Best Food Writing 2010 Read online

  Jeffrey Buben, owner of Bistro Bis and Vidalia, knows for certain that some restaurateurs try to outsmart the Zagat system. He’s one of them (though without the promise of any kitchen bribe). In the past, he’s placed little promotional tents on the tables or slipped cards into the checks, asking diners to vote in the next Zagat survey. His goal is to land a Top 5 ranking in Zagat’s food category. He doesn’t apologize for it, either. “That’s what grass-roots PR is all about,” Buben says. He leaves it up to the Zagat data-crunchers to weed out the questionable ballots, which they claim they can do.

  Makoto has accomplished exactly what Buben was aiming for. The restaurant opened either in 1992 or 1993 (neither Makoto manager Michiko Lecuyer nor anyone at the restaurant could remember), and for its first few years, it never even appeared in the Zagat guide. But then in 1997, it suddenly scored 28 out of 30 points for food, tying it for second place with L’Auberge Chez Francois in the entire D.C. market. Makoto has never slipped lower than third place since then, a run of more than 12 years.

  Lecuyer credits the kitchen for Makoto’s long ride atop the charts. The chefs select only the freshest seasonal ingredients, from fish to vegetables, no matter what the price, she says. The cooks also prepare the omakase plates with a nod to authenticity. “We serve the food we want to eat,” Lecuyer says, “the way we want to eat it.... Our customers get it and understand it. That’s why we’ve been highly listed.”

  Now, if there’s one question you don’t want to ask the owner or manager of an elegant Japanese restaurant like Makoto, it’s this: Do you beg or cheat for Zagat votes?

  “We don’t do that,” Lecuyer says, noting that servers aren’t allowed to talk to customers. “We don’t know who is doing the survey and is not doing the survey. We don’t know.”

  SUCH IGNORANCE MAY BE a blessing to Makoto, but it’s a bane for diners who want to know how legitimate Zagat’s ratings are. Team Zagat in New York won’t answer any questions about its survey methodology, and Tim and Nina Zagat turned down my interview request. It’s more of the same stonewalling that has worked for 30 years for the Zagats and their guides, which now cover subjects ranging from dining to golf in more than 100 countries. The company’s attitude forces you to make a snap decision: You either trust it or you lump it.

  A lot of people are opting for the latter. According to a New York Post article from earlier this month, not only are Zagat sales “down dramatically,” but the company moved too slowly online, “allowing Yelp and others to dominate the market.” Zagat, the paper wrote, laid off about 16 people in May. The founders themselves seemed to see the writing on the wall a year earlier: The Zagats tried to sell their company for a reported $200 million last year but couldn’t find any buyers in that price range and pulled Zagat off the auction block.

  It’s easy to see why people choose Yelp, Chowhound, Urban Spoon, and OpenTable over Zagat, both the guide and the online site. The obsolete-before-you-buy-it Zagat book is $14.95 a shot, and Zagat.com charges nearly $25 a year to access its complete site, including those ratings that can be seriously outdated. Plus, the mere act of creating an account with Zagat.com requires that you provide the kind of personal information—mailing address, telephone, birth year—that other sites have decided to forgo.

  By contrast, Yelp, Chowhound, Urban Spoon, and other sites are free, and most already have established communities where members interact with each other on particular topics and restaurants. Even better for diners looking for recommendations on Yelp or OpenTable, they can see exactly how many people have commented on a particular restaurant—and how those reviews have been averaged into an overall rating. Even the minimal transparency on these sites makes Zagat seem like Stalinist Russia.

  “Zagat is not a primary source [for information] anymore,” says Dean Gold, the chef and owner of Dino in Cleveland Park, which scores a decent 21 rating for food from Zagat. Adds Gold, a college-trained statistician: “Zagat, of all the major sources, probably has the lowest levels of reliability” because of its self-selected survey base, which provides little to no information on the people who actually cast ballots.

  At this point, OpenTable may be the most reliable of the sites that aggregate restaurant ratings. Site administrators send review surveys only to those diners who have honored their OpenTable reservation, and the diners have approximately 30 days to fill out the forms. This process guarantees two things, says Ann Shepherd, vice president of marketing for OpenTable: 1) that every review is actually based on a meal eaten at the restaurant; 2) that the meal was eaten recently, while the memory of it is still fresh.

