The Essential Essentials
Why food media and influencers get so many things wrong, plus a list of a few righteous dishes
At least half of all “good” restaurants, even those lauded by critics, are at best, slightly above average. I’d say 80% of all restaurants are average or worse. Another 10% are above that, 5% are really good, and maybe 5% are quintessential. Honestly, I’m wondering if I’m still being generous.
There are a lot of reasons for mediocrity, but most of them come down to human nature and a flawed system. The restaurant industry has some of the lowest barriers to entry of any capitalist enterprise. You got money and a sanitation certificate? You’re in business. In 2022, if you do a pop up, you don’t even need much money, or anything legal.
If thousands of people in an industry don’t know what they’re doing, they learn at your expense. They can do this because they’re cooking for a society that no longer knows what it’s doing. Which is to say generally we devalue cooking and food so much, very few of us would really know what “good” is anymore. At this point, I know you’re already thinking, Mike, why are you such an asshole? Even though I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks, dined out at thousands of restaurants, and theoretically know what good is, I’m including myself in this group.
I have cooked from scratch three times in the last fourteen days. The rest of the time, its delivery, dine out, or Blue Apron. Even though I should know better I put a horrible meal on the table last night. It was so bad that my wife who was generous enough not to say anything, was relieved, when, mid-meal, I declared how horrid it was.
The meal was so awful, its memory ruled my subconscious. Last night I dreamt that I cooked Mexican mole while my parents showed up with Guy Fieri and Anne Burrell from Food Network. I panicked, screamed at, and treated my parents as though they were serial killers for the impromptu drive by. I treated Guy and Ann though as the peroxided food royalty they are. I made sure to greet the flavor-saver-savior with the proper tongue-flicking pronunciation of his surname, as in “Fieti”. While in a tizzy, I forgot about the mole and burnt it.
In real life, I consider myself a good cook, but even then, being consistent is tough. Cooking, no matter how many times they try to normalize semi-homemade-five-minute-meals on food television, is really hard.
Business too is hard. Because we don’t value cooking, we devalue it when others do it. We’re not willing to pay for it. Restaurant owners who didn’t go to business school panic and push their prices down instead of differentiating and investing in their product. They buy commodity food from broadline distributors that have every ounce of flavor bred out or leached into their vacuum-packaging.
Some restaurants go the opposite route, they pursue differentiation in their sourcing, buying everything from organic and local farms, and they charge twice as much as the collusion guys. However, because humans are programmed for stories, and not self-reflection, they often end up serving stuff that tastes exactly like “Sysco” food at twice the price. The fact is many farms which sell you the “made with love” bullshit are like the bad restaurants, hippies, or the food version of coal miners, doing what their daddy and their granddaddy did, because that’s what you do. They grudgingly operate at woefully inefficient scale, using hidden pesticides, while making mediocre produce sold as a delectable panacea.
People taste the expensive “storied” food, pay twice as much for it, and realize they could pay half for food service stuff and live with it. This of course devalues and hurts the 5% of farmers and 5% of restaurateurs who are doing it right.
Though it’s important, our poor judgement of food quality is less about ingredient quality and more about how humans overvalue and misread things. There’s a whole science called behavioral economics, pioneered by Israeli scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that explains why this is. For example, K&T developed the concept of anchoring, i.e. that presenting irrelevant information, like a random number, can have a huge impact on how the human mind estimates the answer to a question or decision that has nothing to do with the number presented.
If you flash the number 100 to one group and the number 10 to another group and you ask both groups to estimate the percentage of people who truly love the flavor of Malort shots, the people who saw the number 10 will likely give an estimate that is close to the real value, aka 10%. If you ask the 100 group, they will likely give a higher number, which while not 100%, will be way higher than 10%, and way higher than it should be, even for all the die-hard liars Chicagoans who claim they love Malort.
K&T also developed and researched ideas like availability, cognitive (or confirmation) bias, regression to the mean, and hindsight bias. I could go on and on about what they discovered and what these theories are, but generally they boil down to the fact that the less we know, the more we think we’re right, or I guess in the case of anchoring, if we know more and it has nothing to do with what we’re considering, we still think we’re right.
Journalists see restaurants on other best of lists and they continue to repeat the list rather than discover or uniquely confirm whether those restaurants belong.
Journalists participate in representation bias, i.e. they believe they know the characteristics of a good restaurant, i.e. “organic”, “They have linen napkins!”, or “Someone’s cooking with mom’s recipe” or “It’s a multigenerational business!”. If a place has one of these characteristics, writers often believe they’re good. This is the one that gets me more than other.
I still remember taking a big writer from New York to this Chicago taco spot in the back of an old grocery store thinking it was the bee’s knees mostly because it was food writer candy, off the beaten path, old business, grungy looking dudes chopping meat everywhere, etc.. It was a place lauded by almost every local scribe. The New York guy ate the taco and was like, this isn’t very good. He was right. We were all snowed.
While I think the guy was right, he also could have been invoking regression to mean theory. If a bunch of writers tell you a place is good, a contrarian writer might decide they’re bad, or if a bunch of writers say a place is bad, that same writer may overestimate that spot to prove a point against the other writers.
Relationships too play a big role. It’s why I’m always beating the drum of ethics, transparency, and keeping subjects at arm’s length. It’s why I abhor our current fetishism with influencing. Humans in general trust as a default. Introduce any amount of friendliness or positivity from a relationship into that equation, and you can make anyone believe anything (exhibit A: Anna Delvey, Inventing Anna – Netflix) including that the food is very good when it’s not. This is especially true if you’re on deadline with a limited budget and your publication can’t afford to have you move on to another assignment without lying about the first one because it needs to fill column space paid for by dwindling advertisers. And, oh, Dios Mios!, imagine when there’s no editor and the person doing coverage is paid by those they cover, because that’s exactly how influencing works.
Because of these things, one of my goals with this newsletter is to fight against these biases and try to be more rigorous in what I cover and what I recommend. It’s why I’m charging for subscriptions, because if readers fund the effort, then advertisers and restaurants don’t need to. I don’t need to write or do things because someone else wants me to. I only need to do them because my readers value honesty. I know I will still fuck it up sometimes, but I promise you, I will try not to.
Toward that end, I am unveiling something called “The Essential Essentials”, which is a focus on the top 5%, the places that I believe truly give 100% almost 100% of time. A different way of thinking about this is, these are the places I personally want to return to every single day if I had the money to do so. These are the spots creating something none of their peers are.
BTW, if a restaurant is not on this list now, it’s not necessarily because they’re not in the 5%. It’s because I’m consciously engaging in recency bias and talking about the things I’ve eaten lately. I’m also gonna unveil these places in short bursts, rather than define one comprehensive list up front.
Chicago Michelin-darling Oriole, for example, probably deserves to be on this list (or am I engaging in bias?), but it won’t be right now because I haven’t eaten there since they redid it. I will get there and if it’s truly amazing, then it’ll make the list at some point.
Sometimes the list will be a whole restaurant and sometimes it will be just one specific dish, because sometimes you can only experience a few dishes – another problem with traditional food journalism. No one, not even the great Nick Kindelsperger of The Chicago Tribune -and he tries more than anyone in Chicago, can eat everything, so saying something is great without checking a good representative sample is no bueno.
Here's the first batch of Essential Essentials: