food writers Archives — Being John Curtas

Letter of the Month – So You Want to be a Food Writer…

October 25, 2022October 27, 2022

Ed. note: Every week we get e-mails, DMs, texts, etc. asking for our favorite (fill in the blank) __________, steakhouse, sushi, dim sum parlor, high falutin’ French, you name it. We’re always happy to send advice along, but none of those make us think the way Jessica recently did:

Dear Mr. Curtas,

For the last 10 years I have followed your works. Dreaming of the indulgent, and exquisite food you have been blessed to eat. Now, at just shy of 30 years old; I have finally decided on a career change. From being the youngest person in the state of Indiana to get my cosmetology license. To then being a stay at home mother. I have finally decided, after decades of loving food, cooking and eating. I want to write about, and share my food experiences, like yourself.

After doing research on how to start, it seems quite daunting.

At this point you must be wondering why I am even bothering you. I would like to ask your advice. What is a good way to start out in the field? Should I go straight to social media? Should I be blogging? Should I make Tic Tok and YouTube videos? Do I need a shtick (like I only eat at certain types of places)? Any advice you are willing to bestow upon me, would be more then welcomed!

Sincerely,

Jessica

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Dear Jessica,

I’m going to give you two answers – one short (sort of) and probably along the lines you are looking for, and the other, another in a long line of my logorrheic lamentations on my alimentary ascriptions.

Answer #1:

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The first thing I would coach you to do is look around and then look inward. What are you really passionate about? Is it cooking? Eating out? Do you love something about your family’s food history that you’ve always wanted to share with others? Do you have family recipes you are proud of? Are you an avid baker? Does the thought of hunting down a great food truck quicken your pulse? Or do you dream of gourmet meals in dressed up settings?

This is a long way of saying yes, to get followers and be successful at this (however you define success) you will need a point of view and a shtick….but that shtick should always be an extension of who you are.

Then, I would look around where I live and check out who is covering the food scene. Check local magazines. Google local food bloggers. Check out TikTok and Instagram and see who is posting a lot in your area. And podcasting. Hell, even check out “elite Yelpers” and find out what they’re talking about.

Like any worthwhile endeavor, you have to start small. The greatest chef began making bread at his grandmother’s knee. The Hall of Fame ballplayer was once in Little League. Search for a niche in an area you love and see what unique voice you could bring to the subject.

Define what is special about your love of food and approach it from that angle. Use others for inspiration but try to find what makes your love of food unique to you and then figure out the best way to share it with others.

As for social media, I’m all for it, even if, for writers like me, its explosion has been more akin to what that asteroid did to the dinosaurs. TikTok is for youngsters (sort of) and those with the time (and skill) to produce short videos. Nothing against gloppy cheese pulls and humongous tacos, but there’s a gazillion TikTokkers and YouTubers out with whom you will be competing. Distinguishing yourself is going to be mighty hard. But if videos are your thing (and for those under 40, they seem to be), have at it. The learning curve isn’t that steep, but you have to do whatever you do consistently. The food landscape is littered with people who wanted to blog, or podcast, or post about food on some site, and then flamed out after a few months. The only way to build a following is to be a constant presence on whatever venue you choose, and hope that word of mouth increases your visibility.

Instagram is simpler, and becoming easier (either for still photos or videos), with the added bonus of now being more realistic and less concerned with professionally-polished content. As a recent article in Eater put it:

“The things that I see in photos now are really more of that photo dump style,” says Maggie. “It’s less of the perfectly curated marble studio and more interest in my actual kitchen that I actually cooked in.”

All of which bodes well for klutzy amateur food photogs like us, who simply want to get people excited about the foods we love.

To summarize: Find a shtick you love and shtick with it. Pick your platform and go nuts. But always be yourself.

If you truly want to write about food, the climb is much steeper and the audience much smaller, as you can read below…

Answer #2:

(Let’s discuss our days as a galloping gourmet)

Before I begin doling out the infallible, inspiring, and unerringly erudite advice for which I am known, let me begin by noting that the landscape has changed dramatically since I began my career in food, no more so than in the past decade. The following is a much longer overview of my food writing trajectory (over ground which has been plowed before), to give you a little history on the subject of food writing, and perhaps some guidance.

I do not know how well you write or how much you intend to do it. I used to say that to be a good food writer you had to cook a lot, eat a lot, travel a lot and read a lot. The past ten years have relentlessly, systematically dismantled each of those (supposed) pillars of knowledge. Now, all you have to do now is know how to manage a social media account, none of which have anything to do with the written word. Cooking knowledge, eating adventures, and traveling experiences have also taken a hit, since with the swipe of a finger, a person can sound like they know all about Hong Kong dim sum parlors, or the best pastrami in New York.

