If you are a curious person like me, you may have wondered how a restaurant reviewer does their job.
I have heard all kinds of stories about reviewers wearing disguises so as not to be recognized, and in some cases, like the former food critic for the New York Times, Frank Bruni his appearance was a closely guarded secret. Now that he has left that job, he has taken his mask off, and there have been lots of stories about how shocked restaurant owners are to know “that guy” is Frank Bruni.
Bruni recently published this article in the paper that described how he would go about reviewing a restaurant.
One of the things I have wondered is if a critic samples a few dishes in a couple of visits and that’s what goes into a review. They can’t possibly eat everything on the menu, right? Wrong, at least in Bruni’s case.
Bruni was more methodical and sampled absolutely everything on the menu in two or three visits. How? It turns out Bruni had a group of accomplices he would invite to the meals and their job was to work with him and as a group get through everything, and everyone had to share a specific amount of their food with everyone else (if there were four at the table, each person could have a quarter of each portion). Part of what makes the article so fun is the way Bruni talks about the different personality types, who is good at sharing, who isn’t who always wants steak, and so forth.
Even though Bruni “assignsed” dishes to people to ensure completeness, he observes how people started to view the dishes assigned to them as “their” pork, or “their” risotto” when the assignments were typically randomly assigned.
But as a simple point when you have one expert that has to cover a lot of ground, this sort of sampling and getting a team of others to get through it all makes a lot of sense, and it’s very thorough, so the restaurant being reviewed doesn’t have to worry that the reviewer didn’t bother to try their signature appetizer or entree.
Food for thought.
-Ric
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