Who Reviews the Reviewer?

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.