The Secret Life of a Restaurant Critic
Sure, it's a fun job. But when an owner threatens to get a gun because of my review, that's not so fun.
I'M INTERVIEWING THE "FRENCH WOMAN WHO DOES NOT GET FAT." It's a cat-and-mouse game played out in the plush surroundings of the Federalist restaurant on Beacon Hill. Mireille Guiliano's book is on its way to selling more than a million copies, and all I can concentrate on is matching her bite for bite. She sips her champagne, I sip mine. She nibbles at her scallop dish; I politely push my quail from one side of the plate to the other, trying to scribble down her quotes as she outlines her philosophy. We share a creme brulee, each of us tasting a scant tablespoon of the creamy concoction before putting down our spoons in unison. Then we get up to leave. I can feel her eyeing me as I look her over, and I know exactly what she's thinking - because I'm thinking it, too.
We're exactly the same height and each a size 4. But she's in the business of staying thin, and I'm in a business that, by logic, ought to make me fat.
As the Globe's restaurant critic, I get all sorts of questions each week: Where should I take my in-laws? Is there a romantic restaurant in the North End, the South End, the Fenway, off I-495? What happened to that place that sold twin lobsters in the 1950s under the Tobin Bridge? But the one I hear most often from those I meet face to face is: How can you be a restaurant critic and be so thin?
So it's time to fess up - on this and a few other frequent queries. Some are good-natured. How did you get into this? Some not so friendly. How did you get to do this?
For 13 years, I've been getting paid to eat in restaurants - regularly and often. A dream come true, you might say. Well, yes, and then again, no. A friend once asked what the worst thing about my job was, and I answered, "Eating out." The best thing: Eating out. It's a paradox. Tasting another bite of overcooked tuna, another spoonful of sludgy pumpkin soup, another leaden bit of deep-fried calamari can feel like attaching a ball and chain to my tongue. Yet as soon as one taste, one memory wears off, I'm up for another.
First things first: How do you eat out two or three or four or five times a week and not get fat?
To write about a restaurant and its cuisine, I need to taste the food; I do not need to clean my plate (that's another kind of food writing: Tales of the Trenchermen). The drill when you dine with me is that I taste about two bites of everything on your plate - including sauces, vegetables, and those cute flash-fried sweet potato chips on top. Ditto with anyone else at the table. Then I eat the same amount of food off of my plate. And then I stop eating.
That's not just because I want to preserve my figure - butter is still the favorite flavoring agent of most chefs - but because otherwise all that I would remember, by the time I get home and hunker down at my kitchen counter to write notes, is the plate I cleaned. If I'm lucky, one of my dining companions finishes off my meal; if not, the waitress may have questions. Years ago, when giant portions and "getting your money's worth" were the norm in Boston, those could be quite pointed, sometimes including a visit from a manager or even a chef. Nowadays, portions are smaller; people's eating habits are ever more idiosyncratic, and usually the plate is wordlessly carted away.
The other answer is that I exercise - walking, weights, Pilates - every day without fail, and I am very careful about what I eat - no potato chips, no ice cream. My routine is a little excessive, maybe, but the alternative might leave me looking like a turkey the day before Thanksgiving.
Be honest. Do you just stuff your face and write whatever strikes you?
When people ask me how I actually review restaurants, they almost never mean: "How do you force yourself to sit down and write 950 words about a restaurant, trying to find adjectives and phrases to describe food in a culinary world getting ever more homogenized?" No, people want to know about the eating - not the writing.
The Globe reviewers, myself and those who write the "Cheap Eats" column in Thursday's Calendar section, go anonymously. I make reservations under another name; I usually visit each restaurant twice, taking along three companions each time. By the end, I'll have tasted 10 to 16 dishes, plus a smattering of desserts, and have a fairly good idea of what the chef and the restaurant are getting at. If I'm going to an ethnic restaurant - say, Chinese - I try to take along a native or someone very familiar with the cuisine, although by now I've sampled enough Peking duck and dan-dan noodles to have a decent working knowledge.
