Stuck in a soul-leaching CEO-type job, making a measly six-figure salary not including perks? We hear you. Ever think of becoming a restaurant critic? You already watch the Food Network, so you know a braise from a sauté, a scallion from a green onion. What you need are some tips on the way a critic goes about his task; apart from just sampling the food, you need to know what things to look for and how to evaluate them
By Dave Lowry
Part 1: Casing the Joint
The critic’s at work long before he’s at his table perusing the wine list and wondering just how far he can push his editor in terms of expenses. He approaches the building or the space from the outside, stalking it like Kirstie Alley planning an assault on a Krispy Kreme. Few restaurants can afford to construct their own building. That means they must work with the existing space and basic layout. It’s rarely perfect. Citizen Kane’s Steak House in Kirkwood, for instance, is a reworked Victorian home; it could be as cramped and unattractive as steerage class on the Titanic. Clever attention to layout, though, turned the place into a series of cozy rooms.
Just inside comes the first critical test of a restaurant: How does it handle the intermediary space between the door and the space where diners sit and eat? If you’re new in town and haven’t experienced a St. Louis winter, it’s, well, bracing. Without a buffer area, diners risk frostbite every time the door opens if it does so directly into the dining area. The streets in downtown Clayton are packed with restaurants that open right out onto the sidewalk. Their solutions are critical to putting diners at ease and ready to enjoy a meal. Blue Elephant and Cardwell’s both do it nicely, the former by breaking up the entrance space, the latter with a formal entryway that sets the atmosphere.
Once inside, the critic assesses the restaurant’s seating. Sometimes a restaurant will aim for a cozy conviviality, so things are deliberately crowded. Modesto, for instance, specializes in tapas, so it features tables close together, as a crowd is a big part of the tapas experience. In general, though, you can estimate the price of a meal by evaluating the room you have for sitting—the book Architectural Graphic Standards actually offers a guide. If you’ve got less than 10 to 12 square feet, figure the architect and owner hope you’ll consider fries with your order. From between 13 to 16 square feet of sweet freedom, you can expect to take home an aluminum foil, swan-shaped doggy bag. With 17 to 22 square feet in which to roam, you’re probably talking about a place with a wine list worth more than the GNP of many African nations. That’s why at some eateries, like Tony’s or the Ritz, you’ve got enough space between tables to perform a gymnastics routine—and you’ll pay accordingly.
Part 2: Pull Up a Chair and Sit a Spell
Spacing’s one matter. Another is the table and chairs filling it. The restaurant business has been in a quandary for a while now over chairs. Metal and polymers make for chairs sleek and hip. Few of us, however, want to sit in one for two hours. As boomers age, they’re less concerned with hip and more with their hips. The challenge is to make a chair attractive yet comfortable to sit in for a couple of hours. The chairs at Trattoria Branica are elegant, formal and utterly comfortable for a long Italian meal. Tables, of course, have to accommodate a range of diners, from the couple to the party of 12. Banquette tables fell out of fashion; they’re staging a comeback of sorts. Whatever the case, it’s important that tables be at the right height, so diners neither hunch nor reach to get to their food. While waiters tend to like round tables, which are easier to serve, the circles take up more space than rectangular tables, which cuts down on the potential number of diners that can be seated at one time. Look to see how easily tables can accommodate disparate-sized parties. A casual place, like St. Louis Bread Company, can handle this easily. It’s trickier in a formal or even semiformal restaurant . Trattoria Marcella gets top marks not only for its food but also for the way the space can handle almost any size party.
Part 3: Putting a Fork in It
Is the flatware—knives, forks and spoons—functional? Is that a fork on the table or a coal mining implement? The trend right now is toward dinnerware thick and clunky, heavy enough to bring down small game. That’s OK, but when a meal becomes a weight-lifting workout, the critic notices. The flatware should also complement the dishes used. Recently, bowl-like soup plates have become popular for main courses. Though they’re dramatic and beautiful, putting fork to the last bite can be more like well-digging than dining. Attention to how a meal is eaten, when it’s plated up in the kitchen, is often obvious when it arrives at the table. In recent years, formal dinner service has shrunk dramatically; even formal restaurants may have no more than two forks per diner, for instance. Even so, the setting should be proper. Is the coffee spoon placed on the saucer in the 4 o’clock position? Is the bread plate on the left aligned with the stemware on the right? There is sometimes a question from readers as to what constitutes the difference between a good restaurant and a great one. Food will always be the main factor, of course. But the subtleties can make a difference as well. Franco and Harvest both have given attention to these little details; note on your next visit how tableware and dishes complement the food.
Part 4: The Veritas in Vino
One of the biggest changes in the restaurant business in the past two decades has been the explosion in popularity of wine. Starred restaurants had modest wine lists. Some Italian joints offered Chianti or some other red plonk. Fingerbowls were more common than the sophisticated wine menus we see today. Selections, vintages and varieties are astounding. With wine’s newfound popularity in restaurants came markups that are sometimes more obscene than Paris Hilton’s home movies. More and more places, though, are cutting their profit margins to give diners a break on wine. The critic should always credit a restaurant for its wine bargains. It is an accepted generality that restaurants double the price of what they pay for the bottle. But actually, most eateries work on a sliding scale, marking up modest wines more than outstanding, expensive ones. Restaurants make most of their profit on alcohol; we don’t begrudge this custom. However, if a medium-range wine is marked up more than twice its retail price, we note that as well. Wine lists at Five and Acero, a couple of hot new restaurants, are much smaller than at other places, but their markups are happily reasonable. (Fun fact: The cost of a single serving of wine is usually what the restaurant paid for the whole bottle. Unless you’re dining alone—again, we told you it wouldn’t last—it is almost always smarter to buy a bottle.)
Part 5: Reading the Menu
Ever wonder just what the restaurant’s clearing, profitwise, on that duck confit? Assume ingredients in a meal cost the owner about one-third the price listed on the menu. A cassoulet or ratatouille doesn’t make itself, however. Restaurants like to make a big deal out of the quality of their ingredients, and certainly delicacies like morels or truffles can add to their costs. Still, the most significant factor in cost tends to be the meal’s complexity, or how many hands are needed to prepare it. One guy at the grill can turn out your rib-eye. A bouillabaisse, like the superb version at Vin de Set, needs a team. If a restaurant has its own pastry chef, get out the credit card. That’s not to say it isn’t worth it; the critic, though, needs to understand that the cost of a meal can range widely, depending on what’s on the menu and how labor-intensive the meals are.
Part 6: The Pace of the Meal
An infallible sign of a competent waiter, from the perspective of the critic as well as the average diner, is in his pacing of a meal. The clock starts mentally for him when he approaches our table for the first time. He’s sizing us up, deciding if we’re here for one hour or three. He paces our service accordingly. The critic looks to see how well the staff is picking up on cues, both at his own table and at those around him. Parents with kids will probably be in and out faster than a couple by themselves. A good waiter doesn’t hurry Mom and Dad and the kids, doesn’t neglect the couple. But he uses two different paces in caring for them.
No matter who’s eating or how many are there, appetizers should arrive about 10 minutes after ordering. At both Balaban’s and Busch’s Grove, you can almost set your watch by those appetizers. Combinations of appetizer and salad courses can make presenting main courses tricky. The critic also watches to see how the table’s cleared. In a formal restaurant it was once utterly taboo to stack plates while carrying them away from the table. Sadly, those days are almost over, at least locally. Still, the professionalism of the busing staff says a lot about the standards of the place.
