On October 31, St. Louis lost one of its most respected food writers and restaurant critics. Joe Bonwich, 58, died while on vacation with his wife, Jennie. The couple was in Florida, celebrating their 30th anniversary and “second” honeymoon, when he collapsed at the Orlando airport.
“It was their first vacation—outside of weddings—in a long time,” said Susie Bonwich, the youngest of five daughters. She said her father suffered neurological complications, the nature of which are still being determined.
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The longest tenured restaurant critic in St. Louis, Bonwich began writing reviews 35 years ago for the Riverfront Times. He wrote about the dining scene for St. Louis Magazine beginning in 1984, under the pseudonym Joanne Jankowski, his mother’s maiden name. Bonwich is the Americanized version of his Polish grandfather’s name, Basamanowicz. Always proud of his heritage, he wrote a detailed, candid account of a trip to Poland, “the land of my ancestors,” in the August 25–31, 1982 edition of the RFT.
As a longtime food writer and former restaurant owner, I considered Bonwich and the other Joe—the late Joe Pollack—mentor critics from a distance. For years, I knew neither personally but respected the heck out of both of them. Few St. Louisans knew the local restaurant market as well and could communicate its nuances so effectively and fairly. (Qui Tran, owner of Mai Lee and Nudo House, said “Bonwich would at least call and give you a chance to fix something before he went public with it—he was that kind of guy.”)
Bonwich and I worked together at St. Louis Magazine in 1991, with both of us penning restaurant reviews under pseudonyms. His nom de plume at the time was Thomas Hunter (a play on Hunter S. Thompson); mine was Arnie Boye (a play on my dog’s name, Arnie).
Bonwich was always protective of his anonymity, a trait that ran deep. He’d hate that the first time I ever saw his face was on an 8-by-10-inch photo posted in the kitchen at Monarch. Servers walking through the double doors saw his visage dozens of times every day, which was important to restaurant owner Aaron Teitelbaum. “I learned in New York that food critics are king,” Teitelbaum recalls. “You simply have to know when they are in the house.” (Asked about it later, Bonwich said, “Yeah, that was my driver’s license photo and I still don’t know how they got their hands on it!”) Teitelbaum remembers him fondly: “Joe wasn’t a chef, just a very food-knowledgeable layman. A good critic can’t be visible or chatty. Joe was neither.”
Bonwich served as the main dining critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 2002 to 2012. In his final review for the daily, the critic did something he’d never done: awarded a restaurant (in this case the venerable Tony’s) a perfect four out of four stars.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I finally met him, while judging a barbecue competition in Arnold. The judges were asked to wear name tags—and, to everyone’s surprise, Bonwich slapped his on. “No one knows who I am out here,” he reasoned, telegraphing another trait, his humility.
As smart as he was—skipping three grades, graduating from St. Louis University High School at 16, attending Saint Louis University, and enrolling in a master’s program in econometrics at the University of Wisconsin at age 20—he never celebrated the fact. He was quiet, sarcastic, funny, and, when asked by this editor to clarify an apparent miscue, Bonwich was usually right. SLM publisher Ray Hartmann, who also worked with Bonwich at the RFT decades ago, said Bonwich was always the smartest guy in the room—but he never acted like it.
Bonwich’s intelligence was also recognized by Washington University, where he was asked to teach a class on food writing. He would feed students strawberries but forbid them to describe the fruit by using words like “delicious” and “tasty.”
James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Gerard Craft says Bonwich “had such a big impact on my my life and my career. Talking with his class once a year was one of the highlights on my calendar.”
In 2013, Bonwich left the Post to become the director of content strategy for The Vandiver Group, and also returned to the dining pages of SLM, for which he wrote a monthly “Eat at Joe’s” review and contributed to the online dining section. His “Bon’s Bits” titles were often humorous, one including both Latin (Bibamus Cervesiam) and pig Latin (Inkdray Ocktailscay).
The day that Bonwich agreed to write for SLM again was among my proudest days at the magazine. Losing him yesterday was one of the worst.
“People who didn’t know Joe personally might not know his impish, puckish side,” recalls former SLM contributor Byron Kerman. “He wasn’t only an encyclopedia of all things gustatory; he was a wiseacre. You wanted not just his opinion but to be his friend, comrade and, if you could, the Statler to his Waldorf.”
After being notified of Bonwich’s death, fellow SLM dining critic Dave Lowry referred to him merely as “a character.” Asked to elaborate, Lowry did, in spades: “There are those individuals who are lovely and reliable, who are decent and enjoyable, companions and even confidants. They constitute, I suspect, the mass of those with whom we interact all our lives. Then there are those individuals who are all of that, and more, who have the spark, the twinkle, the depths within their personality, that make them something else in our lives. We like them, yet more so we are energized by them. We look forward to the moments we spend with them. We remember conversations with them that, with others, we would have long since forgotten. Most people constitute the weekdays in the calendars of our lives. Some are elevated; we think of them as life’s Friday nights. And a few, very few, are in another category still. Joe Bonwich was a Christmas morning in the lives of many of us who knew him. We recall encounters, treasure them, as we do memories of holiday mornings that seemed almost magical in retrospect. Joe was that sort of character. He could transform the most ordinary dinner, the casual conversation, into a memory. We will remember him because he was, as he made his way through our lives, impossible not to remember. Which is one of those qualities, however rare, that distinguish such characters.”
Bonwich’s wife and five daughters would alternate in tagging along on the reviews. “Dad would make notes in a small notebook—and the spiral had to be on the side, not on the top—but he thought he was more sneaky than he was,” Susie recalls. “Then he’d get mad when he got home and couldn’t read what he wrote.” Bonwich was, however, stealthier when on TV. “He’d either wear a disguise, or they would disguise him and alter his voice. We called him ‘the food spy.’”
Susie emphasized that her father was an organ donor, in large part because his own father survived 20 years after a heart transplant.
This summer, on the 11th anniversary of his father’s death, Bonwich wrote this on Facebook, “The Old Man never believed in being sad for someone who lived a good life. So I won’t. I’ll just close my office door and tear up a little.”
A memorial service is being planned for later this month.
