The Decibel - Everybody’s a food critic. Is anybody good at it?

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

At all but a handful of publications, restaurant critics are a relic of bygone days. In their place, the food influencer has risen up in popularity. Seen mostly on platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok, influencers take their audience along for the ride at all sorts of restaurants, from high-end to casual dining… but unlike old school critics, they don’t necessarily adhere to standards like paying for their meal or remaining anonymous, which helped critics paint a full – and sometimes critical – picture of an establishment. Dakshana Bascaramurty is the Globe’s food culture reporter. She’s on the show to talk about how food influencers are changing the attention economy for restaurants and how good they are at helping us decide where to go for dinner.  Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So right now we are sitting in a car, in Michal's car, in a parking lot in downtown Toronto. We've just picked up pizza from Afro's. And in order to get kind of the full experience that Keith Lee has already established, we're going to eat this pizza in the car right here. Last week, the Decibel team decided to try being food critics. We were inspired by Keith Lee, an influencer with over 16 million followers on TikTok. He records himself eating food in the car and gives it a rating. It's a really good piece in my opinion. It's sweet, it's salty, it got hot honey on it. It got the jalapeno. That meat is fresh. The sauce is real good. This is my first time

in a nine. Nine out of ten. That's from his review of a Toronto takeout spot, Afro's Pizza. So we also went to Afro's, talked to one of the owners, and learned that Keith Lee's review changed everything for the business. What he did is he kind of like quadrupled the business that we were already doing. Yeah, so we went from like doing like maybe like $20,000, $30,000 a month to like $80,000 a month. So of course, we wanted to try this pizza ourselves. That's actually quite heavy. It's got a bit of weight to it, yes. Oh man, that looks so good. And how do you feel eating in a car?

A little self-conscious, to be honest. Okay, so this is the mushroom pizza. So this is, it's a white pizza, so like cheese and sauce, mushrooms. Smells really good. Okay, let's try this. Mmm, very garlicky, but that's a good thing. But this is very nice. It's a this. Hmm. Very garlicky, but that's a good thing. But this is very nice. It's a little bit different.

Our producer, Michal, tried a meat pizza. This looks like it's the Davis Jr. pizza. They call it an old-time classic with a kick. And this crust, I should also say, that's got to be like two inches thick. Okay, let's try it. The dough's got some real bite to it. That is a toothsome dough. And our producer, Allie, tried the mac and cheese.

It has like a coated, hardened shell of cheese baked over top of it. It has like, I don't know what it's called, but it's like the kind of mac and cheese noodles where they're twirly. They're swirly twirlies. They're so cute. Okay, so maybe we're not about to become food influencers, but social media is filled with them. And some, like Keith Lee, have the power to change a restaurant's future. Dakshana Bhaskaramurthy is The Globe's food culture reporter. She'll tell us how food influencers are replacing traditional critics, how they're changing the kind of restaurants that get attention, and how good they are at helping us decide where to go for dinner.

I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Dakshana, it's so great to have you back on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. So let's just go through some history here. I guess, where did modern food critics in this part of the world, where did that kind of start? A lot of people credit Craig Claiborne at the New York Times for inventing what the 20th century restaurant critic looked like, the guidelines they followed. He was sort of running the food coverage at the New York Times. And in early 1960s, he started doing restaurant reviews. He created the star system for awarding stars for restaurants that he liked.

And it didn't take long for newspapers all over the Western world to follow suit and install their own restaurant critics who were going to give readers a detailed account of what a restaurant was like and just overall, you know, was this a place that you should dine at or not? At this point now, though, right, we don't really see many full-time critics at papers anymore. So I guess when did that kind of die out? I think in the last 15 years or so, we've seen a dramatic decline in restaurant critics, full-time restaurant critics at newspapers, at magazines. And that has coincided with just the decline of print media, which had been happening for a while before then anyway. For decades, we had a full-time critic.

Our last full-time critic was Chris Nuttall-Smith, who was on staff and ended his run in 2016. And since then, we've had some freelancers who have been writing restaurant reviews, but they haven't been a regular feature of the newspaper in a couple of years now. There are still a few markets, like New York. The New York Times still has staff critics. The New Yorker Magazine still has a staff critic, but they've become deeply endangered species otherwise. Yeah. And we will talk about kind of the transition of what's filled that space. But to go back to kind of the traditional restaurant critic, how influential would they actually be? The reviews that they're writing, could they actually, you know, like make or break a restaurant? They absolutely could make or break a restaurant.