Back in the Late Cretaceous period, you had to put in the work. Now, all you have to do is…

Fake It Till You Make It Emily GIF - Fake It Till You Make It Emily Emily In Paris - Discover & Share GIFs

(No passport? No problem.)

….which seems to be the motto of your generation (sorry).

Writing is rapidly becoming a lost art, right down there with toad doctors and drysalters, Though it may be an endangered species, for forty years of my life, the written word was the only way to communicate about food. In cooking, home cooks used to have to decipher impenetrable prose to learn a recipe from a printed page. This was how people were taught for over a century. Now, you can learn everything from mille feuille (puff pastry) to how to butcher a whole pig from a YouTube video.

Writing is hard. A real pain in the ass. (The classic saying is: writers hate writing but love having written.) Writing is its own reward, but you have to be driven to do it, and do it all the time. You can no more be an occasional writer (about food or anything else) anymore than you can be a good part-time violinist.

If you want to write about food, it helps immensely to be a good writer first. One can learn to write well, but as with music and sports, it helps to have a facility for it, and to start young. I knew I could write about food before I ever started doing it. I knew it in the way a good athlete knows from the beginning that they can play their sport. But as with golf (my favorite sport), even if you’re good, you have to keep at it, and even with constant practice, it can be frustrating.

Reading and writing are exponentially harder than talking and listening, which is why there are 2.4 million podcasts out there, and also why so much food media has taken to visual and spoken word platforms. Posting videos beats the pants off of slaving away for hours at a keyboard trying to think of entertaining ways to describe a dish or a meal. This is not to say producing YouTube content or podcasting is easy, but it ain’t as hard as churning out a thousand entertaining words about a restaurant.

Precious few people now want to read about food anymore than people want to write about it. The internet has created a race to the bottom, with both media and customers feeding off each other (PUN. INTENDED!) by demanding less and less in the form of thoughtful content — the triumph of unbridled narcissism over gastronomic rumination.

Well That Didnt Go Well Julia Child GIF - Well That Didnt Go Well Julia Child Julia GIFs (Mr. Curtas’s less-than egg-cellent TV career hit a snag when they discovered he had a face made for radio)

In the beginning, there was nothing insidious about social media platforms. They were convenient and free and immediately brought millions into the world of good food, nutrition, and better eating. In the space of this century they made more knowledgeable consumers out of an entire generation. I called this the Age of the Blogs (2002-2012) and what others have called the “good internet” or the Golden Age of the Internet — when people sought out websites and in-depth information about everything from pizza to politics.

Once Facebook took off though (around 2010), followed in short order by Instagram (in 2014 ) most blogs got plowed under by the sheer mass of two sites where everyone could get their news, info, pictures, and friends without ever having to leave a web page (cf. search engine optimization).

The rise of social media further combined to (almost) obliterate the mainstream food media where I made my reputation. Ten years ago, you could find me all over old school venues and some social media. Now it is just the opposite. I made my name by writing — first with radio commentaries (about food and restaurants), and later in print periodicals, which led to this website, TV appearances and eventually to my book (shameless plug alert!): EATING LAS VEGAS– The 52 Essential Restaurants…

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The big national food magazines now exist only as a memory. Most local periodicals have either thrown in the towel, or gone completely to the free internet (with content that appeals to those with the attention span of a housefly). Food TV (what is left of it) has been reduced to ridiculous competition cooking shows. What has been buried under this avalanche of information are pearls of wisdom. (MIX! THAT! METAPHOR!) Expertise is no longer valued. Now people want short, sweet and sexy — easy-to-digest info better at grabbing attention than making you think.

It is into this world you will step, Jessica:.

Tomato food pizza GIF on GIFER - by Feloril

Thus is the food media world now paradoxically saturated with content and starving for substance. Most media is either pay-to-play (advertorials disguised as journalism), or the kind of “influencer” nonsense (pretty pictures and gooey videos) designed to advertise to Yelpers. Getting paid to write anymore is a pipe dream. The few of us who still get freelance gigs are doing it for peanuts. The number of food writers in America who actually draw a salary they can live on would probably fit around my dining room table. The days of Anton Ego are long gone.

So, whatever you do, dear Jessica, do it for yourself and no one else. The best a young person can hope to do in this climate is to develop an audience through social media, and then cultivate some kind of content-creating gig that will pay enough to subsidize your culinary appetites. But keep in mind, you will never be good at what you do, if you are only doing it for the clicks, or the $$$, or the free food.

