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Dine

Meet the new food critic

By Laura Reiley
Published April 5, 2007

Laura Reiley: Democracy on the dinner plate

My little brother once razzed me that I became a restaurant critic because it combines my two favorite things: eating and criticizing. Uncharitable, and also untrue.

That's not it at all. I guess I believed what British author William Thackeray once said: "Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them." But more than that, I write about eating because it is among the most democratic of all human activities, the others being too scatological, too maudlin or too ribald to discuss with any regularity in print. We all eat. And over years of meals loved and reviled, we become self-appointed experts. Likes and dislikes are cemented, ideas of good food and drink are honed.

In essence, everyone's a critic. What makes a good food critic, though, is someone who appropriately sets his or her expectations. For me, these expectations were calibrated through years of cooking in restaurants in Connecticut and Virginia, followed by a culinary school program in California, and then a whole lot of eating and, as my brother would point out, criticizing. Dish by dish, bite by bite, I learned what questions to ask, the first of which is always, "What is this restaurant trying to do?"

Put another way, by playing amateur detective, you can tell a lot about a restaurant before you've ever eaten the food. Its prices, its ambience, its location, how the menu is printed, even the restaurant's sign all provide clues.

In years of writing restaurant reviews at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Baltimore Sun, I picked up some of the tricks of a good detective.

If you are not a particularly astute observer, it's easy to walk into an Italian restaurant expecting a huge bowl of linguine with red sauce, only to get little portions of frou-frou raw beef with capers and other doodads. And you get mad. It's easy to be disappointed when you haven't read the signs right. That's not the restaurant's fault.

Once you have determined a restaurant's goals, your next objective is to assess how well it achieves them, and how consistently. From the taco stand to the fancy French place, maintaining standards is an ongoing battle, one rendered more difficult with the intricacies of staffing, sourcing and the changing tastes of the dining public.

As Chris Sherman steps aside as restaurant critic for the St. Petersburg Times, a first look at the Tampa Bay area's culinary scene assures me that it's an exciting time to enter into a local dialogue about dining out. The number of forward-thinking independent restaurants is on the rise, and chain restaurants seem poised to reinvent themselves with a greater focus on health and nutrition.

It's diners' increasing sophistication that makes demands of food purveyors, chefs, restaurateurs and food critics alike. It ups the ante, raising everyone's level of play. And I'm thrilled to be seated at the table.

Laura Reiley can be reached at (727) 892-2293 or lreiley@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 4, 2007, 11:10:48]