I think that the old school critic was a figure who was feared in a lot of cities, because a lot of them develop these huge readerships, and people would make decisions on where to go based on what they read there. And if you're a small restaurant, completely self-funded, you're opening up shop and you've invested so much money, if you have a bad review, that could just tank your business. You might not survive the year because of that. And similarly, if you're struggling,

a great review could make the difference between closing your doors and maybe enjoying decades of fruitful business. And it's interesting because kind of one of the key parts of this kind of restaurant critic's job would be to remain anonymous when they went into a restaurant, right? They would pay for their own meal. They'd try not to draw attention to themselves. Why was that so important? It was so important to be anonymous because the restaurant critic wanted, you know, the average Joe diner to have the same experience that they had when going to eat at this restaurant. So it became a sort of elaborate game in certain cities for restaurant critics to, you know, sometimes don disguises when they were going in to eat. You know, they would often book under a fake name or if they had dining companions joining them, they would have them make the reservation.

And the idea is, you know, they didn't want to be recognized and have special treatment. They didn't want to get this experience that wouldn't be accessible to the average diner. So that's why it was so important for them to stay anonymous, stay unknown. Because I guess the idea is that if a restaurant knew this is the New York Times food critic, they would give them a very different experience then. Absolutely. Some restaurants will have photos up of restaurant critics, you know, behind the counter. So front of house staff can ID like a VIP who's just walked

in, alert the kitchen and make sure that, you know, maybe there's like an extra dessert that gets sent out. Maybe there's something, you know, that the chef has been playing with that they want to send out for free for this critic to try. And so it was always like very important for restaurant critics to resist that. I guess one of the kind of self-selecting parts of this, though, is that usually the restaurants that would get reviewed, these are pretty high end places, right? What are the limitations of that? Sure. I think this is a very persistent criticism of traditional restaurant coverage over the last many decades where critics would be not exclusively, but very consistently looking at fine dining establishments. And, you know, sometimes these would be places with $200 or more tasting menus. These are places that are just not widely accessible to the general population. And so, you know, I think it was a very valid criticism that restaurant reviews could be quite elitist.

And also, you know, there was another, another, I think, very fair criticism that they weren't very inclusive in terms of the different cuisines that were explored. A lot of times, there would be like skewing towards French food, Italian food, maybe like a high-end Japanese bistro, but a lot of regional cuisines from around the world that were very popular or reflective of different cities' populations were just shut out from these reviews. But isn't, I guess, one of the benefits, though, of having a restaurant critic that does this? I mean, I guess they're good at what they do and they have knowledge based in what they do. This is something that I talked to Pete Wells about.

He was a New York Times' restaurant critic for 12 years and he's recently moved on from that role. And, you know, he kind of pushed back on this accusation that's leveled at critics a lot that they are snobby or elitist and even the way that they write is not very accessible to a lot of readers. And he was saying, you know, I'm not an expert, and I'm not purporting to be an expert on fine dining, or, you know, all of these different regional cuisines. I'm approaching this job like a journalist. And he said he would decide that this was a restaurant that he wanted to

review. And it was his responsibility, if he wanted to do his job correctly, to research that cuisine, to learn about this chef, and where they had come up, where they'd done their training. He would learn about the ingredients, the provenance of those ingredients. He took his job very seriously. And he's saying a lot of critics do. And that authority and knowledge that they bring to their reviews, like that is why people trusted them. We'll be right back. Okay, so we've done kind of a, you know, a brief history of restaurant criticism throughout that time period. Dakshana, when did we start to see the shift away from that kind of traditional criticism?

So in the mid-aughts, we really saw the rise of the internet as this participatory medium. So, you know, you have websites like Yelp taking off where you can look up, you know, virtually any restaurant and you can find a lot of user reviews of that place. And so suddenly there's this other great, very easy to access free source of information about restaurants. Maybe there's a place that you want to check out that is never going to get reviewed in your local newspaper, but you can see what, you know, the last 30 people who dine there thought about it. And this was a forum where nobody was asking you about like how many times you'd gone to the restaurant. If you had any like certain, you know, experience in kitchens or any sort of pedigree, like anybody could go and post there. If you'd eaten at this restaurant once, you could post there.

