Nowadays if you say something critical they throw you right in jail

A 3,500 WORD BUMPER SPECIAL

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Is criticism dead?

We’re hearing it more and more. Influencers have destroyed it, or lack of media literacy has destroyed it. Maybe both. Everyone’s just chasing clicks. You can’t write a negative review about a restaurant right now, it’s in poor taste.

It’s been an interesting summer for criticism, I’ll tell you that. A rich text. Many rich texts! This Chic long read takes you through some of them. Don’t kill me!

The LVD of it all

In mid-July, everyone I know was talking about ‘A Love Letter to Priya Krishna,’ a response to the New York Times Review of Le Veau d’Or by the restaurant’s bar manager, Sarah Morrissey. Published eight (8) months after the initial review and a month after Krishna’s tenure as interim NYT food critic (shared with Melissa Clark) ended, this response made up for its lack of timeliness with, uh, lots of energy.

Let’s go back to the beginning. In June of last year, Pete Wells announced he would be stepping down from his role as the Times’ food critic, a role he took over from Sam Sifton more than a decade prior. Both Sifton and Wells are behemoths of food criticism, big shoes for the Times to fill. At the time, it was announced that Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna would serve as co-critics during an interim period while the paper filled the permanent position, an announcement I took to mean that Tejal Rao was busy or needed time to find an apartment in New York. I try not to give the Times too many of my clicks these days not filtered through a paywall remover, given that some of their work is not exactly Nuremberg-proof, you know? But I still watched from a distance as Clark and Krishna established themselves, mostly through an apparent pivot to video on social media. Every year is an opportunity for another wave of pivoting to that sweet sweet video. I didn’t love it, not because I don’t like Krishna or Clark or because of the short-form content format, but because this shakeup of their criticism felt more like that sort of algorithm-chasing, focus-groupy “what do YOU guys want us to talk about?” editorial vision which haunts risk-averse media companies now. In November, J.Lee, the semi-anonymous food critic for Interview Magazine and Feed Me posted a picture of ‘FOOD CRITICISM” etched on a tombstone on Instagram, saying of the Times’ new criticism, “there’s no spin, there’s no edge there’s no angle. I want a sharper tongue and wetter ink.”

Two days before, Krishna had published a review of Le Veau d’Or, the second-coming of an Upper East Side icon, reopened by the chefs behind Frenchette. The review gave two stars (very good), several compliments and a few knocks. As a piece, the premise is interesting: how do you compete with nostalgia? How can you recreate a local haunt in the modern hospitality market? But Krisha doesn’t go long on the idea. There’s angle, but perhaps no edge.

The review is quite tepid. Reading Morrisey’s delayed response on Substack, you would think it had been a real spanking. The Love Letter begins:

“You will probably never read this letter, I know you are far too busy eating ethnic foods and taking down the patriarchy. I am just a small bartender woman riding the hot subway to work, working on my feet for 14 hours a day and watching my savings account dwindle.”

Woah. Obviously, this is not a good note on which to start. Race card on the first hand? Redraw! Go fish!

The immediate jab at ethnic foods, and by extension Krishna’s ouvré which seeks to highlight nonwestern cuisines, has been picked apart to death in the comments. Morrissey herself has not responded or clarified what she meant by this, but a network of surrogates has swooped in to defend the author from assertions that this opener had racist connotations. You have to remember, being called racist is like, really awful for a white person.

I’m more interested in the second sentence, about being so teeny tiny.

Perhaps the worst thing Bourdain ever did was convince every CDP and bartender that they have a scathing essay (and later, a book of essays) inside of them. It’s an epidemic that mostly manifests as long Instagram captions. If you know enough chefs, you’re familiar with the overly lyrical Neo-Bourdainian prose that plagues hospitality social media. Writing and cooking are similar in that true Freaking It can only come from a mastery of the basics, a fact often overlooked from an outside view. Bourdain’s style is often emulated without the sort of baseline that comes from extensive reading and writing—or having a copyeditor for a mother—leading to grammatical flair that is less interesting and more messy. In Morrissey’s essay, that manifests as a bunch of sentences that are, shall we say, un-diagrammable.

It’s tough. Morrissey spells her own restaurant’s name incorrectly more than once. The crux of the piece is that Krishna failed to notice the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears of the LVD team and that, in only rating the restaurant ‘very good,’ she disrespected their work. Morrissey harkens back to the retired Wells. He knew what was what.