  Those are two promises that you will never hear from Zagat, a guide that looks destined to follow so many other print publications into oblivion.

  ZAG AT’S 2010 MAKOTO BLURB shows why the guides are “refrigerator-magnet poetry,” “dubious,” good only for a “lonely traveler... searching for a good place to sup before masturbating himself to sleep.”

  Grade Creepiness: As first pointed out in SmartMoney magazine in 2007, Zagat food grades have spiked dramatically over the years for restaurants in the New York guide. Same goes for the D.C. area: In the 1992 guide, only 13 restaurants earned grades of 25 points or higher (out of a possible 30). In 2010, more than 60 restaurants topped the 25-point mark. Even more startling, 72 percent of D.C. restaurants with actual ratings in the latest guide earned a grade of 20 or higher, which means that nearly three-quarters of our eateries are “very good” or better. No one sucks here anymore.

  The Method, Man: Readers have no idea how many votes are required before the results are considered statistically relevant to merit a Zagat grade (Zagat’s Barbalato told me that Makoto edged Inn at Little Washington, 28.9024 to 28.8495, but would not say how many votes were cast). What’s more, they have no idea if the grade represents the votes of the restaurateur’s spouse and 100 close friends or a statistically sound sample of D.C. area diners. All they know is this: The voters are self-selected, which is a pool almost guaranteed to skew results. Readers don’t even know if voters actually ate at the restaurants in question. OpenTable, by contrast, posts reviews only from diners who have honored their online reservation.

  Cut-and-Paste Prose: Zagat editors take a ransom-note approach to writing descriptions of the restaurants in their guides. Compare that to consumer-oriented sites, such as Yelp or Don-Rockwell, where amateur critics can relate their entire dining ex-per iences without fear that an editor will place a dis about “uncomfortable seating” right next to some yahoo’s Pollyanna piffle about a “wonderful experience.” Zagat is refrigerator-magnet poetry at a time when people want the Library of Congress at their fingertips.

  You’ve Been Duped: For those who purchased the 2010 edition of the Washington, D.C./Baltimore Zagat guide, the Makoto entry might seem familiar. For good reason. It’s the exact same entry as last year’s. The exact same awkwardly phrased copy. The exact same dubious grades. And yet you’d be hard-pressed to learn from the introduction that the 2010 guide is merely an update. Here’s the truth: The even-year Zagat guides are based on the surveys from the previous year. Do you know how much a restaurant can change in two years, let alone two months? Would you trust a review from a year ago on Yelp?

  Solitary Confinement: Zagat bases your estimated check on a single dinner and drink, plus tip, which is rather symbolic. Social network sites want to create a community around a common interest in food, which explains not only Myspace Local’s recent move into online restaurant reviews but also local restaurateurs’ embrace of Facebook and its ability to connect supporters. Zagat, by contrast, still conjures up images of the lonely traveler, that burgundy guide tucked into his back pocket, searching for a good place to sup before masturbating himself to sleep.

  Caught in a Binder: Like newspapers and magazines, Zagat is dependent on print, where presumably the company still earns most of its revenues, despite the fact that its most timely and user-friendly information (menus, maps, and recent reviews) is found online. Zag
at withholds survey ratings from its free Web pages in hopes that you’ll plunk down $24.95 a year to find out what the voting public, in whatever numbers, thought of places like Makoto over a year ago. It’s a hopeless online business plan, but it’s probably a better deal than the $14.95 you pay for the actual paperback guide.

  EL BULLI GETS BESTED

  By Carla Capalbo From zesterdaily.com

  What does the title World’s Best Restaurant really mean? Capalbo, one of several seasoned journalists on the staff of this intriguing new food news site, roots out the back story on the changing of the guard.

  When superstar chef Ferran Adria’s restaurant, El Bulli, was dethroned after four years at the top of the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants classification on April 26 in London, the invited audience of professional foodies gasped. The annual award is based on the votes of an 806-strong international jury of food critics, chefs, restaurateurs and food enthusiasts called the Academy. This year the prize-giving was held in the magnificent medieval Guildhall in the city’s historic center.