If you'd eaten at this restaurant zero times, you could post there. If you were offended by the fact that you tried to call and make a reservation and nobody returned your call, you could give them a zero star review if you wanted. So this kind of democratization in a way could have, I guess, positive effects, but also negative effects. Yes. The rise of Yelp and other sites like Chowhound, and now we have Google Review know, Google reviews as a major player, like, it was a double edged sword. It certainly empowered diners, and it also highlighted places that were maybe never going to be covered by traditional critics. Okay, so with platforms like Yelp, you know, anyone in a way could be their own food critic. How and when did that develop into into the kind of social media food

critics that we actually see today now? So on Yelp and Chowhound, some people got really into reviews and they sort of made a name for themselves as sort of influential users. And I feel like you can really see a direct through line from that phenomenon to what we see now, primarily on TikTok and Instagram of food influencers, people who have huge followings, who are posting about restaurants that they've gone to about dishes that they've eaten. And, you know, it's like the point of view of the diner, rather than somebody who's coming from, you know, established food media has a lot of currency right now. Yeah. So for someone who's, I guess, never seen this kind of review,

like what do they typically look like? You definitely notice a lot of reoccurring themes and motifs. Stop scrolling because I'm about to put you on this hidden... Come with me for brunch on the Halifax Waterfront. I need to put you on this spot that my friend Charles took me to. Today we are trying the best hot chicken spot in the GTA. A lot of times it's like, you know, a point of view filming of like actually walking through the door of a restaurant and capturing the vibe of the room is so important. In some cases, it

actually seems a lot more important and the food is sort of secondary. They got it all from a pretty patio, amazing food, a beautiful interior aesthetic, and an insanely cheap patio. This location's got a 4.5 rating on Google. As soon as you enter, you could tell the ambiance is really nice in this place. They are eating lunch at the most retro and aesthetic japanese restaurant in vancouver and so you've got these like bright led lights that are basking the food in the most unflattering glow um and so you're you're sort of seeing quick glances of that and you have to keep in mind that this is you know know, like social media, like reels or TikTok videos where

you have like seconds to capture people's attention and hold it. A lot of these videos can sometimes feel like advertisements for the restaurants rather than any kind of, you know, objective review. So you're watching a video. What kind of, you know, objective review. So you're watching a video, what kind of information are you getting from that, compared to like a traditional food critic writing in a newspaper? So food critics would, you know, have these columns, maybe you're getting 1500 words, and they can go into detail. And there's just like no space for that kind of detail. And a lot of these influencers, their whole thing is authenticity. They are in many ways trying to be the anti newspaper critic. And so they're trying to talk to you about what you would care about. So a lot

of times prices are highlighted a lot in these videos and, you know, whether or not this place would be good for a date night is very commonly brought up in these videos. And there's definitely like this air of positivity that kind of blankets a lot of them. You don't really see a lot of this content that's going to say, the service here was horrible. This dish was inedible. This steak was overcooked. It's all very, very positive for the most part. Can you tell me more about that? Like this air of positivity that you're talking about? Why do we see that? You know, a lot of people that I spoke to for this story drew a line between this trend towards positivity in these reviews and, you know, what the world went through during the COVID lockdown of 2020, you know, going into 2021. A lot of restaurants

suffered immensely. A lot of restaurants went out of business. And in a lot of cities, there was this understanding that these were businesses that we needed to support. Maybe when they were coming, when they were opening up their doors again, things would be a little touch and go, but we wanted these businesses to thrive. So being negative about them, I think sort of became frowned upon. It was sort of seen as like below the belt to highlight restaurants that you hated or weren't worth going to. I do think that we may have gone to the point of overcorrection though, where I think looking at a lot of influencer videos and what some would call reviews, it's hard to really tell what is good and what isn't because they're so full of

