Restaurant reviews: bloggers don’t cut the mustard
Food bloggers have conditioned restaurants to expect constantly favourable coverage from the media. Readers deserve better.
When Joe Hockey hoisted “Age of Entitlement” up the national flagpole of political patois, I don’t think he had the restaurant community in mind. Maybe he should have.
There is a mindset among the food vendors, bar operators, mixologists, baristas, publicans, chefs and restaurateurs of Australia that has grown slowly, like a truffle, in the past 20 years and it is definitely one of entitlement — specifically, entitlement to media support.
The flowering of the cheerleading media — the webzines, the blogs, the consumer feedback sites, the “influencers” with their pay-to-play Instagram posts, the everything-is-fantastic-and-every-chef-who-ever-fried-a-chicken-wing-is-Michel-bloody-Bras-with-a-beard crowd — has created two key expectations among those who start any kind of new business selling food and beverages.
One is that they will get coverage. The other is that it will be supportive. Sycophantic, in many cases, but certainly positive. Ra-ra.
The rise of self-publishing, social media, food mania in the general community, those “influencers” and a PR industry dedicated to playing go-between with their burgeoning ranks of restaurant clients has created a perfect storm of demand and supply. The new “media” needs the material, free; the PR people are happy to provide it; and the restaurant industry, often unsophisticated in the ways of traditional arms-length media practices, develops a Pavlovian expectation about what they should get for their PR dollar.
Put on a nice dinner for a bunch of bloggers and influencers corralled by your PR? You want pictures and praise, right? Affirmation. And the more it looks like legitimate comment, the better. (The idea that legitimate comment cannot be bought is a fuzzy one for many who work with food and wine.)
Is this what readers want? Oh, the readers — let’s not forget about them, shall we? A food-loving acquaintance recently summed up what, to my mind, is the issue with a lot of the new media “reviews”.
“Realistically, you know that most new places will have something wrong with them; not everything will be perfect,” he said on email.
“But [these glowing reviews] create certain expectations, and you go along and spend your money and feel you’ve been short-changed because it’s not perfect. And it’s not really the restaurant’s fault.”
So when Pavlov’s dog bites, it’s quite a surprise.
During the delicious fracas that followed a recent review in The Weekend Australian Magazine of Adelaide’s Hill of Grace restaurant, much of the debate, on both sides, was fairly predictable. It gets a bit that way when you’ve had the good fortune to review restaurants, backed by media houses that support their critics, for many years. The same — often quite legitimate — arguments get trotted out in defence/offence of a poor review, although I was surprised by how much commentary fell into the “if you don’t have something nice to say” category.
(By way of background, the restaurant was scored 0 from a possible five; the reviewer — me — declared the place could not be recommended to anyone.)
But only one person who contributed to the “comments” section touched on something truly perceptive. “I’m not saying it’s Hill of Grace, but perhaps one problem these days is the expectation of a favourable review from media who are not quite so independent.”
Bingo.
Too much of what constitutes “food media” these days enjoys a first-class ticket on the gravy train. And by the time pre-launch hype has passed, and opening-night hoopla has turned into the reality of a business — a team, performing on the field — it’s too late to say anything that isn’t nice. That would look a little silly.
Now, nobody is more aware than a staff member at a traditional masthead of the way publishing has changed and continues to; the way new platforms are delivering information, the way journalists must respond. But let me tell you, 10 years ago, if you published a full-page review in an important publication that was even half favourable about a restaurant — which is, after all, a team of people — you’d get a note of appreciation. A response of some kind. These days? Niente.
I don’t particularly care that people in the restaurant industry have poor manners, but it is an interesting comment on this entitlement thing. Restaurants don’t tend to discern between breathless fluff and critical appraisal, as long as the name is out there. And why wouldn’t it be? They’ve paid a PR firm to get the new media in for a freebie, or the post-launch promise of one, press it with text/images/video and god knows what else in the way of supplied content, and so naturally there should be some kind of quid pro quo.
By the time a restaurant opens these days, so much cheer squad material has been published about the chef/sommelier/manager/plongeur, and most of it has been at least inspired by PR. Just search online for Embla, for example, to see what was written about a new Melbourne food and wine bar before launch.
I’m not immune, but I’d like to think we follow up with honest, independent appraisal, those of us in mainstream media who form a tight little band of reviewers who don’t need friends in the restaurant trade, a diminishing coterie of old farts who, it seems to me, are more valuable than ever in a world of exploding food options.
So here’s the news: we don’t live in a world of equals. Some things are better than others, and someone has to steer you towards the light and away from the dark.
As Chris Schonberger, editor-in-chief at American webzine First We Feast, wrote recently in a powerful, and slightly depressing essay titled “The problems with food media that nobody wants to talk about”: “Beyond restaurant reviews … food journalism is too content to uphold the status quo, jettisoning the subtleties of what makes things great, crappy, intriguing, frustrating, and just OK in the interest of painting the dining scene as one endless procession of superlatives.”
And later: “Ultimately, everyone’s feeding at the PR-created trough to maintain their place in the pecking order and ensure they get the next inconsequential piece of publicist-scrubbed intel.”
Like I said, depressing.