The Unethical Food Critic and His “Secret” Boka Restaurant Group Black Card

There’s a dude (of course it’s a dude) who writes Harry Potter-novel-length restaurant reviews about Chicago’s restaurants. His name is Grimod and he runs the website Understanding Hospitality.

I have often been called long-winded or meandering in my style, but Grimod, well, everything he does is basically a Cory Booker-level filibuster.

Grimod’s not his real name. It’s actually a pseudonymous nod to the dead French lawyer Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière who is generally believed to be the world’s first food critic.

Chicago’s Grimod generally drop 20,000+ words on restaurants in the voice of a tenured academic celebrating his seventeenth year of sobriety. As a passionate student of restaurants and their associated criticism, I have tried mightily, but can say with confidence that due to the pedantry I have never read every single word in one of his pieces.

It's all just too much like what I imagine the internal dialogues of the foppish New Yorker magazine mascot Eustace Tilley sound like.

What I do appreciate about Grimod’s pieces is that they represent as knowledgeable, anonymous, dispassionate, and ethical. This is why I invited Grimod to participate in last year’s survey on Chicago’s Mt. Rushmore of chefs. Grimod pulled out some real bangers including Joseph Seyl of the Palmer House hotel.

If Grimod makes one nod to modernity and humor, it’s that he underpins his manifestos with a rating system based in tuxedo-wearing pineapples.

As you might imagine, it is very difficult to secure three pineapples, his top rating. Lately he has not granted anyone pineapples, instead focusing on what he calls “morsels” or 7,000+ word first looks or news items.

One of the newest pieces on Zarella, the new Boka Restaurant Group pizza place caught my attention, one, because (a literal weeping Virgin Mary statue miracle) it clocked in at under 3,000 words, and two because it wasn’t a review of any kind at all. It was a general bashing of Boka Group, pretending to be dispassionate, but ultimately came off as him seemingly deeply butt hurt that he had been banned from making reservations at Boka group restaurants altogether.

I wondered, how could a critic using a pseudonym on his website be banned from a restaurant?

Surely, they would not know who he was?

But, after some sleuthing, I found that Grimod does indeed use the same name (let’s call it Jake) to make reservations because it is tied to his Boka group secret “Black Card”.

What is the Boka group black card? It’s a card that entitles frequent Boka group restaurant diners to discounts, previews, free events, and even a backdoor reservation line that allows members to secure seating not available to the general public.

Boka group principle, Kevin Boehm once described the black card process to Restaurant Business Online:

“The card is awarded to guests who book frequent reservations through platforms like OpenTable. The next time a loyal guest dines at a Boka concept, a “reservation concierge” brings the card to the table, wrapped in a beautiful box. The card includes an email and phone number that the customer can use to book a reservation from then on. “Even if the restaurant seems completely full, we can usually slide them in,” said Boehm. “And the spend for guests with Boka Black Cards goes up by 40%.””

Grimod was, at least once, a very frequent Boka group restaurant diner and had been granted privileges as such. Should a restaurant reviewer be availing themselves of perks not available to the general public? Wouldn’t discounts and first looks provide them some incentive to support the restaurant group?

In the case of Boka group, a team that Grimod once dubbed as “Hospitality Wolves in Sheeps’ Clothing, it seems decidedly not. Since 2021 or so, the group has received Grimod’s full animus. Consider that against the backdrop that Grimod who has established himself as discerning somehow found himself liking and lauding what at that time (it may have changed and improved as of recent) was one of Chicago’s worst ever high-end restaurant openings in the form of Feld.

Surely Boka wasn’t that bad?

Grimod felt so, saying things like:

“The BRG honchos proved themselves more than happy to obscure a rudderless, soulless, emasculated kitchen behind the veneer of a Studio K design. The demonstrated that a lust for the easy money of faux luxury had eclipsed their duty to be stewards of the city’s dining scene. Boehm and Katz parade themselves as “James Beard Award winners” but are nothing more than craven businessmen whose chosen medium is the restaurant.”

Damn, son.

Grimod continued to rail over the years on Boka in the form of Alla Vita and chef Lee Wolen in a way that seemed unequal to other groups and chefs he reviewed.

But why?