Pete Wells, of course, has written some of the most famous bad reviews in modern restaurant writing. I wonder if the staff at Peter Luger or Eleven Madison Park felt that their hard work and dedication was validated by Wells’ admonishment. Morrissey writes of kind servers and extensive google docs and thoughtful design, all of which are true, I’m sure, and lovely. But this gets at the current impasse of restaurant criticism. The last few years have squeezed restaurants so hard, the field has become so muddied by influencers, and bad reviews have become so taboo that even mild critical engagement opens one up to this sort of emotional diatribe. It’s not sustainable.

It’s a question we’ll keep returning to: what does a writer know about a restaurant? Shouldn’t reviews be written by chefs or at the least, restaurant workers?

Beauty is in the eye of the baker

Also in July, it was once again time to talk about an article in The Cut. The Cut is such an interesting publication because it’s mostly ecommerce and some of the best reporting on abortion in mainstream media, but you would think they only publish unhinged clickbait. Where the meaty, discourse-generating longreads published in The Cut used to be reported pieces, like the 2019 piece on a Brooklyn preschool I still think about, recent years have seen an influx of sensational personal essays that an editor with a real duty of care would not have published. Whether writing about a scam (?) they fell for or confessing to animal abuse, these pieces reflect one of the most insidious trends in click-driven media, which encourages mostly young women to bare traumatic and unhealthy personal stories for a foot in the door of the essay-industrial complex.

‘Enough With the Ugly Cakes,’ by Bindu Bansinath, wasn’t a dangerous personal essay, but it was raw clickbait. Bansinath details her own experience of trying to find an appropriately chic cake for a friend’s birthday, balking at both the prices and the stylistic choices. She goes on to categorize the “vintage monstrosities” and the “floral slop,” directly linking to the business Instagrams of several cakes she finds offensive.

It doesn’t adequately contextualize her birthday party story, nor does it lean fully into being a hater. A personal essay about rejecting the financial and aesthetic pressure of the perfect party dessert and serving a kinda bad tiramisu to everyone’s delight would have been better, but would have drawn less clicks.

In a response, the editorial team behind Cake Zine, a New York-based print zine focused on dessert as a jumping off point, defended Ugly Cakes. It’s worth comparing this response to Morrissey’s on several fronts. An easy response to Bansinath’s piece might lean too heavily on this prevailing notion that you can’t criticize a baker, or a woman, or a small business, let alone all three, and there is some element of that sentiment throughout. But where Cake Zine’s response succeeds is in its textuality. Criticism is about writing and therefore about reading. In responding to the text of Bansinath’s piece versus the vibes of it, a real conversation can begin. This response identifies Bansinath personally, but doesn’t make it personal, saving the bulk of its ire for the media trends and editorial decisions that underpin the piece. It’s not free of emotion, and takes personal quotes from the bakers originally targeted, but it’s more measured. While people’s livelihoods are serious business, this response would not have you believe that it’s life or death.

I have my own thoughts about some of the cakes I see on my screen, but as I often say, it’s important to know which thoughts are for the group chat.

If you can’t cook it, you can’t critique it

Just when I thought there was no more criticism discourse to be had, they poured a few more buckets into the trough just for me.

The paper of record, knowing I’m trying not to give them clicks but reeling me in regardless, announced changes to its arts desk as part of an effort to go, “beyond the traditional review.” This mirrors the changes seen on the food desk, where the work of new co-editors Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan seems to include a lot of video. Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker, published a defense of the written review in response, worth reading in its entirety. He writes:

I’m not spreading my arms out in front of traditional reviews to protect them from insult or attack. Rather, I’m advocating for them, not in order to preserve the status quo or to revive past practices but to advance the cause of art itself—because reviews, far from being conservative (as Michel’s words imply), are the most inherently progressive mode of arts writing. When writing reviews, critics are in the position of the public: watching a movie, attending a concert, seeing a play, buying a record. Reviews are rooted in the most fundamental unit of the art business—the personal encounter with individual works (or exhibits of many works)—and in the economic implications of that encounter. The specificity of the review is both aesthetic and social. For starters, it’s a consumer guide, an intrinsic variety of service journalism. Critics are simultaneously consumers and avatars of consumers; as Pauline Kael wrote in 1971, in The New Yorker, “Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.” What’s commercially crucial about reviews, which serve as something like a consumer-protection file, is precisely this independence, both editorial and textual.

