Never Order Chicken On a Monday by Matthew Evans

Author:Matthew Evans [Matthew Evans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781864712704
Publisher: Random House Australia

10

The free lunch

WHAT YOU'VE HEARD is true. Reviewing restaurants is the best job in the world. It's ten times as good as you can imagine, yet less glamorous than you've ever considered. Well, it was for me. It surpassed my expectations in many respects, left me speechless, mesmerised and in awe. It also disappointed me when I least expected it to. It left me with chest pain and weight gain; it left me persecuted, popular, defamed, sued, ecstatic and appreciated. But in spite of it all, it is probably the best work you can do sitting up.

A review doesn't appear because the restaurant wants it. It doesn't get published because reviewers need someone to subsidise their lifestyle. A restaurant review exists because the public demand it.

Most restaurant 'reviews' you see, however, are not really reviews as such. They're compromised. Often they're in the local paper on the same page as the ad for the restaurant. Some annual guidebooks don't even make yearly visits to the restaurants they write about. Smaller newspapers are often sponsored or have been given a free meal in return for some coverage. On tight budgets, with no resources, smaller publications resort to the simplest, cheapest way to review, which is of dubious benefit to the reader – you're hardly going to criticise the people who pay your bills. Most of the bigger publications, however, pay their way. That way, reviewers are free to write without being unnecessarily encumbered.

I'd been a chef and recipe writer, a voracious consumer of other people's views and reviews for years. Even as an apprentice I'd written to the local paper to complain about the quality of reviewers after one journalist used words to the effect of 'apparently coriander is a common herb in Thai cookery', followed up with this piece of wisdom: 'the only difference between good and bad food is that good food doesn't make you sick'.

Many newspapers send the lowly trainee, the cadet, out to do restaurant reviews because they don't get paid much and need the free meal. What the reader gets are the thoughts of an inexperienced writer and diner. Someone's business is in the hands of a person who probably hasn't eaten out much, or written much. In this way newspapers shaft restaurants in a way they wouldn't any other small business.

Professional restaurant reviewing may seem like a contradiction in terms. But to do the job properly, to give the dining public an experienced, credible, readable choice it's better to have someone dedicated to the task, not just doing it between PR gigs or advertising copy. A full-time reviewer knows the industry, its movements, its foibles, its high and low points. How can you take responsibility for a chef 's hat award, something that can cost or make the business many tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, if you haven't been immersed in the industry as a diner?

The Sydney Morning Herald's chief restaurant critic was a position I'd long wondered about. Influential, respected, and based in a dynamic dining city still on the ascendant, it seemed the duck's guts of reviewing jobs.

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