Those invited on the first visit are the lucky ones; I might give some direction, but generally they can order the herb-crusted rack of lamb or savor the pan-seared duck breast that they desire. The next round of diners, though, gets marching orders - "no lamb, no duck, no striped bass with chanterelle mushrooms" - whispered by me across the table. This can cause discord - sometimes heated arguments - and I have had friends pout for months over the loss of the pork tenderloin with fruit chutney and mashed potatoes.
While I'm eating, I'm making mental notes, about the food and about the restaurant itself. How does the room look? Is the lighting too dim, too bright? Is the management keeping track of slow service from the kitchen? Are the waiters moving fluidly or clumsily? Do people look happy to be here? In other words, I'm the one staring around the room, sometimes eliciting questions like "Is everything all right?" from the waitstaff.
I don't take notes at the table - I need to be a regular diner and not call attention to myself. For a while, I used a tape recorder on the drive home, but the sound of my voice when I replayed the tape was too embarrassing. As soon as I get home, no matter how late it is or how tired I am, I retrieve my mental images and write pages and pages of notes. It's tedious, but, who knows, all that mental work may stave off Alzheimer's.
Who pays for the meals, and do you wear disguises?
The newspaper pays for the meals; no food is accepted for free. I don't wear disguises, mostly because I would feel so foolish that I wouldn't be able to carry on a normal conversation and would be outed as a critic. Or, at the least, as a strange lady with a curious wig fetish. Sometimes I am recognized. It's inevitable. It's usually not by the chef but by managers and waiters, who are a peripatetic tribe. If I review a restaurant, and the hostess later figures out I must have been that woman at Table 6, and two months later, having moved to another job, she seats me at her new restaurant, I might be spotted. But by that time, it's too late for management to call in another chef or change the waitstaff.
Also, I try to keep a low profile: I don't go to benefits, wine dinners, or other gatherings; appear on television or participate as a celebrity in events; or accept offers to try a chef's cuisine. That can limit one's social life, but it's the price I pay for getting paid to eat out.
What's changed in Boston's dining scene over the years?
Sometimes I find it disheartening that service doesn't seem to get better in Boston. Styles change; there's not so much "Hi, my name is Bob, and I'll be your server" anymore. But it's still too often that you feel as if you're dining on the waiter's schedule. Order when he arrives or be prepared to suffer a painful wait for his return. Expect to have conversations interrupted, to be asked too early, "Are you still working on that?" - a phrase I hate - and, often, to have to practically strangle someone to refill a water glass or get a check at the end of the meal.
There are funny memories - the waitress who tripped, sending my son's Shirley Temple and a glass of wine into my lap. Or annoying ones - the waitress who literally ripped a menu out of my hands at the Barnstable Restaurant and Tavern recently to give to her friends who'd just walked in (I walked out).
My newest pet peeve is the waiter's asking: "Have you dined with us before?" as if this restaurant's menu required a PhD while all the others I'd eaten at only needed a master's degree, and then proceeding to instruct the new diners on how to properly order. On the second visit, after a waiter at Tomasso Trattoria and Enoteca in Southborough asked this question, I couldn't help myself and snapped, "Yes, we do know how to do it."
And while I'm at it, new upscale restaurants are starting to look so much alike that I walk into one and think I've already reviewed it. Eastern Standard looks like the Metropolitan Club, which looks a larger version of Union Bar and Grille and a little like the original version of Rialto. Doesn't any restaurant designer have an original thought anymore? One more wall of changing colors - 33 Restaurant & Bar, Lot 401 (in Providence), Mare - and I swear I'll throw a spoonful of your finest white bean spread at it. And though I like the looks of Stella, it's channeling Mistral. Makes one yearn for the old days when hippie chefs put up an Indian bedspread and called it decorated.
Anyone ever get angry about a bad review?