Brody’s perspective is on the arts, but every word applies to restaurants. There has been much talk about whether influencers have made restaurant criticism obsolete. It’s become common to say that influencers democratized reviewing, but what they really democratized is advertising. Even when a meal hasn’t been comped, a review predicated on short-form video which sells a lifestyle is an ad. It’s all an ad!

Read ‘Does Restaurant Criticism Still Matter?’ on Best Food Blog

This week, Seattle restaurateur Kevin Smith shared an infographic titled, “If you can’t cook it, you can’t critique it,” on Instagram. I would generally say who cares about what some guy is saying on Instagram, but it’s a clear distillation of this view in hospitality, a slightly glossier version of Morrissey’s essay.

Many modern food critics have never worked a station on the line, planned a menu around seasonal availability, negotiated with local farmers, or managed the razor-thin margins of a restaurant business. They often lack firsthand experience with what it takes to create, maintain, and evolve a kitchen — and yet they pass judgment on those who do it every day under pressure most could never endure.

Obviously, this is why chefs don’t make good critics. Smith goes on to talk about the narrow, Western-centric focus of critics, and okay, but this gets at something which has been gnawing at me since the Morrissey essay. So much discussion of the current state of restaurant criticism focuses on the cliff edge of Pete Wells’ retirement and the dearth of talent in a way that feels completely disconnected from reality. Soleil Ho, Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan, MacKenzie Chung Fegan, Helen Rosner—all of these critics are at the top of their game. New avenues open up for the likes of J.Lee and Jonathan Nunn. Some of the best restaurant writers are only getting started.

A Review of One’s Own

Tart, the debut book by anonymous Instagram user @SluttyCheff, has been billed as a lot of things. Some coverage frames it as a delightful, sexy romp, others frame it as the heir to Kitchen Confidential with a necessary feminine bent.

In the days between my decision to review this book and my procurement of a copy, I came across three separate women reading it in Victoria Park at different times. I interrupted all three to ask what they thought. All three told me the same thing: they couldn’t put it down.

I’ve been following @SluttyCheff for a while now, since the Summer of 2023, when the chef on everyone’s lips was Thomas Straker. A viral post about the eponymous restaurant’s all-white guy lineup turned into an article in British Vogue on the fetishization of the “chef daddy.” This turned into a bi-monthly column, which promised an inside look into high-end restaurant kitchens from the perspective of a young woman chef. Only, that didn’t quite come to fruition. The column isn’t about restaurant kitchens, or about anything really. It reflects the shifting purpose of the column as an entity within the media landscape, one that is less about editorial vision and more about SEO and commission links.

I was apprehensive about reading this book because I haven’t enjoyed the columns or, frankly, some of the Instagram longreads and I was beginning to feel like the odd one out. It’s always weird when everyone else seems to like something and you don’t, but in such a small, incestuous community as the London food media scene, there’s an added layer of orthodoxy one fears to disrupt. Critical engagement feels hard when everyone is friends with everyone and criticism itself feels so loaded.

I, like everyone else, read this book very quickly. It’s eminently readable in the way a wine is eminently drinkable. Long passages about working through mise lists and cycling through London go down very smoothly. Yes, that Neo-Bourdainian prose is here, but our author is better at it than most of her Instagram counterparts. When a book deal is so clearly social media based, it’s valid to wonder how that will translate into the long-form. I think it’s better here than on Instagram, benefitting from more space and an editor’s eye.

In many ways I’m the target demographic for this book. I, too, have flown down Kingsland Road, my state of emotional disrepair soundtracked by “Ooh, Baby Baby,” I’ve basked in the afterglow of a romantic dinner on the 38 bus, I’ve surely enabled bad behavior by East London chefs. I wonder how some of these passages read to a wider audience, but I think that the sense of place must ring through. If the column was these vignettes, I’d likely be a devoted reader.

Columns aside, what first made me feel truly like Elaine Benes watching the English Patient was a piece of micro-fiction published on Instagram in May, a riotous story about having period sex with an Italian woman. It’s the sort of outlandish tale of lesbian sex that can only come from someone who’s never had any; the vivid culinary descriptors of this woman’s “big body” read like lines from a dirty limerick or the diary of some freaky tween boy. People like this? It put me on Body Watch. @SluttyCheff is anonymous, yes, but she’s doing a sort of bespoke anonymity where she does photoshoots but covers her face, often with a burger emoji. All the viewer knows about this author is that she has collarbone-length auburn hair and that she is thin. It begs an interesting question: would anyone be interested if a visibly larger woman wore a hamburger balaclava and called herself a slut?

