What Do Restaurant Critics Do?

[Editor’s Note: The sixth edition — and third incarnation — of Eating Las Vegas is in production. The 2018 version of our restaurant guide is down to two authors: John Curtas and Anthony Curtis.

John was in the original ELV author trio with Al Mancini and Max Jacobson, the book took its name from his website, he’s the only author to have been a part of all five books to date, and he’s eaten in more Las Vegas restaurants than anyone on Earth (though he’s much more concerned with quality and authenticity than value). Anthony comes at it from a mostly value point of view, has never claimed to be a food expert, and has had a big hand in the recommendations of restaurants in various categories in the back of every Eating Las Vegas.

So the sixth edition is written by Curtas and Curtis, two quintessential restaurant reviewers writing the essential guide to the essential restaurants in the essential dining city, Las Vegas.

The following is a sneak preview of the book, in the form of an excerpt written by John, on what it’s like to be a dining critic.]

What do restaurant critics do?

Restaurant critics: Eat. Write. Cook. Travel. Eat more. Study. Read everything possible about food and travel. Eat even more.

Most of all, restaurant critics think incessantly about food. Not just the food that their happens to be shoveling into the old pieholes at any one moment, but about how everyone eats. And cooks. And feeds each other. More specifically, restaurant critics are charged with the responsibility of evaluating how businesses that sell food to satisfy some human urges—hunger primarily, but also the quest for quality, value, exotica, novelty, or distinction—are doing their job.

To be a good restaurant critic, you need to eat a lot, write a lot, read a lot, and travel a lot. If you lack the stamina for any one of these things, you should hang it up right now. It’s like being a porn star: It sounds like great idea until you have to do it all the time, on schedule.

Restaurant critics (real ones, not casual food bloggers) are writers first and foremost. But their beat isn’t sports or news or politics, it’s rating and reviewing each and every bite of food they ever put in their mouths, then putting those thoughts on paper or screen, usually weekly, facing deadlines.

Secondly, restaurant critics are consumer advocates. If your motivation for the job isn’t to help the general public spend their dining dollars wisely, you should find another occupation. People who just like to eat out all the time and tell everyone what they think of their meals are known as blowhards … or food bloggers. Food bloggers, as knowledgeable and passionate as some of them are, aren’t restaurant critics.

Real restaurant critics get paid for what they do.

There are four types of professional critics: 1) full-time columnists who write for major metropolitan newspapers or national periodicals (these jobs are becoming increasingly rare, probably less than 100 in America who make a living this way); 2) freelance journalists who subcontract to magazines, free newsweeklies, and daily newspapers, sometimes as a steady gig, sometimes intermittently; 3) online critics who work for large websites (like Grub Street, Eater National, and Huffington Post); or 4) established critics who maintain their own websites (some make money, some don’t). As for me, I fit into the second category for the first 15 years of my restaurant writing career and now ply my trade as a member of the fourth group, with occasional forays into numbers 2 and 3.

Restaurant critics don’t make a lot of money. If you’re lucky enough to land a job with a newspaper, you’ll make about as much as a schoolteacher; if you freelance, you’ll be lucky to top a barista at Starbucks. It’s like being a poet: You do it for the love of your subject or you don’t it at all. And like dedicated poets, you should always remember what Robert Graves said: “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.”

Food writers aren’t restaurant critics. A food writer pens articles or books about food. A food writer might write an entire book about a specific food topic, such as Salt by Mark Kurlansky, or on diet and food politics, for example, The Ominvore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. For food fads, pick up any monthly food magazine like Bon Appetit or Saveur. Food writers also write about themselves (M.F.K. Fisher), or recipes (Julia Child), or travel (Anthony Bourdain, Joseph Wechsberg, etc.). Restaurant critics write about what they taste, then evaluate the final product of professional chefs who charge the public good money for the fruits of their labors. All restaurant critics are food writers, but rare is the food writer who is also a restaurant critic.

Most restaurant critics work on a weekly basis. (There may be critics out there who manage to eat, digest, think, and review multiple restaurants in a week, but if they exist, it’s a fair bet they’re either independently wealthy, really really fat, or crazy.) Many periodicals assign their critics to file articles on various foods and food trends in between their reviews of restaurants. In this respect, most critics, if they’re good writers (more on this below), can toggle back and forth as part-time food writers. On the other hand, most cookbook authors and food writers wouldn’t be caught dead writing hard-boiled opinionated prose about, for example, some phoning-it-in celebrity chef. But that’s just fine with real critics, because you wouldn’t want a food writer to write a proper restaurant review any more than you’d want a cheerleader to be a football coach.

In a typical week, critics will visit at least a half-dozen restaurants—most for the first time, some to get a second look—as they keep their pipelines stuffed with reviews in progress, possible subjects for future reviews, and potential food articles. Back in the Stone Age, the late 20th century, it was de rigueur for a critic to visit a restaurant multiple times before filing a review. These days, due to the news-a-minute immediate-gratification impact of the Internet, almost no publication, save for maybe a few major newspapers, requires critics to eat more than one meal in a restaurant before giving their opinion of it.

This is extremely unfortunate, because restaurants are not movies. Every movie critic sees the same movie; a restaurant is an organic being, dependent on the coordination of many people to do its job well. All it takes is for a dishwasher to call in sick, or a waitress to have a fight with her boyfriend, or a cook to check into rehab for you to have a lousy time. Only by eating in a place multiple times can a real critic take the measure of a place. Every place in this book (not counting the listings) has been visited multiple times by me.

Also, due to the Internet, anonymity has gone the way of the tasseled menu and the hat-check girl. All real critics writing for respected publications or wielding any real clout are known to every major restaurant in their cities. Their photos are posted in restaurant kitchens, and anyone with a mobile phone can look up anyone’s picture in 30 seconds.

Eating a meal in a restaurant is no more enough to correctly opine on its merits than looking at a single painting is to judge an artist—even if you’re a knowledgeable critic. To judge a steakhouse, you better have eaten in dozens of them all over the country. An amateur is one who says, “I went to Mama Leone’s and really liked the lasagna.” A restaurant critic has made lasagna in her home kitchen, watched professionals make it on TV, eaten lasagna in the great Italian restaurants of the world, and traveled to Bologna to see and taste the real thing. Anyone with an opinion can tell you whether something is good. I don’t know beans about art, but I can tell you that that Rembrandt fellow sure looks like he knew what he was doing. A good critic knows (and tells you) why something is good or bad.

And that’s the hardest part of all.