[ChrisLehrer]

Originally Posted by KYHeirloomer

There are all sorts of reasons why a poor reviewer might remain on the job. But that person never achieves a position where he/she actually influences anybody. Among decent chefs, that reviewer is an object of amusement and scorn, not somebody they're afraid of.

We're on the same page. I'm more cynical than you are, that's all. Your world is a nicer, happier place than the one I live in.

In this straitened economy, what does it cost to move to your place?

[ED BUCHANAN]

""Where I agree with you, though, is that the majority of reviews are the worst of both worlds. They're by people who don't have expert knowledge of any food, yet who think they should pretend to it because that's what reviewers are supposed to sound like. That is useless, destructive, and dishonest. And, of course, usual. ""

Chris
I agree you dont have to be a chef to review, just a bit more knowlege of foods.

[PeteMcCracken]

Upon reflection, are we, perhaps, confusing a "review" with a "critique"?

To me, although I definitely may be misguided, a "review" is a synopsis of what it is like to "dine there" while a "critique" may be more along the lines of "do they really know what they are doing"?

Although a "restaurant critic" may be able to write a "review", I wonder if a "restaurant reviewer" is capable of writing a "critic"?

[ChrisLehrer]

Originally Posted by PeteMcCracken

Although a "restaurant critic" may be able to write a "review", I wonder if a "restaurant reviewer" is capable of writing a "critic"?

I doubt that this distinction is particularly strong. As far as I'm concerned, the only reviewer who doesn't need to be a critic is someone who fills out those little forms for Zagat's and like that. Any other reviewer who isn't a critic in this sense is in the wrong line of work.

[KYHeirloomer]

Pete, there may be a dictionary definition difference. But in the real world I'm too near-sighted to see any difference between the two.

[KYHeirloomer]

>Your world is a nicer, happier place than the one I live in.<

Don't go betting the farm on that, Chris.

[KYHeirloomer]

>I agree you dont have to be a chef to review, just a bit more knowlege of foods. <

The same could be said about many so-called professionals in the food service industry---including chefs.

The misinformation that is spouted by many of them, nowadays, in terms of not understanding the food they are working with and the techniques being used, is nothing short of incredible.

Just one example of many I could provide: Based on their verbal descriptions and how they refer to them, there's not a celebrity chef in the business who truly understands what heirloom vegetables are. Same applies to many (perhaps most?) non-celebrities.
"Organic" is just a word to many chefs. And there are an awful lot of food professionals who should be sent a quarter so the can buy a clue when it comes to understanding the differences between, say, range-fed and conventional chickens; grass-fed vs. feed lot beef; and farm-raised vs. wild-caught seafood.

Doesn't stop them from pontificating on these subjects, though, substituting buzzwords and half-vast googling for real knowledge.

But, unlike those who merely write about food, those people are professionals who work with food everyday. And therefore, they automatically know more about it. Yeah, right!

[ED BUCHANAN]

Doesn't stop them from pontificating on these subjects, though, substituting buzzwords and half-vast googling for real knowledge.

Same way I feel about some writers. I have many a recipe and cook books written by people who are alleged authorities,that ran a Tea Room in Brooklyn. Problem is a lot of the recipes dont work. Should I blame proofreaders??

[KYHeirloomer]

Ed, the problems with cookbooks---especially chef-written cookbooks---are legion. Some can be laid at the feet of the publishing house, sure. But far too often there are other reasons, ranging from the fact the chef never made the dish on home-equipment, to the fact that the chef never proofread the recipes, to the fact that changing a recipe from restaurant amounts to home amounts is very often done mathematically, rather than by actually preparing the dish that way.

Even when the chef does make the dish at home, he or she is likely to have a home-kitchen filled with commercial (my son calls it "industrial") type equipment---which adds up to being the same as having made it in the restuarant. Not too many home cooks, after all, have a pair of 9-burner cooktops, and six ovens that never get turned off, and a salamander, and a stove vent that allows indoor grilling, and.....well, you get the point.

All of this adds up to a dish that may be fantastic when you order it in the restaurant, but which doesn't work when you try making it at home.

This is one of the reasons Cheftalk book reviewers are required to prepare at least two recipes from the book, and are encouraged to do more of them. Many a recipe reads well, but doesn't translate into the realities of home kitchens. Most of our reviewers, if a recipe doesn't work, will try another, and still another, in order to reach a fair conclusion as to the quality of the recipes. I've done as many as seven before deciding there was a real problem with that particular book.

On the other side of the equation, despite claims to the contrary, many cookbook publishers do not have test kitchens, and the recipes never are tried. Proofreading has become all but a thing of the past. Many publishers either do not have proofreaders on staff, or farm that task out to freelancers with no familiarity with the subject. Then the chef/author merely signs off on the final proof, without actually reading it (hey, they're busy with their real work, right?), and any mistakes made in typesetting show up in the final book.

To my mind, that last is the biggest problem of all. We got a note, once, from a chef author who was disappointed in our review---which had been rather on the negative side. She said to me, "if you're bothered by all those errors, just think how frustrated I feel...."

But the point is, she had a chance to correct them, and never did. Those errors (and there were many) didn't creep in between the final proofs and the printing. She just hadn't bothered reading those finals before signing off on them.

So, you can blame proofreaders if you want. But to my way of thinking, the author's name is on the product. If she/he doesn't care enough to assure that everything is as right as possible, then that's where any blame lies.

[ChrisLehrer]

KY, you and I have discussed publishing before, but let me just briefly weigh in here.

