyone is more conscientious than ever about food, and that has to be a good thing. I’m glad that people are more informed about a wider variety of cuisines and that we are all increasingly savvy about what makes a quality restaurant experience. But like climate change research, we should all be deferring to the experts. There are people out there who have studied and practiced the craft of food writing, and I believe in the value of informed, objective criticism. When we abandon the monoliths of expertise, we end up wading in a pool of opinion-sewage. Our tummies grumble while we moan through tastelessly written reviews of anecdotal circumstances.

John Chinnici is currently finishing a master of fine arts in poetry at The New School, where he works as readings coordinator. Raised as a meat-loving Texan, he now enjoys a vegetarian life in Manhattan. His poetry credits include the North Texas Review, Gigantic Sequins, and The Best American Poetry Blog.