Anatomy of an Award

Notes on power.

Hello! This week’s read is free for everyone. Initially, I had only planned on writing two of these ‘anatomy of’ newsletters. The first would be about the importance of professional criticism, the second would cover the nuts and bolts of a critic’s work. At the time, that felt like a complete picture. But lately, I’ve been wanting to write an addendum with bits and pieces I felt were missing. As I began putting them down, some themes started to appear. Mostly, I was circling back to this notion of power — how much of it a critic yields and, in turn, who gets to have it. Thanks for being here!

---

I knew exactly what I was doing when I quit my job as an inspector at Michelin in 2018. For me, as a new mom, there was no future in a role that required me to travel as much as I did, packing my bags every Sunday evening and boarding an early flight the next morning to some other city that wasn’t home.

In leaving, I also knew that I was stepping away from an immensely powerful platform. The Michelin brand has been around for over 120 years; its position as the authority in the genre of restaurant awards is entrenched. That’s not a job you leave lightly. The majority of inspectors I know will never leave until they retire (a few, like me, have left to tend to their families).

But I wanted to see if I could grow my career beyond a luxury brand and into a space that aligned more closely with my values. I loved the passion inspectors shared for food and restaurants, and I took seriously the privilege of recognizing deserving chefs, but the elitist, exclusive worlds that we inevitably served with our work made me uncomfortable.  

Still, little could prepare me for the lived reality of losing such a big platform. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what I had until it was gone, as Joni Mitchell put it, it was more like the hidden power structures had become so apparent that they had crossed over into the absurd. All of the sudden, my taste and my opinions, which hadn’t materially changed at all, were somehow immaterial. And because I had chosen to stay and work in food media, it was like losing my voice while still trying to be a part of the choir.

Which is all to say, some critics work very hard to keep their jobs because they know few(er) people will listen to what they have to say when they aren’t tethered to a powerful institution. And yet, as much as critics are bestowed power by their platforms, these organizations have to get their publishable POVs from somewhere. It’s not like the ink, digital or otherwise, writes itself.

Herein are two positions of power that feed one another — the platform and the critic. And as I’ve learned, neither is very effective alone.

The Platform

Around this time every year at Michelin, without fail, I would watch media outlets spin themselves into a frenzy as our annual selection of restaurants was released. I’ve heard more than once that stories about Michelin, good or bad, drive the most clicks and engagement for food-centric sites like Eater and others. So, the blistering sideline commentary had become its own sort of sport.

The annual October release of the New York guide is big news, at which point we all begin dutifully breaking down each year’s winners and losers. Michelin, as a restaurant-ranking organization, tends to be incredibly self-important, frustratingly opaque about its operation, and curiously out of touch with other local critics. This combination makes it an easy target for criticism, which is as much a part of the annual Michelin rollout as the guidebook itself. – Alan Sytsma, GrubStreet

It's an unpopular opinion in media, but the truth is, the news blitz is proportionate to Michelin’s influence in the industry (it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, really). The guide’s outsized power is both tangible and intangible — it has an ability to catapult a restaurant into another level of operations and to impart an aura of prestige.

I’ve read that a new one-star award from Michelin can lead to 20% more business at a restaurant. In an Eater article from 2020, the owners of now-closed Contra attributed 40% of their business to tourists visiting on Michelin’s recommendation. The owner of Jeju Noodle Bar in the West Village said, point blank, “Michelin saved us” in its first year of operation, the same year it received its star.

So, sure, Michelin has a lot of power to make or break a restaurant in this industry, but so do The New York Times, the James Beard Foundation Awards, and Bon Appétit or Food & Wine magazines (and, internationally, San Pellegrino’s 50 Best lists). I remember interviewing a restaurant owner for a Hungry City column in early 2020 when she mentioned preparing for the NYT “bump,” which occurred when diners flocked to a restaurant on pub day. 

Big platform restaurant criticism in the form of reviews, awards, and lists all have a say in a chef or restaurant’s ability to draw customers and make money, acting like a line of credit that allows a restaurant to continue to operate, or to exist.¹

The dogmatic pursuit of Michelin stars, glowing reviews, and acknowledgment from the Beard Foundation has taken an irreversible psychic toll on restaurant professionals. Not by choice, but because the success of their restaurants often depends on it. – Adam Reiner, The Restaurant Manifesto

But there’s another manifestation of power at play here. In addition to viability, these platforms can shape public opinion about the “best” food out there. The notion of a best anything is questionable and relative, of course, but the practice assigns meaning and hierarchy to a chaotic, unorganized, and oversaturated industry. See also: service journalism! Lists and guides are a posture of importance from our arbiters of taste, which is just another way of saying that the chefs, cuisines, and restaurants that make the cut have been deemed worthy by the refined palates of our critics and therefore deserve your unmitigated support. There’s prestige at stake for the business owners, and valuation at the level of the commons.