Of course, restaurateurs, chefs, and faithful customers don't always like what I write. Early in my reviewing days, as I sat at a Theater District restaurant, those at my table overheard a woman loudly telling her companions, "I don't see how she can be vegetarian and review restaurants." I'm not (I could just see myself writing, "Well, the steak tartare looked delicious"), but that vegetarian rumor persisted for a while.
Once a South End restaurant owner called my editors and threatened to get a gun - he didn't, as far as I know. And there are some in the business who don't return my phone calls or who complain about me to my colleagues. And after a critical review or even a mixed one, I often am barraged with e-mails from a restaurant's fans or enemies wondering how I could be so dumb. It's part of the job, and I'm glad people are passionate about the places they love - or hate.
What's the best meal you've ever eaten? And the worst?
Some years ago, my husband and I traveled through the Puglia region of Italy, and in a remote, very rural place, we had the meal I'll remember until the end of my days, at Al Fornello da Ricci: olive oil pressed from the restaurant's own trees, so fresh you could drink it. Lamb with so much delectable flavor that it defines what the meat should taste like. Wonderfully rough-textured bread to soak up the olive oil and juices from the lamb. Handmade ravioli. Tiny zucchini, salad greens, herbs all grown on the premises. Local wines. It wasn't a formal restaurant or a particularly elaborate one, but it's my idea of paradise.
Over here, Melissa Kelly does honest and glorious food like this at Primo in Rockland, Maine, but in the new experimentation a la Spain's Ferran Adria, chefs seem to be moving away from this elemental food. Not that I'd ever pass up the delectable creations that Kenneth Oringer at Clio and Pino Maffeo at Restaurant L put out, using equipment more at home in a chem lab.
I try to write and move on, so I don't harbor bad memories. There was an Indian restaurant formerly in Inman Square, Akbar, to which I gave one star. A copy of the review appeared in the restaurant window with four stars mysteriously affixed (slightly askew), but after a phone call from one of my superiors, the copy disappeared. I'm not likely to forget that, or the oceans of mediocre creme brulee after years of sticky tiramisu. But as I say, I move on.
Did your resume just say "I like to eat," and you got the job?
Under the rule that you always seek what you didn't have, a life in restaurants was my destiny. I grew up in a tiny village in western Kansas where we never, ever ate out - there were no restaurants. But I was the oldest of eight kids, and my mother thought cooking was much more boring than books and politics.
My grandmother, who lived next door, was a talented cook and obsessed with freshness. When she wanted to make chicken and noodles (Dutch heritage), she got chickens from her brothers on the farm, fattened them for a couple of days on the best corn, and then chopped off their heads. At age 5, I got to help her pluck them. She poached the chickens over low heat for hours, and made and rolled out the noodles. Between her and my mother and necessity, I learned to cook early. And there were plenty of models. At the parish socials, the men signed up for dessert before the dinner started - for Lucy Lutz's chiffon cake or Grandma Doll's rhubarb pie. The communal meals were basically long conversations about whose pie crust came out better or whether anyone else could achieve the height of Genevieve's German chocolate cake. It was food reviewing by the masses.
I left home to be a journalist - I still feel that what I do goes by the ground rules of reporting - who, what, when, where, and why - and I discovered restaurants in Kansas City, New York, Boston, and beyond. As a longtime editor on several newspapers, including this one, I learned to cook "fancy" food and wrote about food on the side (sometimes squeezing the writing in after 1 a.m. and a shift on a copy desk or while my children napped). When the Globe's former restaurant critic, Robert Levey, decided to retire, I was asked if I wanted to change gears and take the job.
Boston restaurants have evolved, and they, and their food, have gotten much more sophisticated (although I'd also argue they've gotten much more alike, as the pressure of the big bucks needed to start up and sustain a restaurant has escalated). But to taste food and decide its virtues and drawbacks, I still hark back to the clear, clean, true tastes of my grandma's chicken and noodles.
Alison Arnett is the Globe's restaurant critic. E-mail her at Arnett@globe.com. 