  The upset was caused by a spare 42-seat restaurant in a warehouse on the docks of Copenhagen run by Rene Redzepi, a 32-year-old chef whose idea of a spring salad includes beech leaves, axel berry shoots, pine shoots and unripe white strawberries in a dressing made from grill-charred cucumber skins.

  The cuisine at Redzepi’s Noma focuses on a continuously researched range of Scandinavian foods. “As soon as they named Ferran as No. 2 in the countdown, I knew the winner had to be Noma,” said Alessandro Porcelli, a longtime collaborator with Redzepi on the concept of Nordic cuisine.

  “That sends a really strong message that high gastronomy is going in a new direction, toward place-specific, seasonal ingredients, including wild and forgotten ones, cooked in more natural yet highly creative ways.”

  “This will be a great inspiration for cooks all over the world to look for interesting ingredients in their own backyards and use them in new ways. It’s no longer all about technique and technology,” Porcelli added.

  THE NEWS OF NOMA’S VICTORY spread like wildfire via the Internet, Twitter and the traditional press. Within 24 hours, the restaurant received a staggering 140,000 requests for dining reservations, more than enough to fill the 45-seater at lunch and dinner for six years. As Redzepi took the stage to get his award, he and four of his sous chefs donned white T-shirts with a photograph of a smiling black man printed on them. “This is a team prize, the result of seven years of working together,” Redzepi said. “It’s a testament to what you can do working with people you love, with whom you can develop yourself,” he added, before explaining the T-shirts pictured their dishwasher, Ali, who had been refused a 24-hour visa to be at the award show.

  Adria, who is closing El Bulli at the end of next year, gave an emotional speech as he accepted Restaurant Magazine’s prize for Chef of the Decade. “El Bulli will never be a restaurant again, so it won’t be able to get a prize as one again,” he said, as the audience rose to its feet to applaud him. “But this prize is in my heart, and my career is linked to this prize.”

  NOW IN ITS NINTH EDITION, the World’s 50 Best classification has been steadily gaining importance. “For the most ambitious chefs, this list has become the key to who’s who in the food world,” says chef-patron Davide Scabin, of Combal.Zero in Turin, listed at number 35, up seven places from 2009. “It now matters more for us to be in the 50 Best than to acquire other Michelin stars. There’s also an element of national team competition: This year, five Italian restaurants are in the top 50, and that’s exciting. It’s a stimulus to keep improving.” The Americans have eight in the 2010 top 50, the French six, the Spanish five, the British three. The remaining restaurants come from countries that include Finland, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Sweden, Singapore, Australia and South Africa. The highest scorer for the U.S., and receiver of the special Acqua Panna Best Restaurant in North America award, is Alinea, at number 7, up three places from last year. Its brilliant chef, Grant Achatz, was visibly moved at the success and warm reception he received. Other high-flying Americans present included Thomas Keller for Per Se (at number 10) and the French Laundry (32), David Chang, for Momofuku Ssam Bar (26), and Daniel Boulud, for Daniel (8). Boulud also hosted the chef’s lunch the next day at his elegant, soon-to-be-opened, Bar Boulud in Knightsbridge.

  The Michelin system, with its legions of faceless inspectors and penchant for the pompous and the prissy, is not always in tune with the direction today’s most innovative restaurants are taking. Its rating structure is often too cumbersome and its criteria too rigid to follow the thrust of the ground breakers. Le Chateaubriand, an unstuffy 1930s bistro in an outer arrondissement in Paris, is a case in point.

  Chef Inaki Aizpitarte is selftaught and hugely inventive. His food is imaginative, improvisational, and instinctive—adjectives more often used for a jazz musician than a cook. From his tiny, chaotic kitchen he prepares just one multi-course meal a day, take it or leave it. He has no Michelin stars, but came in 11th in the World’s 50 Best this year—after jumping in at number 40 in 2009.