Final Thoughts:

In his excellent essay on the essence of criticism, H. D. Miller writes:

Anton Ego has a pure soul. He is someone who cares only and exclusively about art (in this case cookery). He knows what is good and suffers enormously from what is bad. This is close to what I mean by “critical sense”, that the critic knows, deeply knows, the difference between what is good and what is not and is emotionally affected by it.

The job of a good critic is to educate, not simply appeal to the lowest common denominator. You must be in love with what you are writing about, and you should want to relentlessly share you passion with others. Without that level of emotional commitment, you will most certainly fail. With it, you will always find the devotion to keep going, no matter how large or small your audience.

I have always written for me, or someone like me. Every word — going back to my first radio scripts of 1994 — has been aimed at an avid home cook with an insatiable love of restaurants, travel, food and drink. I write for someone who gets as excited by a good cheeseburger as they do about a life-changing gourmet meal. Most of all, I have written for that person who wants to eat the best food, in the most authentic places, wherever they find themselves. Who wants to know why this taco is better than that taco, or why some famous chef isn’t worth your time or money, while some unknown cook, slaving to make the rent, is worth a trip — sometimes across town, sometimes across an ocean.

This is the best advice I can give you: think about who you are and what you love. Write, blog, podcast or produce something in whatever format for the person you are, and for an imaginary person just like you, who gets as excited as you do about whatever it is you are talking about. Do that and you will find an audience who appreciates you for all the right reasons, no matter what its size.

Best and bon appétit,

John Curtas

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Seymour Britchky

May 28, 2021May 28, 2021

Except for a brief interlude in the 1940s, the Japanese have always enjoyed a reputation for graciousness and hospitality.

Stay away from the Kipper Paté — it looks, smells, and (one guesses) tastes like cat food.

Nothing about this restaurant is as remarkable as its reputation.

– Seymour Britchky

He has been dead for seventeen years, yet his ghost haunts my prose like the specter of Antoine Careme over a chocolate sculpture.

Acid-tongued, razor-sharp, narrow-eyed wit defined his prose. A curmudgeon through and through, his reviews are works of art unto themselves, untethered from the prosaic, dismissive of something so pedestrian as evaluating a sauce or a piece of fish. For him a restaurant was a holistic experience — an encounter he dissected from the front door to the petit fours. Calling him acerbic is like calling water wet.

New York restaurateur Drew Nieporent once described him as a Larry David-type writer, seeing things in a restaurant no one else saw. And he did so with precision and barely a wasted word. True, some of his sentences were longer than Tolstoy but, as food writer Regina Schrambling put it:

“What he did was so pared down. You got such a rich sense of the place in so few words. These days I’ll read a review, and I’m just reading and reading and reading and, oh, my god, I’m just trudging through this. You don’t have to tell us about every forkful, and you don’t pull back enough to give us a sense of a place.”

I think about him whenever I read some sad attempt to describe a dish by a too-eager amateur (and quite a few professionals) of what I call the “I liked how the flavors of cardamon and tarragon played off the crunchy spaghetti bathed in vindaloo foam” school of food over-writing.

When Seymour said “they get good produce here” you believed him, there was no need to detail the tomatoes.

Part of the needlessly flowery descriptions that have plagued food writing for the past decade can be laid squarely at the feet of chefs — to whom writers ceded the high ground of food nomenclature when they let them get away with logorrheic elucidations like:

Carpaccio of Maldivian long line caught yellow fin tuna’ – fanning an island of Rio Grande Valley avocado creme fraiche, topped with young coconut, with a splash of Goan lime, coriander and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds

Chefs love to pad their menus with fancy descriptions like these (so they can charge more), and invariably, food writers rise to the bait and think they have to follow suit. (Mix. That. Metaphor!) Do we need to know the limes are Goan, the line was long, and the coconut young? Only if you require reminding that the fish were once swimming.

What we are left in the 21st Century is the overwrought and the under-baked. Flowery, meaningless prose, or spoon-fed pablum in pictures, videos, and Tik Toks — infantilizing our tastes as they numb our brains.

What made Seymour so entertaining was he had humor and a point of view. Good luck finding either in food writing these days.

Food writing has gotten so boring (and political) it is no surprise that videos and influencers have stepped in to fill the void. True, a picture is worth a thousand words, and our societal attention span now rivals that of a housefly, but in the end, internet influencing is just another marketing wolf aimed at those in sheeple’s clothing.

