I wrote a harsh restaurant review. Then the chef emailed me

This article is part of our Behind the Headlines series, where Age reporters reveal unforgettable moments in their careers.See all 13 stories.

The negative review can be a glorious thing. Fun to read and fun to write, the true take-down is the type of story most likely to draw eyeballs and go viral. If you peek behind the curtain of our analytics, my most popular critiques over the past few years – by far – are the ones in which I am my meanest self.

In the insider-y world of global restaurant criticism, the reviews that remain memorable for years, that gain an air of legend, are always the savage pans: Pete Wells on Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in the New York Times; Jay Rayner on Le Cinque in the Guardian. But negative reviews pose a real problem for ethical critics, especially given their popularity.

I’ve faced this problem – and one case in particular changed the way I review restaurants.

One chef and restaurant changed the way Besha Rodell thinks about writing negative reviews.Credit: Marjia Ercegovac

In my almost two decades of professional restaurant criticism, first in Atlanta and then in Los Angeles before coming home to Melbourne, there is one review I still think about often, years later.

I was new in LA at the time, a city I’d moved to for a job as a restaurant critic at LA Weekly. It was a thrilling time, but also an intensely anxious one: I was replacing Jonathan Gold, the most revered reviewer of my generation, the only food critic ever to have won a Pulitzer Prize, regarded as the patron saint of LA and its food scene. I knew barely anything about the city, having never visited beyond the international terminal at LAX on my many trips to and from Australia.

I had been hired, in part, thanks to my reputation for being unafraid to criticise beloved, trendy and powerful restaurants when it was warranted, for not pulling my punches. I was looking to step out from the shadow of Gold, to prove myself worthy of the position in my own right.

I instituted a star rating system, something the newspaper had never had in the past. One of my early reviews using that system was of a trendy, new-ish restaurant that had been getting a fair amount of buzz, partly thanks to reports from numerous outlets (including the Los Angeles Times) that the chef had worked at several extremely well-regarded New York City restaurants.

Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold died in 2018.

I was puzzled by these reports – there were things about the cooking that, to my mind, represented a lack of basic skill: chicken skin was aggressively seared but still flabby underneath; fat, salt and sugar dominated almost every dish; desserts had issues that could only be attributed to a lack of pastry training. How had this man worked at some of the best restaurants in the world and yet did not know how to cook a piece of chicken?

I put on my reporter’s cap and started calling New York. Neither of the restaurants cited had any history of the chef ever having worked there. I called the chef. He somewhat sheepishly admitted that he had only worked short, unpaid internships – probably a few days or less – at both venues. So, what was his training? A nine-month culinary program in New York, and not much else. After that, he moved to LA and opened his own place, and no one else who spoke to him had bothered to check what he meant when he mentioned his experience in those highly regarded kitchens. I took the opportunity to make the review, in part, a musing on the term “chef”.

In Australia, anyone in a kitchen is called a chef – in America, you are a cook until you run your own kitchen. What makes a chef, I wondered? Is it years of training and hard work? Or is it simply having enough resources to go to school for a few months and then put your name above the door?

The review was harsh. It did not accuse the chef of fabrication, but it did list his actual experience and pointed out the narrative discrepancy. I gave the restaurant one star out of five. The review did well. As I’d hoped, many people seemed thrilled there was a critic in town who was willing to say what needed to be said, who might speak the unpleasant truth.

Also as expected, there was a chorus of commentary that took me to task for my perceived cruelty. So be it, I thought. Comes with the territory.

And then, I got a long email from the chef himself.

Yes chef? Jeremy Allen White as chef Carmy in the cult TV show, The Bear.Credit: FX

He was devastated. He had long admired my work, he said, and was excited to get a review from me. He explained that he was interviewed in the restaurant’s early days by a blogger – not a professional journalist – who asked about his background, and he mentioned the two internships in passing. The blogger posted about it in words that made that experience seem far more significant than it was.

Other writers, including professional journalists, repeated the information until it became an accepted part of his story and the restaurant’s story. He was embarrassed about it, he wrote, but didn’t know how to correct the record.

The restaurant was small, and he had opened it with help from his family, who believed in his talent but were not particularly wealthy. He feared that my review had crushed his reputation, and would ultimately crush his business. We had a lengthy, respectful and intense back-and-forth via email.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I regret the review, in part because it led to this conversation, but I left the experience with a different outlook on when and why to write negative reviews. It made me think about who I’m serving, and what the act of criticism really means. What is the point? Is it solely to pass judgment on one establishment? And if, when passing that judgment, I find problems with the cooking or service or some other aspect, should I be looking to shame someone for their faults? Or should I be trying to help, to nudge them towards a better outcome?

Writing restaurant reviews is a complex process.Credit: Marija Ercegovac

I’m not sure what, if anything, I’d do differently if I were to encounter the same set of circumstances again. In some ways, it was a perfect storm, and once I found out that the chef had been misrepresented in print, it almost forced my hand to report what I’d found. I can’t say what impact I had on that particular business, but eventually, the chef switched to a much more casual concept that was far better suited to his skill set. I wrote about it positively. He was thrilled.

But in the years since, I’ve come to think of reviews not merely as the passing of judgment on one particular business, and I’ve stopped thinking of my own tastes as particularly important. Rather, I think about the broader question of what we want our cities and regions to look like, and how these businesses fit into those hopes. I approach a restaurant with the question: What are they trying to achieve? How are they succeeding? Are there any insights I might offer that would help them? Who would love it, and who would hate it? Can I write in a way that lets both of those readers know whether it’s for them?

And for the most part, I save my truly negative reviews for establishments that seem cynical, somehow, that appear to be truly taking the piss: a hotel group that came into town, took over an important historical building, and delivered an offering that was truly baffling; large international chains that feel soulless and expensive.

My book is coming out this year. I imagine the critics who might review it, if I’m lucky enough to be reviewed. I think about how they might approach the task. Should they compare me to all of literature, to what they personally want in a book? Or should they consider my goals and the readers who might be interested in the subject?

A takedown might be much more fun to read than a nuanced evaluation, but fun only goes so far when you’re talking about people’s livelihoods, their careers, their life’s work. Anyone who comes to hospitality from a place of passion deserves consideration. Not coddling, but certainly not cruelty.

And I suppose for anyone looking for a positive review, my basic advice is: do your best, and do not take the piss.

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