Company Blog

Everyone’s a Critic

by Adam Zack — December 23, 2019

On weekends we read the old fashioned real paper…

I was reading the Los Angeles Times newspaper (usually on my ipad, but on weekends we read the old fashioned real paper, which has become thinner, narrower and radically more liberal over the years – still I like the Sports and Calendar sections). On Thursdays they have a Food section, which was recently “reinvented” with much more photos and two new restaurant reviewers. It’s OK. Just OK. So we got talking about the days where restaurant reviewers went to great pains to hide their identity. Wigs, fake names, never doing anything in public – things like that kept their anonymity so the restaurants they visited wouldn’t know who they were, thus giving them preferential treatment over what the average Joe Schmo like me would get. It’s a nice thought, but a little flawed. I learned of some great restaurants over the years, trying several just based on the review I read. Especially a decade or more ago, many of the published reviews were really horrible.

The restaurant might be called out for undercooked pasta, bland fish or indifferent service. I always hated the negative reviews because I wanted to read about someplace to go, not somewhere not to go. Absolutely nothing positive resulted from a scathing review. Restaurants went out of business, people lost jobs and no one’s life was saved because they avoided a radically under-seasoned pork chop. Mom always said “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” and Gabe always said “When you’re drunk, shut up”, and I say I want to read things that actually make my life better. No chef is able to cook shitty food every day and turn it around just because a critic is in his store. Our customers are our critics and our fans, and they all should be treated like every action we do will be the subject of their next review.