Their restaurants rule

Stephen Downes January 15

Have journalists dropped the ball when it comes to good restaurant reviewing? Are the majority of critiques published in our dailies nothing more than gratuitous exercises in leisurely dining or, even worse, thinly disguised publicity pieces? What really remains unsaid about the Melbourne food-scene? In the latest issue of Meanjin, journalist and restaurant critic Stephen Downes reviews the reviewers, answering these questions and more. You can read the full essay on our editions page, as well as this extract published last year on Crikey and John Lethlean’s response.

Chef–restaurateur George Calombaris had either ‘his own personal Delphic oracle’ or a ‘canny understanding’ of the world economy, Larissa Dubecki wrote in the Age early in 2009. His new restaurant Hellenic Republic was ‘cheap(ish)’, ‘cheeky’ and ‘cheerful’ and it served ‘gutsy, uncomplicated, home-style Greek cooking’. This encomium—if I may be Greek about it—for Calombaris and his latest venture effulged ever more brilliantly, sounding to me more like a hyperventilated media release than a restaurant review. (Ms Dubecki, it should be added, was at the time the paper’s fairly new restaurant critic.)

The following month on the Fairfax Digital Executive Style website, John Lethlean, who preceded Ms Dubecki as Age restaurant critic, began his piece: ‘Subtle, Aegean blues. The high gloss sparkle of white tiled walls. Lobster pots for light shades and a distinct smell of burning charcoal in the air. Those kooky little red anodised aluminium pitchers used for cheap table wine nowhere else in the world.’ (In the March edition of Gourmet Traveller magazine, Lethlean found Hellenic, ‘absolutely infectious’.)

Nothing in either of these two nugatory assessments could be considered seriously critical, in my view. Aided and abetted by copious plugs written by others in glossy food magazines, similar boosts in daily newspapers’ weekly magazines, an editorial in the local Moreland Leader and a plethora of cyber postings by excited food bloggers, the Hellenic Republic would have needed to become Stalin’s Russia to fail. Calombaris would have trouble buying such publicity.

The Fairfax Press, and especially the Age, is seen to write the gospel according to food. The opinions of its reviewers are believed, and the annual Age Good Food Guide is perceived to be Melbourne’s bible of eating out. On things gastronomic, the Fairfax Press has form. One PR consultant told me about a bar client that preferred publicity in the Age over the Herald Sun because the former brought in a better class of person. Reviewers are supposed to be reporters, and by its very nature what is written on editorial pages is believed by readers to be unbiased, independent and unaffected by anything other than serious-minded fact-finding and analysis. A journalist’s word is worth much more than an advertiser’s. It’s trusted. I once read marketing research concluding that the value of editorial over advertising copy was something like three to one. And while this kind of gross and unquantified generalisation is perhaps dubious, there is no doubt that restaurant critics are highly influential.