The new new restaurant criticism
The new new restaurant criticism
Pete Wells hates tech but Keith Lee sure doesn’t!
In late August, TikTok-famous restaurant reviewer Keith Lee visited Washington, D.C. How do I know about this from 3,000 miles across the country in San Francisco? Because when Keith Lee visits a city, everyone talks about it. He’s famous for hyping small businesses to his 16 million followers, sending customers — and sometimes a good amount of his own cash — their way. It’s the kind of attention that can make or break a restaurant, and in Lee’s case, it seems to be doled out thoughtfully.
Lee is a prime example of the way restaurant criticism has evolved in the age of TikTok, where professional journalists are replaced by influencers that offer their own brand of real-world criticism1. These reviews can be just as helpful (and hurtful) as the pro journalist variety — or maybe more.
In D.C., Lee reportedly visited 12 restaurants on the clock, but decided to share review videos from just half of them. Eater D.C. said he posted a montage of unnamed restaurants “allegedly violating various health codes,” but said he wouldn’t review or name them.
It was almost the same story in the Bay Area in January; Lee cut that trip short “citing lackluster food, an allergic reaction and general shock and dismay at the living conditions he found in the Bay,” per a KQED news report. A few months prior, Lee complained that restaurants in Atlanta tried to give him special treatment to sweeten their own social media optics.
In May, he took on Chipotle, casually scoring the chain a 2.5 out of 10 thanks in part to small portion sizes. The food does “not hit the same” as it once did, he said. The sentiment went viral, snowballing into Chipotle’s then-CEO Brian Niccol appearing on national television to ask customers to stop filming the chain’s employees inside its stores. It was a lot! But so it goes when the critic is arguably more recognizable and popular than the restaurants they review.
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Restaurant criticism has obviously changed from the outwardly glam days of hushed visits and elaborate disguises in an effort to dine undercover2. Legendary Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, who passed away in 2018, dropped his anonymity guise almost a decade ago. “I have become adept at pretending not to notice that a restaurant staff is pretending not to notice me noticing them noticing me,” he wrote at the time.
The job of any reviewer or critic is to provide an honest report and informed opinion about a dining experience, but plenty of modern realities — like the internet and social media — have made it nearly impossible to do from a position of secrecy. So why not lean in?
I asked my friend Hanna Raskin about this. She’s editor and publisher of The Food Section and has worked as a restaurant critic in a handful of U.S. cities. As Lee and Gold expressed, she confirmed a good critic can easily tell when their experience differs from a neighboring table’s. But unlike others, Raskin still doesn’t publish her photo. It can read as a request for special treatment, she said, which is at odds with the purpose of the job. And unlike a lot of critics, she said, she’s a fan of TikTok reviews and Yelp write-ups3.
“I have no quarrel with anyone thinking seriously about what restaurants serve and putting their impressions into words or recording them on video,” she told me. “That said, there’s a difference between production and consumption: I fully support art classes in grade school, but I’m not going to hang a random third-grader’s watercolor on my wall. For diners who care, critics who bring ethics and experience to the practice still matter most.”
New York Times critic Pete Wells, one of the most visible critics in the country, announced in July that he’d step down after 12 years on the job, citing, in part, some serious health issues. (Another occupational hazard that’s clearly a harsh reality of reviewing restaurants.) In his last column as the paper’s influential restaurant critic, Wells laments “a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants.” He attributes many of those changes to technology, and manages to throw all the usual punches: touch-screen ordering, QR code menus, online reservations, the demise of restaurant phone lines, bots, transactions, delivery apps, and ghost kitchens.
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It’s easy enough to take a side on this particular restaurant-technology debate, but it’s impossible to deny that evolving technology has changed the way many of us, including those who do it for a living, think about, learn about, hear about, and interact with local restaurants.
To quote a recent edition of Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day newsletter that paraphrased someone else (they were talking about music criticism, but it’s relevant):
“When all the critics lost their jobs, it didn’t kill criticism, it just left a vacuum that was filled in by some folks that probably weren’t meant to be the only critics left and now we have to fight about their opinions all the time.”
There’s a journalist vs. influencer debate here that I am absolutely not wading into in this newsletter; let’s just say that *no one* can argue against the power of 16 million followers.
Ruth Reichl’s 2005 memoir about this phenomenon, Garlic and Sapphires, is a forever favorite!
Raskin wrote a fun how-to-write-great-Yelp-reviews-book a decade ago.