  It’s not just for the chefs’ egos that the listing matters; the World’s 50 Best is proving a winner in terms of business, too. “Many of our new customers come thanks to the list, and they’re arriving from all over the world,” said chef Yoshihiro Narisawa, whose Tokyo restaurant Les Créations de Narisawa was awarded Best Restaurant in Asia for the second consecutive year.

  If most reactions to the new order have been positive, the World’s 50 Best has its detractors. Comments on the Le Figaro website and in French blogs suggest some French diners just can’t accept a non-Michelin, non-French-starring list, especially one that comes out of Britain. Despite being classified in the 50 Best, several of France’s senior chefs, including Pierre Gagnaire, Joel Robuchon and Alain Ducasse, were noticeably absent from the awards ceremony. Grunts and jeers were also heard from some in Italy and other Old World countries whose traditional food is often considered a sacred—and untouchable—part of their cultural heritage.

  Chang expressed another point of view: “I think Noma’s win shows that the days are over when a chef’s image will be constructed around a single person’s ego, when it was all about me, me, me, me! Redzepi’s acceptance speech proves you need to keep your team together to create a top restaurant. And that’s a great lesson.”

  ANONYMOUS ONLINE REVIEWS AFFECTING TWIN CITIES EATERIES

  By Rachel Hutton From City Pages

  Whom should you trust when picking a restaurant—a professional dining critic, or a tip from a “real” diner on an online review site? City Pages food editor Hutton examines the impact of such amateur reviews on her local Minneapolis/St. Paul restaurants.

  They gripe about their server tacking the gratuity onto their bill, without realizing that the sum was actually the valet parking charge. They fault the pulled pork for being “too shredded,” when, by definition, that’s exactly what pulled pork is. They complain that the appetizer is too small—“a ¾-inch diameter of food on a big plate, about ¼ of what I would expect”—not recognizing the absurdity of such a large portion of foie gras. They air their criticisms to everyone on the internet, but rarely share them directly with the chef. These are the anonymous commenters on local restaurant review sites, message boards, and blogs: a source of both delight and ire to the local restaurant community.

  Restaurants have long been subjected to professional critics—I dug up a New York Times review published in 1859. But increasingly restaurateurs find themselves being critiqued by anyone with an internet connection. Few other professions face such public scrutiny. You don’t read many blogs that assess the efficiency of a particular computer programmer’s code or the speed at which a certain farmer milks his cows. While service-industry workers certainly deal with their share of public feedback, the skills of hairdressers, tailors, and mechanics are perceived to be a bit more mysterious than those of chefs. How many people cut their own hair, sew their own clothes, or fix
their own cars, compared to those who make their own dinner?

  Thus an inordinate amount of online chatter—on blogs, message boards, and review sites—is devoted to restaurants. When I last checked the review site Yelp, it listed 130 reviews in Minneapolis’s Beauty and Spas category, 225 in Nightlife, 476 in Shopping, and 898 in Restaurants. The commentary is by and large positive, and restaurants for the most part are grateful to have their praises sung further and faster than they would by word-of-mouth. Several restaurateurs I spoke with said they also appreciate critical but respectful online feedback as a tool to help them improve their business.

  But negative anonymous reviews are murkier territory. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, certainly, and relaying one’s experience with sub-par food and service can be a valuable warning to would-be diners. But many restaurateurs say they have received criticism they felt was false, unfair, or malicious—which they had little ability to correct or refute. They were deeply troubled to know that, with a cursory Google search, such messages could reach potential customers for the foreseeable future.

  LENNY RUSSO, CHEF-OWNER of the upscale Midwest-focused eatery Heartland, says that often the inaccuracies he sees in online comments are minor. A person might, for example, describe a meal at Heartland that included rice and pineapple salsa—two foods the restaurant doesn’t serve. “Maybe it was wheat berries or barley, and it was squash that they thought was pineapple,” Russo says. “Hopefully the people reading understand that the writer is ignorant.”

  But he has also seen broad mischaracterizations of his restaurant spread rapidly around cyberspace. He was particularly exasperated by one commenter who complained about Heartland’s small portions: “I think I could have gotten more food walking around the taste testers at Sam’s Club,” she penned. “She didn’t really understand what we were doing,” Russo says.