This Is Not A Review of What Might Be One of the Best Italian Restaurants In Chicago
If I were to deliver the restaurant review for you this week that I had planned, I’d be stone cold lying to you and operating out of personal insecurity.
Some of those insecurities include:
I just spent $250 dollars of a limited personal dining budget on a meal. I need to report on it no matter what happened.
After all, I tried. I used an alias for reservation, brought my credit card with a fake name (Phil Vettel, obviously), made a reservation for a Sunday night where I assumed anyone who could identify me would likely be off. I was wrong. My neighbor works there. He spotted me, and then, he “killed” the table with a sprinkling of extra dishes.
Still, I reason, they didn’t know I was coming. Even though they knew I was here, it’s not like they could remake their entire afternoon prep or do something special for me. It’s fine to write about.
Most importantly, the insecurity I worry about most: you, the subscribers paid your hard-earned money to read a review this week. I need to write it anyway.
After fighting these monsters for a few days, I decided they were straw men constructed to get me to do the thing I hate that so many others are doing. There are very few, if any critics or even food writers in Chicago right now who aren’t giving in to these insecurities regularly.
And I don’t just mean the usual suspects, the television personalities or influencers whose main purpose is self-enrichment.
I mean I’m seeing it more in the people I used to trust most, the people who I thought were unimpeachable independent sources, the people who seemed to cover food because they wanted to objectively elevate the good stuff above all, the people I went to when I was out of ideas.
There is no question that if you read this newsletter, you probably read them too. You can read between the lines if you want to. Just look for phrases in their writing like “I was invited” or “paid for by” or “the restauranteurs are really nice” in their coverage. It’s their guilty way of telling you that their insecurity or ego trumped their quest for objectivity.
I’m not mad at the second group of folks. Some of them I consider very good creators who have their heart in the right place. I understand how passionate they are, how much they know about food, and how hard they’ve worked to establish their platform.
I know how much they’ve struggled in the last few years. If they are freelancers, they are paid less and less. If they don’t consider themselves journalists but enthusiasts, they’re tired of working so hard for nothing. If they are full time journalists, their budgets have been slashed, their co-workers have been laid off, and they have no support. Because of thinning teams, many of them have been put in critical positions they never wanted, or they reluctantly took the job because it was the only choice they had.
The problem of course is that being a critic requires a healthy opposition to basic human nature. It requires you to commit to honesty when natural relationships and everything else conspire against that pursuit.
A good critic must suppress their ego. You don’t do this job as some have wielded it because you think you’re smarter than and know better than everyone else. You don’t do it because you want to tell the sucker masses that their taste for X is stupid poor people nostalgia garbage.
You are not here to yuck other people’s yum. In fact you need to be in tune with these people because they are who you write for. If you don’t have a franchise restaurant obsession, a yen for some stupidly forbidden condiment, or a soft spot for grandma’s cooking, you probably don’t have the calling. You can’t be a true eater.
That’s why I restarted this newsletter a few months ago. Much of what I saw in the local food writing space was a combination of compromised cheerleading, selfish-enrichment, or reluctant acting.
I fail in these three ways too, but my goal is to minimize them in this community, which is why what I say next is not a review.