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Originally Posted by jaytuk  Here are some of my the things that I'm going to put in:
Overall Quality
Food
Service
Price
Any Unique Factors |
Unlike Ed, I don't think you have to be an expert as such to review a restaurant. But with the list you have above, the first 4 can easily be handled by a star or number system, as with the Zagat guides. Then there's a brief descriptive paragraph doing the "unique factors" thing. While the result is valuable if lots of people do it, as with Zagat's again, it's not worth much if one guy does it independently.
First of all, where are you coming from? I mean, are you an ex-professional line cook who did mostly French but did a stint at a sushi place? Did you go to cooking school and bail out from your first job? Do you just like to eat out places? Are you an avid and obsessive cookbook reader? And so on. These things matter, and they should be made clear to your reader -- I hope not as an up-front "here's who I am, blah blah" kind of thing, but it should be clear throughout.
Here's why. Suppose you review a Chinese restaurant that you love. You've eaten at a bunch of Chinese restaurants over the years. You don't cook Chinese at home, have no such cookbooks or anything, and you don't read or speak Chinese. At base, your knowledge of what you're eating is entirely a matter of what you've liked and not liked, what seems to be normal on menus in places you've eaten, what some guy told you once, and so on. All of that is legitimate in a reviewer -- it really is. But it is not at all legitimate for that reviewer to make grand pronouncements about quality, or worse, about authenticity.
Think about reviews you read (and if you don't read a lot of reviews, you shoudn't be planning to write them). How often have you read, "for terrific, authentic Mexican food, El Blah Blah is the best place in Munchieburg." Really? What's "authentic" Mexican food, precisely? Does the reviewer have any qualifications to make a statement about it? Or has this reviewer just gotten some vague notions from seeing Rick Bayless on TV and decided it's okay to shoot his or her mouth off?
Now if on the other hand you are very hard-core about some cuisine, have done a great deal of work learning about it in every way possible, then it is okay for you to make statements like this. You don't have to have cooked professionally, but you have to know what you're talking about.
If you're just a happy eater, like so many reviewers, I suggest that you make this clear. Make it a selling point, actually -- an honest happy-eater-type reviewer would be practically unique! For example, "Dave's Sushi Bar serves great food. Some people say it's not very authentic, but frankly, I doubt they know any more about what sushi is like in Tokyo than I do, which isn't much. What I can tell you is that the prices are good, the fish is fresh, and Dave puts on a wonderful show for those who sit right up at the bar. I had..." and so on. Notice what this does: it says what you are and aren't, it says what you like, and it gets us right to the heart of the matter with the restaurant.
Ultimately, a review is not a list of factors. Not a good review, anyway. A good review is an essay. It's not an easy thing to write. The first thing to get clear is who and what you are and aren't, and to start building a voice around that. The second is to start writing scads of imaginary reviews, samples, sketches of reviews of places you've liked and hated. Once your prose is good, your voice is clear, and you have a strong sense of what you want your reviews to look like, you're ready to actually start reviewing.
I suggest that you look at some reviews by great reviewers. Craig Claiborne was fabulous. Ruth Reichl I don't like, myself, but certainly she was very well respected. Look at Calvin Trillin, the greatest American food writer: his "Tummy Trilogy" is genius, albeit not really restaurant reviews as such. Think about what these people do, how they write, that makes them effective.
Don't kid yourself. Any kind of writing is hard work and serious business. Far too many restaurant reviewers think that being passionate about eating makes up for other failings. They're wrong.