Instagram does not inform or compare. There is no depth; there is no substance. The only point of view is that of the camera’s. Thus, in less than a decade, has food journalism been reduced to a visual — no imagination needed — a two-dimensional enticement requiring nothing more than a blank stare. To paraphrase Frank Lloyd Wright: restaurant writing has devolved into chewing gum for the eyes.

If you’re in a charitable mood, you might say our communications about food have come full circle. People have always eaten with their eyes, and forever have trusted others to tell them what was tasty. It was only in the latter half of the 20th Century, when the printed word was king, economies were booming, and photojournalism was in its infancy, that paragraphs were used to convey what used to be done with a grunt.

Britchky may not have been everyone’s cup of mead, but he made you think. And he put you right there, in the place where he had sat, and let you know what to expect and whether it was worth your hard-earned cash. His only filters were his own sensibilities, and that’s what made him so much fun.

He got put out to pasture in the early 90s — a relic of a time when reading about food was almost as much fun as eating it. To this day I think about him every time I sit down to chronicle any meal I’ve had, and to my dying day I will appreciate this:

Mamma Leone’s has been called the most underrated restaurant in New York, which tells us more about the ratings than about the restaurant. There are worse restaurants in New York, but those are the ones which cannot be described in words, the ones that can only be rendered by example or anecdote. The English language can cope, however, with Mamma’s place – it is stunningly garish and ugly, the food is decent, the service automatic, the customers contented and unliberated cows with bulls and broods in tow.

…over a worthless word salad like this:

A wild array of textures—the shattering, airy crunch of meringue at the edges, and the softer one of toasted almonds, with rolling bubbles and pockets skittering across the surface. They’re more relaxed than a Florentine, more lightweight than a brittle. And they’re altogether really lovely over a cup of coffee with an old friend.

One tells you everything you need to know without mentioning a single dish; the other tells you too much and nothing at all at the same time.

As an ending tribute: a poem about him written after his death by an admiring young woman who was once his neighbor. It captures the essence of Mr. Irascible more than my words of praise ever could. Like me, Bolt is a fan. Unlike me, her view of Britchky’s world is refracted through the prism of New York reality, as well as a gimlet gaze.

Seymour Britchky

Appetite of a Dead Connoisseur

by Julie Bolt

Memory:
When I was nine I rang Seymour Britchky’s
downstairs apartment asking for
an egg. He retorted:
“Egg? Me?
Food critic for The New York Times?”
and turned brusquely, slamming the door.
I stood there stunned for minutes.

Fact:
My husband is frustrated
by my ongoing predilection for ordering
and eating out, much like Seymour Britchky;
I never have an egg.

Fact:
Seymour once wrote,
“Sardi’s most famous dish
Is its cannelloni,
Cat food wrapped in noodle
And welded to the steel ashtray
In which it was reheated under
Its glutinous pink sauce.”

Memory:
When I sold Girl Scout Cookies,
Seymour intently purchased
six boxes of Thin Mints
and fourteen Peanut Butter Patties.
I met my Girl Scout goals.

Reflection:
Beard and bowtie,
Belly bordering on the rotund.
But only bordering, since Seymour
walked, walked everywhere, swiftly.

Memory:
Seymour sneered at my friends
hanging on our Greenwich Village stoop.
With tallboys, hidden joints, and bad posture.
He seethed to my mother: they are thugs.
Embarrassed, she tried to shoo them away.
Did they not know we were hungry and hopeful?

Factoidal Evidence:
1) In New York Seymour was known for:
a) Literary flourish and acerbic wit
b) Pissing off chefs
c) Really, really pissing off chefs
2) In June 2004, Seymour died of pancreatic cancer at age 73.
3) Despite his constant presence on paper, in the city streets, and his name clearly placed in our building directory, Town Hall has no record of any persons in New York by the name of Seymour Britchky.

Reflections:
I’m back to my vacant childhood home
after a decade of desert, ocean, mountain, sky.
Back to the simmering souring city I love;
I expected to see Seymour weaving through streets
Sneering and smiling; greeting, rebuking
Because he is this building, this block,
All the contradictions of this place.

Memory:
Seymour beamed each time
he passed our sheltie, Skippy.
On those rare days, he greeted us:
“Flight of angels!”

Defense
Seymour’s dead and so is my youth
But oh we are both hungry, greedy, hungry
For words, brioche, provocations, trout almondine
Cruelty and soufflé aux fruits de mer,
Peanut butter patties and beauty
Angels in the form of smiling dogs
Hungry for roast squab and squabbling
Greedy for the name in print
Even when it?s a pseudonym and upon death
There?s no proof of existence, only footprints
From Mojave to Café Loup on West 13th
Where I just passed, and Seymour Britchky,
or whatever his name was, often drank alone.

