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I’ve still got my notes from the first review I wrote for the FT. God, I was so earnest! I scribbled observations about the quality and number of the bathrooms, and stained the pages with dessert. Something else also stood out on the page. I’d recently discovered Jim Harrison, the American poet, writer and food obsessive. He sadly died in 2016, but he exerted an immense influence over me. There in the notes I’ve laboriously transcribed a quote: “Distance from food preparation poisons the soul with cold abstractions.”
As I’d begun to think about how to critique restaurants, I’d questioned what my own tastes were, my own tightly packed prejudices, and I’d realised that what really lit me up was sitting at a counter somewhere and watching my food being made. Harrison, it seemed, had hit me bang on target.
It seemed to me that anything that gets between the cookers and the eaters — booking systems, over-drilled service droids, “concepts”, artificially managed exclusivity, ridiculous prices, fashion, rigid culinary dogma, uncomfortable formality, any imposed framework for objective analysis of “quality”, chef ego — those cold abstractions eroded the experience. But how is that a basis for restaurant criticism?
Anything from a bacon bap to a state banquet can be “perfect”, or just as easily, can fail cold. When the path is shorter between cook and eater, there are fewer places to screw up. So if you’re looking to your critic for a bankable piece of valedictory advice, it’s inspired by Harrison. Watch your food being prepared, see the hands it passes through on its way to you. Eat at the counter where you can.
When they find out what you do for a living, people presume some kind of supreme palate or exceptional experience. They usually ask what criteria you apply when critiquing, that’s if they’re polite. The more direct approach is, “What gives you the right?” I still don’t have an answer.
I have, though, found myself writing the word “hospitality” more and more. I’ve become more focused on this and less on the obvious elements of food/service/venue, possibly to the point of obsession. This has made the job tougher, because, though critics have gently and rightly moved away from performatively lacerating reviews, there are, it seems, fewer places offering authentic hospitality. Some of my favourite restaurants — St John, Bouchon Racine, Brutto, Ciao Bella, Noble Rot, Andrew Edmunds — seem predicated on hospitality. But vanishingly few seem able to prioritise it in the same way. Perhaps, as metropolitan restaurants have become more serious commercial investments, it’s not easy to justify on a spreadsheet. Perhaps I’m naively romantic.
Going out to eat is an exchange of hospitality framed in a commercial transaction. People make food that you will like and take care to serve it to you in an enjoyable way. You eat and take pleasure in the experience. An equitable sum changes hands. But everyone in the transaction, from the moment the restaurant is conceived to the second the diner leaves the premises, needs to understand what hospitality is, and commit to providing it.
Don’t confuse hospitality with service. Trust me, a restaurant with sufficient resources will drill a crew until the service is flawless. Yet the place can still feel soulless. The food can be as Michelin approved as you like, but that just helps you to feel you’ve made a prudent choice and financial disbursement. That your judgment was validated — not that you are loved. Feeling loved requires genuine hospitality. I have found it in 14-course tasting concepts (rarely) as well as in burger wagons (surprisingly often). In my experience, it has been more common in independent restaurants than in chains. And perhaps it’s the easiest to achieve in projects based on vague, misguided love and enthusiasm. Again . . . I’m not rating high on critical objectivity here.
The obvious truth is that there is no objective way to measure a restaurant, and the critic’s subjective opinion is of almost no real value. We all know this. We don’t have it tattooed but we might as well. But if you believe, as I do, in hospitality then judging how well a restaurant does has remarkably little to do with fashionable ingredients, groundbreaking technique or novel flavour combinations.
So what is a critic for? This is the second quote that’s in my notebook. It’s in every notebook because I always write it on the first page: “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” Kurt Vonnegut.
As of next week, I’m getting to write deeper about the parts of cooking I genuinely care about (starting with an indecent obsession with egg sandwiches), but I’ve always felt that people care about hospitality. They may not know it. They may think that fulfilment lies in dropping their money in a “concept” run remotely under the brand of a celebrity chef. But know when they’ve received it. They can’t help it. That’s because the urge to nurture and nourish is innate, an atavistic drive that defines us as human beings. If we have provided hospitality, we are validated. We know that we have done something good. When we receive it, we feel loved, honoured, protected.
So in the end it all comes back to Jim Harrison and the narrowing of the distance between us and food, which, to me, from now on, will mean not just being close enough to criticise, but, instead, actually having my hands in it.
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