There’s been some fuss in the national press and among bloggers about restaurant critics’ anonymity being blown after LA critic Jonathan Gold won the Pulitzer Prize last spring.
Much argument on this. Many people, both critics and non-, feel it’s essential. Mimi Sheraton, former restaurant critic for the New York Times, is strongly in this camp. Some people even think that if critics aren’t anonymous, their meals are free. (That is way not true.)
For us – and that’s a key phrase – anonymity is not necessary. A little background first for those who don’t know us:
Joe’s face and name were known publicly (via the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the St. Louis Football Cardinals) before he began reviewing restaurants for the Post-Dispatch in 1972. There was no way he could have become anonymous. In addition, he ate out a lot and spent much time in bars. Waiters and bartenders are usually good at recognizing faces, and they move around a lot. We’ve been served by the same waiter in as many as six different St. Louis restaurants.
Ann, on the other hand, was just another woman eating out, often alone, when she began reviewing for the now-departed St. Louis DINING in the late ‘80s.
These days, we sometimes find we’re not recognized – and believe us, we can almost always tell. We never identify ourselves as restaurant critics, either locally or when we travel. Even the name on the credit card doesn’t raise flags if we weren’t recognized earlier. (Then there was the waiter who returned with the card and looked curiously at Joe. "Mr. Pollack, the artist?" N.B., Jackson Pollock, the artist, died in 1956.)
In St. Louis one critic (or, in our case, one pair of critics) cannot make or break a restaurant. In New York, the Times reviewer is close to that powerful. Amazing in a city that big, if you think about it. So Mimi Sheraton may be right, in that particular case.
"If being anonymous is so important,
why do I get so many bad meals?"
–Joe Pollack
We may get the best server in the house if we’re recognized, and sometimes we get a change of server partway through the meal. But it’s not hard to tell if other tables in a restaurant are having problems. Craned necks, overheard complaints; it’s not difficult. And our network of spies is pretty good. It includes strangers who come up to us saying, "Are you the Pollacks? Let me tell you what happened to us at Café Ooops."
And food? Well, we may get a larger steak, but we suspect no one in St. Louis has a shelf marked "Critics’ Food" with prime meat instead of choice, picked-an-hour-ago greens and a sign that says "no seasonal vegetable medley." We still get brown lettuce, cold french fries and sour coffee. The soups and sauces have been made, the vegetables prepped, and cakes baked before we showed up. Once, years ago, after an unconscionably long wait, a server confessed to Joe that the chef hadn’t liked what he’d done, trashed the first version and started all over again, but that was a one (or possibly two)-of-a-kind event.
Any kitchen that ‘s seriously interested in impressing the critics can make a study of sloppy habits and resulting complaints and simply avoid repeating them. For us, for instance, they can pick the brown-edged lettuce leaves out of the salad greens and cook something other than the broccoli-squash-carrot vegetable medley, things we have often discussed in clearly negative terms. They don’t do it for us, they don’t seem to do it for other local critics. We say they should do it as a matter of regular practice, which might help business.
And free meals? Let’s get this straight. Our policy is simple:
IF WE DON’T PAY, WE DON’T WRITE.
And a couple of local restaurants were omitted from our last book because they would not let us pay the tab.
The Post-Dispatch insisted that Joe buy all his meals and those of his dining companion, and reimbursed him promptly, though with occasional winces. We have continued that policy. There probably are people out there who accept free meals. We’re suspicious of reviews that always glow, and we try to see whether publications review restaurants that don’t buy ads.
In conclusion, all we can address is how we do things.