Legacy institutions have so much power with which to influence because of their reach and longevity. In my marketing days, we would call Michelin a category leader, like Kellogg’s in the realm of breakfast cereals or Mercedes-Benz in the world of cars, to keep the luxury thing going. These brands commandeered a sizeable market share because they were among the first, if not the first, to serve their respective markets. To use more corporate lingo, they had the first mover advantage. I would even go as far as to say Michelin effectively created the market for restaurant awards and then did the smart work of maintaining its place in it.

For others, increasing reach has been a core business objective. This August, the New York Times reported more than 10.8 million subscribers with a 13.6% year-on-year earnings increase. Apparently, the goal is to reach an unprecedented 15 million subscribers by 2027. That’s a pretty good outlook for a company that made the bold pivot from being New York’s leading paper to the nation’s leading paper.²

Disruption of these legacy platforms is underway thanks to well-funded upstarts like TikTok and Substack, which may have growing audiences but lack the same prestige. It’ll be a long time until the influence of legacy media is shriveled, dead, and gone though.

Regardless of which platform you choose to love, or love to hate, each one represents an ideology. Michelin has a sense of aloofness grounded in its Frenchness. Bon Appétit offers an irreverent coolness that seems more concerned with vibes than actual cooking. The 50 Best list doesn’t care about you, the diner, at all. That one’s for the chef-auteurs, and chef-auteurs only (hence its waning relevancy). I could go on!

More often than not, the ideology, whatever it is, has to be self-serving. It has to be desirable to a large enough group of people to persist. How else does a platform maintain its power?

The Guide does not exist to serve the restaurant industry or boost the overly massaged egos of chefs. It does not attempt to be truly comprehensive or represent the tastes of the 99 percent. No, the Michelin Guide exists for the benefit of Michelin. – Jonathan Nunn, Mr Porter, but honestly, replace the Michelin Guide with anything.

In the same way that legacy media has shifted its coverage of digital content and creatorship (which is still not enough for some), big platform ideologies have also evolved to maintain relevancy among a younger and more diverse audience, which is key to their long term survival.

But it’s also important to recognize that not so long ago, nearly every restaurant critic at every big platform in America was valorizing the same thing. The ideologies were consistently in praise of Western European cuisines, even when it was under the guise of farm-to-table American (inspired not by Native practices, but seasonal European sensibilities) or Asian “fusion” (the appropriate framing being some European cuisine “elevating” the Asian other). And if it wasn’t explicitly French or Italian or, side eye, Mediterranean, the ideology was uniformly centered around a White person’s point of view. Everything else was just ethnic.

This racially fraught history of restaurant criticism is integral to why I believe there is so much resistance to platforms and their powers of existing solely to assign value and worth. Picking apart annual guides and lists of restaurants feels like innocuous fun, the low-hanging fruit of deriding voices of authority, but when that power has been deployed to exclude and dismiss entire communities, it’s hard to earn back the trust of an audience that falls into one of those communities.

So, in this business of restaurants and evaluation, if the question we are continually trying to answer is whether or not some food, restaurant, or chef is good or worthy of this platform and its power, the next line of questioning has to be — according to who? Who gets to make that judgement? And why should we trust them?

The Critic

I’ve already established my view that professional critics are best equipped to make these judgements and not influencers whose conclusions may be clouded by ulterior motives, like virality or fame.³ I’ve also explained that the best restaurant critics approach their work with a carefully formed yardstick of study and experience; their credibility hinges on this measured expertise.

What I didn’t express clearly enough, perhaps, is this: in literature, there’s the idea of a generous reader, or someone who reads an author’s work closely and credits it with meaning or significance, even beyond what the author intended. The generous reader is a perfect parallel for restaurant critics who are trained to be generous eaters. We give chefs the benefit of a narrative or a point of view, expressed through their cooking. As good eaters, we can see past obvious, glaring criticisms and appreciate nuance.

And the more I think about the art of writing a review, the more I am reminded of another writing concept known as aboutness, or what any particular piece of writing is about. As in, its key takeaway or its essence. In a restaurant review, that might be giving credit where credit is due. Other times, as in compiling a list or guide, it might be as subtle as radical inclusivity. In either case, the aboutness is the critic’s stance on what is worthy of your time and attention.

But all of this — the thoughtful expertise and the ability to convey something essential — is directly influenced by our position or relationship to the subject. No matter how hard we strive to be objective, the philosophical truth is that delineating between our thoughts and our selves is a farce. I’ve always said that you can’t separate the criticism from the critic, but until now, that’s been a largely theoretical argument, blind to the topic of identity. And yet, there’s a reason Brillat-Savarin’s platitude “tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” is so persistent. Food and our sense of self are inextricably linked. You could easily say, tell me what you think about what you eat and I will tell you what you are.

