Please Don’t Kick Me Out of Your Restaurant

As a kid, my dream was to be Don Merrill. I knew very little about him, other than that he wore a white bucket hat and a long red scarf, watched TV from a folding chair while holding a notebook, and had a job at TV Guide called “television critic.” 

The reason I knew so little about him was that Don Merrill didn’t exist. The line drawing of him was a fiction. “Don Merrill” was a pseudonym TV Guide writers used so that they didn’t get beaten up by people in the entertainment industry.

Criticism appealed to me largely because it meant getting paid to do what I already did: watching TV. I’d soon learn there were critic jobs for all the things I loved: theater, music, movies, books, and, best of all, restaurants. Critics got to be pop professors, synthesizing their analysis with a depth of historical knowledge and a breadth of information about current trends. They go to snark like Waldorf and Statler and gush like Roger Ebert after seeing Hoop Dreams. So when Time magazine asked me to be their movie critic a couple of decades ago, I got excited. Then I called my agent, who told me that under no circumstances could I take that job. Unless I wanted to cease having friends.

Hating critics is not new. Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play, Waiting for Godot, has an exchange that often requires more than a minute to wait for laughs:

Estragon: Let's abuse each other.
Vladimir: Moron!
Estragon: Vermin!
Vladimir: Abortion!
Estragon: Morpion!
Vladimir: Sewer-rat!
Estragon: Curate!
Vladimir: Cretin!
Estragon: Critic!

But there used to at least be an upside to being a critic. Once, Craig Claiborne, Ruth Reichl, Jeffrey Steingarten, and Jonathan Gold were respected. Now, critics are not only anonymously aggregated into one Rotten Tomato number but democratized into such stupidity that most Yelp reviews are versions of calls to Domino’s complaining about how long it took to get their food. 

We need to save critics before they’re extinct.

Thomas Keller recently spotted San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan at his Napa restaurant, The French Laundry. She had reserved a table for four under the pseudonym “Margaret” and was hiding behind giant sunglasses. I don’t know in what Nancy Meyers movie that disguise works, but Keller has been spotting critics before internet browsers, when you had to score physical photos of critics’ faces to thumbtack to the kitchen wall. So Keller recognized her right away. 

This is the part of the story where Fegan’s table gets extra courses. So many in fact—and I tell you from several personal experiences—that some members of her party might vomit afterwards. 

This is not what happened.

Instead, after Fegan’s table was served an opening course of truffle vichyssoise, a general manager came by and escorted her to a bench in the courtyard. Keller joined her and told her that he would not be serving her—or her three friends—dinner. He asked them to leave.

Fegan told him she was not planning to review the restaurant, and that her restaurant-owning family had brought her to the French Laundry, upon her request, as a college graduation present back when she was a server in New York City. He relented, gave Fegan and her friends a tour of the restaurant, served her table the rest of the prix fixe menu plus all those extra courses, and refunded the entire cost of the meal they had prepaid through Tock. Fegan, respecting the journalistic ethics of the San Francisco Chronicle, ran the price of the meal—$1,831.75—as a tip on her credit card. 

I love Thomas Keller. In an issue of Time magazine that not a lot of people saw since it came out two days before 9/11—I named him America’s Best Chef as part of a series called “America’s Best.” I’ve had long conversations with him that were deeply thoughtful. It doesn’t surprise me that he would have a 30-minute conversation with a critic in the middle of dinner service.

Like just about everyone else I’ve met who creates things, Keller isn’t crazy about critics. Novelist Richard Ford expressed his reaction to Alice Hoffman’s New York Times review by mailing her a copy of one of her books that he shot bullets through. What I usually hear from artists is some version of “those who cannot do, teach; those who cannot teach, teach gym; and those who cannot teach gym are critics.” Keller was a consultant for the movie Ratatouille, and the critic in the film is given a name that even George Lucas would think isn’t subtle enough: Anton Ego. 

Voiced by Peter O’Toole and drawn to look like whatever the Trump administration thinks Harvard professors look like right before they die, Ego had given a bad review to the previous chef at Gusteau’s who then died “presumably, of a broken heart,” as the narrator puts it. As Keller told Fegan in the courtyard, his friend Michel Richard, whose great food I’d had in Washington D.C., got an awful New York Times review which Keller said led to Richard’s death two years later. 

But pure loathing is not what Ratatouille, or Keller, think about criticism. At least not quality criticism. Ratatouille ends with Ego not only giving the rat-helmed restaurant a great review but also giving criticism itself a great review. 

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.

I cook nearly every night. Chefs such as Grant Achatz and Ludo Lefebvre had let me “cook” in their kitchens with them so I could learn what they do, which is nothing like what I do. Nevertheless, when I serve dinner to my family, I’m frustrated at every little thing that went wrong and lash out if they dare mention any of them. 

If I didn’t hate being hated, I would love to be a critic. Because I am a fan of chefs. And just as when I see a Charlie Kaufman movie, read a Thomas Pynchon novel, or see a Caryl Churchill play, I want to read someone who can explain all the connections, allusions and big ideas, I’d love to do that with Dave Beran’s meal at Seline. 

The critic isn’t just telling us where to eat and what to order (though that matters). A critic isn’t a truth-telling coach pushing a chef to do better. A critic is the articulate, experienced dinner companion. A critic is telling you that food is worthy of thinking about. When we stop having them around, we’ll stop being diners and just be consumers. 

I’m glad Keller didn’t kick Fegan out. And I’m glad she wrote about it. Now, if you would like to proffer criticism of this article, email [email protected]. I won’t drag you to a courtyard—I’ll just cry about it in my pantry like a normal person.