superlatives. And the emphasis is sometimes put so much more on the space and the vibe rather than what is actually being served in front of you. I guess I wonder about this then, Daksana. Where is the line then between being a food critic and then just pure publicity? If most of these reviews are positive, doesn't it kind of stray into the latter? It's really messy. And there are a lot of content creators who call themselves critics, and maybe will bring some of that same rigor, that framework that the old school critic applied to their work. So you know, they're going to pay for their own food, they're going to try and maintain anonymity, it's obviously a lot harder to do if

you're like filming everything when you're in a restaurant and have some sort of like rating system. But the thing that I have noticed is a lot of food content creators, as their followings grow, even if they started out with, you know with that goal of paying their own way and not having restaurants influence any of their content, eventually when they get a big enough following, restaurants, you see their content that sort of fits a certain framework, and then suddenly their feed is interrupted with, like, an ad for some fast food chain. And so it's this strange gray zone, I think, where it's up to you as the audience to kind of decide for yourself if this is somebody whose recommendation you trust. And they're not always disclosing it either. If they have had a meal compensated, you just don't know.

I do want to ask you about one influencer in particular, though, Keith Lee. He's the one who eats the food in his car, who inspired us to do the same when we did our review. Dakshana, what do people find appealing about his reviews specifically? Keith Lee is such an interesting example of what this kind of transition that we're going through right now could look like. He's sort of inhabiting that space between the old school critic and the modern food content creator. So, you know, when we talk about authenticity, like Keith Lee is, I think the example that people would turn to the most because he is doing the majority of reviews in his car, you know, he's got the camera in selfie mode.

He's got a styrofoam container of takeout in his lap. The aesthetics are so different from what, you know, food media had been for the longest time. There are no beauty shots of these sandwiches that he's eating. I heard about this place a lot. So I'm assuming this is a staple in Houston. We're gonna start with the waffle fries and cheese sauce first. I'm not a huge fan of the cheese sauce. I'm gonna try the waffle fry by themselves. That's a, that's a, I can't even say it. That's a good fry.

A damn good fry. It's just a guy eating in his car. Yeah, it's exactly what it is. It's a guy in his car. And you know what? A lot of us are a guy eating in our car. And so, you know, if we're talking about putting yourself in the shoes of your audience, you know, something that the old school critics were always striving for, Keith Lee is doing that. And so, you know, he holds on to some of

those guidelines that the old school critics followed, where he really wants to maintain his anonymity. He's very recognizable. You know, he's got like millions of followers. And so what he'll do is he'll send a relative into a restaurant to pick up the takeout order. And he insists that he pays for everything himself. And he'll give these very blunt reviews, sometimes negative about what he's eaten. But one thing that is worth pointing out that is very consistent with a lot of these modern content creators is he chooses where to go a lot of times based on what his audience is asking for, or even what the restaurants themselves are asking for.

He'll say, I'm going to Atlanta, or I'm going to Jacksonville, like, where should I eat? And then restaurants, some of whom are really struggling, will say, please come and eat here. I make the best, you know, X, Y, or Z in the city. And yeah, the Keith Lee effect, like a lot of businesses have said that they were getting ready to close their doors. They didn't said that they were getting ready to close their doors. They didn't think that they would survive many more months. And then after Keith Lee came and anointed them worthy of visiting, business completely turned around. Basically, they were rescued. Wow. So Dakshana, just lastly, before I let you go, I got to know, you're the food

culture reporter. How do you decide where you're going to go for dinner? So I spend a lot of time on social media. So I am finding out about a lot of restaurants through seeing posts. But I also have a lot of friends who are very into food. And I like to hear their experiences of where they went and what they ate and what they enjoyed eating. But I will say that one thing that I find very frustrating about my generation, so I'm an elder millennial, is we over-research everything. And sometimes you just have to, you know, walk into a place off the street and give it a shot. You don't need to see that it has 234 five-star Google reviews. You don't need to, you know, see that like 30 influencers have posted about this dish you need to try. And actually a perfect example is just from this morning. My husband went out

for a walk. He popped into this like Indian fast casual place that had opened up. This is a place that we didn't know anybody had gone there. We had not read anything about it, but he just popped in and he got some snacks, brought them home. And this was like probably the best samosa that I've eaten in the last 15 years and wouldn't have discovered it if he hadn't just sort of stumbled into this spot. So that's a good thing to remember then. Yeah. Dakshana, this was so interesting. Thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show.

Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.