So when it comes to holding positions of power, especially in the space of taste making, it serves us to ask questions like what is this critic’s background? What are the biases? Are they equipped to comment on the culture of the moment? To shape our thinking of it? (Insofar as this is even possible since several voting bodies, Michelin included, purposefully obscure this information as a matter of methodology.)

Inevitably, this raises the thorny question of who we want to be in control of the narrative, which spawns a weird form of nativism in the world of food and food writing. I’ve struggled with this myself as someone who doesn’t feel ownership over any one culture and approaches everything with insatiable voracity. As the writer Sharanya Deepak wrote in Vittles, “Our rootlessness prescribed a certain liberty to eat what we want, and call it part of ourselves.” Food is at once so personal and so universal that it can be hard to distinguish between the two.

The next logical question in this line of identity-driven thinking goes something like: do you have to be from or of a culture to appreciate said culture’s food? Well, no, of course not. But would I rather hear about a meal from someone who has an intimate relationship with that cuisine through some kind of life experience? (My vagueness here is intentional; experience could be years of study or appreciation, it doesn’t have to be genetic.) Yes, I would. In the case of a review, it’s not just the subject that gets our attention, it’s the inherent politics of language and “aboutness.”

I’m no j-school grad, but I’m pretty sure this goes against the founding principles of modern-day journalism where anyone should be able to act as a conduit for both sides of a story or become a topic specialist, a bureau chief. While I have complicated feelings about that, it can be true that being too close to something also blinds us. From the trenches, or in the weeds, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. To meaningfully criticize a creative choice if you feel like the weight of your community’s success is on your shoulder, hinging on your approval.

But, to go back to the history of restaurant criticism, so-called objectivity has not served marginalized communities well. The veil of impartiality has ignored the realities of how race and socioeconomic background shape what is given value in our society. This is why, in my opinion, identity politics is so palpable right now. So many of us feel powerless, but in our identities, we can establish boundaries and exert control in an environment that wants to extract our cultures for capital gain. We can be the experts of our own experiences. And given the platform, we have a great responsibility to speak that truth to power.

Here's an example of the ways in which a message changes based on the source and structures of power: I once wrote a tweet for Michelin North America’s social media account that basically said, if you go into an Asian restaurant and see no Asian people dining there, you probably should leave. (As inspectors, we had to provide little quips from our dining adventures to populate various social media platforms.) The implication of my tweet was that the food at an Asian restaurant was not going to be good if it was catering to a White audience. It was a reductive claim, yes, but it’s also a tropey joke among Asian people. An IYKYK sort of thing.

But Michelin was the platform tweeting, not me. Here was a very French brand making a joke on behalf of a community some would argue it doesn’t belong to, or serve, or even understand. The disconnect and its underlying power imbalance was uncomfortable enough that the joke fell extremely flat. If I had posted it to my personal account, I probably would have gotten a few co-signs because, well, IYKYK.

I know this is all a bit heavy for the topic of food and restaurants. Platforms like Michelin and Bon Appétit and the NYT food section have prospered largely because they exist in an arena of pleasure and fun, targeted to an audience that has the luxury of engaging with food as a lifestyle or a hobby. But then, isn’t this precisely when the critic becomes necessary? To help us see clearly the engines of industry and to make sense of style and context so that we, the audience, can engage with the work in a more rewarding way?

Critics are needed now more than ever to help us understand the vital issues in our food system and to make sure that those voices are used, as well as called out when they are not. – Nicholas Gill, New Worlder

In the end, for me, the best thing a restaurant critic can do with their platform and power is to share it with others. To give worthwhile chefs and creative forces in our industry an opportunity to reach and influence a larger group of people than they are able to alone, without the spotlight. With greater visibility, maybe these chefs can make a case for something greater than themselves. Like, asking customers to consider paying as much for a bowl of noodles as they do for a plate of pasta because the value of the ingredients is the same, so the value of the labor should also be the same.

And how great would it be if we had specialists across all cuisines and historical foodways in the same way we have experts of regional politics. Of course we should still save space for people who remind us that the world of food can be fun and frivolous, or those who come to an experience with fresh, unencumbered eyes, but also, let’s continue to support an abundance of diverse voices in powerful positions speaking to their unique authorities. A full-on chorus of people with an opportunity to be good, generous eaters.

1. There’s a whole other essay to be written about the consequences of all this attention, which in many cases is unsolicited.

2. The NYT’s growth is largely attributed to the success of the Cooking and Games verticals. If it’s bizarre that a tire company funds one of the restaurants world’s most prestigious awards, is it not also bizarre that a cooking app funds one of the world’s most prestigious news outlets? Or is that just how it all works; the money has to come from somewhere. Also, it was a stroke of genius for the NYT to start publishing restaurant lists for circulation on its own platform. To quite literally make the news.

3. But let’s not forget a vice even the most seasoned critic is susceptible to — vanity.