If I had these themes churning in my mind before, reading Tart did not put me at ease. Another interesting question arises: does anonymity require one to abandon the corporeal? Put another way, if I was writing under a nom de plume, would I still want people to know that I’m hot? I don’t necessarily think that, particularly in a book so focused on bodies, @SluttyCheff must forsake her own, but the frequency with which passages are broken to remind the reader that our narrator is skinny but has a great ass felt self-insistent. This is a tough needle to thread in a cultural criticism desert because what, you’re knocking down a woman for being body positive? But it’s clear that bodies are, in many ways, the forum for our narrator to navigate gender and her own positionality without having a firm grasp on either. Men are big and hulking but hipless, women are small and soft little hourglasses. Which leads me to the gender of it all …

About two-thirds of the way through the book, our narrator stops to tell us that she doesn’t usually think about gender in the kitchen, causing me to laugh out loud. There is a lot of gender in this book. But its treatment of gender is not rooted in anything beyond our author’s own attempts to parse how she feels about her womanhood, and that becomes evident. The women of Tart are not written really as people, but rather archetypes, relational tools for her to negotiate her own sense of identity. The swanning FOH girls at her first restaurant serve as the high-femme foils to the kitchen as Slutty first tries to find her footing in a male-dominated atmosphere, her oldest friends serve as noble savage-type normal girls with normal lives to reaffirm Slutty’s desire for the unconventional, and one unlucky Dalston lesbian serves as a bizarre interlude to reaffirm something, I just don’t know what that something is. Even Maggie, the only woman in any of the three kitchens of the book, isn’t given any level of care or interiority.

I went back and re-read the debut Chef Daddy essay. As I had fewer and fewer pages left of Tart, I kept waiting for her to turn it on its head, to assure me that I had the conceit of the book all wrong, but that never came. Tart is rife with the fetishization of male chefs, whether quite directly or through a fetishization of the conventional kitchen culture where they thrive. The “it’s so toxic and horrible but I wouldn’t want to live any other way,” mindset of chefs is everywhere, but it feels especially damaging to read in what is supposedly a disruptive narrative. The section on experiencing sexual harassment by another chef feels, at first, like a powerful confessional. But the confessional only goes so far. Our author rationalizes her own decision not to speak up, not to warn Maggie, decisions which are perhaps understandable in the moment, but never reflects on how those choices perpetuate the harm.

On its face, Tart is a good book that suffers from overzealous PR. Comparisons to Kitchen Confidential, though rampant in coverage, feel unfounded. It’s more Chelsea Handler than Anthony Bourdain, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But while authors aren’t responsible for the PR machine, what does it mean that a book framed as a timely status quo upsetter is actually very much reaffirming the status quo? In an interview with Cosmopolitan, @SluttyCheff describes anonymity as “a cloak of power,” but to what end?

If I had just fallen out of a coconut tree, if I hadn’t read the debut essay or many of the columns or the fawning coverage of the book release, I might have had an easier time enjoying Tart for its considerable strengths. At one point, I put the book down and messaged Maddie, my kitchen collaborator and dear friend, I need to buy a bike. There’s clearly a reason so many young women in Victoria Park can’t put it down, and for a Londoner author, what a feat in itself. But unfortunately, I exist in the context of all in which I live … AND what came before me. I can’t forget the debut essay and thus I can’t overlook Tart’s complicity in the very culture @SluttyCheff set out to disrupt. Just as chefs might not make the best critics, I worry chefs might not be the best placed to write about the toxicity of restaurant kitchens.

In 2017, Bourdain wrote that, “To the extent which my work in Kitchen Confidential celebrated or prolonged a culture that allowed the kind of grotesque behaviors we’re hearing about all too frequently is something I think about daily, with real remorse.” His death came at a time of great introspection, a period which I always imagine was just the beginning for a man seriously capable of grappling. The premier of the final season of Parts Unknown, the only episode completed before his untimely death, ends with a ruminative monologue. Why do I have the microphone? He asks us, How do I use it properly?

I have high hopes for @SluttyCheff, whose talent is obvious to me. I just hope that the virality of it all doesn’t prevent critical engagement with her work; it’s the only way for a writer to grow. 🫒