I write academic books, published by university presses. I have also taught more than my fair share of freshman composition classes, which is a quick and extremely unpleasant way to learn the art of proofreading.

In times past, top academic presses insisted that every book have a line editor go through everything prior to producing galleys, the author had to respond to all line editing, the galleys were sent to the author for review, and then they went back to the regular editing staff for a last check. These days this simply cannot be done. A normal academic book from a top press probably sells 750 copies in the first two years, if it's in a mainstream sort of discipline, and if it ever sells more than 1500 that's fairly remarkable; in times past, you got an extra 500 copies at least just from library purchases. Printing costs, despite technology, have gone up and not down. And what this means is that an academic press runs very, very close to being in the red at all times.

The very first thing you do to cut costs is to insist on professionalism. That's free, it doesn't reduce quality except for people who are unprofessional, and it in no way lowers the press's standards. So what you do is, you send the book to a line editor, the author responds to edits, this produces galleys (these days usually PDF), and these are sent to the author for final review. Full stop. If the author cannot catch his or her own errors, in the original submitted manuscript, the line-edited version, and the galleys, where 99% of the time the error was present from the beginning, then that author isn't being professional about it. We even have an extra mechanism to twist the author's arm: the author produces the index, which means reading the whole darn MS word by word.

What happens is that authors seek subventions to farm out indexing, they blame the publishers for mistakes, and all in all there's this attitude that trivial things like spelling are beneath the concern of a serious scholar. (In case you're wondering, one reason I have managed to develop a positive relationship with a top academic press is that the line editor kind of has to struggle to find errors -- I've done so much proofreading and such that I catch mistakes very, very fast.)

With cookbooks, I think there is the problem that a lot of chefs see it as self-promotion rather than an achievement of its own. This is like scholars who see books as something you write in order to get promotion and fame, not to say anything worth saying or to produce knowledge. In both cases, these authors think proofreading of all kinds is somebody else's problem. I call it unprofessional behavior.

But with reviews, magazine articles, and so on, I really think we're talking about something else. There you simply cannot have any illusions that anybody is going to do deep content editing other than you, the author. You're very much on your own. If I had one thing to say above all else about the reviews here, it's that you've got the very unusual situation that everyone involved is very knowledgeable about the subject, which is emphatically not the case with any other kind of reviewing or criticism of food.

To boil it down radically: Ed's confusing the issue, granted, but you're falling for it.

[KYHeirloomer]

>I have also taught more than my fair share of freshman composition classes, <

For which you have my deepest sympathies.

Chris, in theory (and who was it said: in theory, theory and reality are the same; in reality they're not) there's only one real difference between how university & scienfitic presses, on one hand, and trade presses, on the other, work: the concept of peer review. It's just not done in regular publishing.

In the good old days, even run-of-the-mill consumer book publishers went through that same series of in-house and author editing. And, as you point out, it's very rare that an error creeps in between the original proofs and the final galleys. So the author has had ample opportunity to catch and correct them.

Thus, if they appear in the final work, it is certainly not the publisher's fault.

Sometimes the process results in turning the author off, and he/she doesn't edit it properly as a result. With my last book, for instance, the equivalent of a line editor was a freelancer whose only credientials were having a classics education. There wasn't a paragraph that didn't have comments asking for clarification or definitions of basic terms and conditions. Essentially, these notations reflected her unfamiliarity with the subject. Fortunately, instead of throwing up my hands in frustration I called my editor, who told me to ignore most of those comments. "You and I decide what goes in," she said, "so just make any real corrections, and don't worry about the rest."

But I could easily see somebody taking the attitude, "this is ridiculous. I'm not wading through all this crap." And, because of that, real errors go undetected.

As an aside: I am probably the second worst speller in the world. When I first went to work at McGraw Hill, I worried about that. My then boss, however, told me: "That's what we have copy editors for." One of the problems is that most publishers, nowdays, see copy editors as an unnecessary expense. Which, far as I'm concerned, just puts the burdon back on the author---where it belongs.

>To boil it down radically: Ed's confusing the issue,.......<

I don't think he's confusing the issue. It's a matter of basic assumptions. You know how many women in this country think they know all about sex, just because they're women? Ed is the same way about food arts. His basic assumption is that anyone who works in the food industry knows all about food, just because of their job. And any writer can't possibly compete with that knowledge and skill base. Notice, for instance, that in this latest of his "experiences" he is prepared to blame a proofreader rather than the authors. That's typical of how he reacts anytime a writer disagrees with any of his cherished opinions.

>If I had one thing to say above all else about the reviews here, it's that you've got the very unusual situation that everyone involved is very knowledgeable about the subject, <

Thank you for noticing. We've worked very hard to assemble that kind of staff. But the thing to keep in mind is that about half of them are not now, nor ever have been, professionals in the food industries. On the other hand, we also have some professionals who are not only knowlegeable specialists, they are recognized as tops in their respective fields.

[ED BUCHANAN]

Thats whats great about America, We all have and are entitled to our own opinions.

[hippysandy]

The ambiance of the restaurant is also one of the most important considerations. The surrounding is one of the factors that could whet the customers' appetite.

[jaytuk]

Originally Posted by hippysandy

The ambiance of the restaurant is also one of the most important considerations. The surrounding is one of the factors that could whet the customers' appetite.

That is a good one!

[rgladso]

I think you should include the following: the decorations, the inside of the restaurant, the neighborhood it is in, the outside of the building, the foods taste, the drink selection, the food selection, the server's and their attitude, and the seating arrangements. All of these things are very important because they help you to decide if you should come back again.