———————————-

Postscript:

Oh Seymour, could you ever have guessed, as you were hunched over your Olivetti, pecking out some lacerating putdown forty years ago, that an aging food writer in Las Vegas, in 2021, would be penning his own homage to your words? I like to think you would be slightly flattered, but from what I’ve read of you, I doubt these adorations would raise even a smile. There were no awards for Seymour Britchky. No television appearances, national recognition, public feuds or fawning fans. All you got was a poem — a poem that I like to think would’ve amused you. Only two chefs showed up to your funeral. Something tells me that would have amused you, too.

EATING LAS VEGAS Announcement + What Do (Real) Restaurant Critics Do?

August 14, 2017August 15, 2017

ELV ANNOUNCEMENT: Huntington Press announced last week that the 6th Edition of EATING LAS VEGAS – The 52 Essential Restaurants is in production and looking forward to a release in mid-November. For the first time, those 52 eateries will be chosen and written about by me and me alone. As much as I’ve appreciated the yeoman’s work that Greg Thilmont and Mitchell Wilburn did on the last two editions (2016 and 2017), Anthony Curtis (publisher of HP) thought it was time for me to do one book with my complete, unfettered and unvarnished look at the Las Vegas restaurant scene. Curtis (no relation, although he does have the same sounding name as our staff), is taking responsibility for the second half of the book — evaluating and listing everything from best burgers to boffo buffets (with an assist here and there from yours truly). As long time publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor, Curtis knows the ins and outs of Las Vegas in a different way than I do, but one that readers will find highly useful when more down-to-earth dining is on the agenda. The heavy lifting (i.e., research and writing) of this edition has been going on for several months now (if you follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram you can get an idea of all the territory I’ve been covering), and the next six weeks is crunch time. In the meantime, below is a taste of one of the additional chapters I’ll be writing that will pepper the book with some of my insights gleaned over 23 years of restaurant writing and covering the Las Vegas food scene. Bon appetit!

WHAT DOES A (REAL) RESTAURANT CRITIC DO?

He writes. She eats. He Cooks. She travels. He eats more. She studies. She reads everything she can about food and travel; he thinks incessantly about food, all the time. And after all that, he/she spends an inordinate amount of time hunched over a keyboard, trying to describe food and the experience of eating out in the pithiest, most informative and entertaining way possible.

Not just the food that he or she happens to be shoveling into their piehole at any one moment, but about how everyone eats. And cooks. And feeds each other. More specifically, a restaurant critic is charged with the responsibility of evaluating how restaurants — who are in the business of selling food to the public to satisfy human hunger — are doing their job.

To be a good restaurant critic you need to eat a lot, write a lot, read a lot and travel a lot. If you lack the stamina for any one of these things, you should hang it up right now.

Being a restaurant critic is like being a porn star: It sounds like great idea until you have to do it all the time, on schedule.

A restaurant critic (a real one, not a casual food blogger) is a writer first and foremost. But their beat isn’t sports or news or politics, it’s rating and reviewing each and every bite of food they ever put in their mouth, and put those thoughts on paper, usually weekly, while facing deadlines to do so.

Most importantly, a restaurant critic is a consumer advocate. If your motivation for the job isn’t to help the general public spend their dining dollars wisely, then you should find another occupation. People who just like to eat out all the time and tell everyone what they thought of their meal are known as blowhards….or food bloggers. Food bloggers, as knowledgeable and passionate as some of them are, are not restaurant critics. A real critic analyzes its subject; opinionated Yelpers/bloggers tell you things are “legit.” Big difference.

The job of a restaurant critic is to eat out, all the time, and write cogent, informative and entertaining essays about what they ate, how good or bad it was, and how they felt about the whole experience. A real restaurant critic gets paid for what they do.

There are four types of professional critics: 1) full-time columnists who write for major metropolitan newspapers or national periodicals (these jobs are becoming increasingly rare, and there are probably less than 100 writers in America who make a living from them); 2) free-lance journalists who work as subcontractors to dead-tree magazines, free newsweeklies, and papers (sometimes as a steady gig, sometimes intermittently); 3) on-line critics who work for established Web sites (like Grub Street, Eater National, Huffington Post); or 4) established critics who maintain Web sites of their own (some of which make money, some of which don’t). Yours truly fit into the second category for the first fifteen years of his restaurant writing career, and now plies his trade as a member of the fourth group (since 2008), with occasional forays into numbers 2) and 3). The rarest of the rare critics actually publish yearly restaurant guides, written on real paper!

Restaurant critics don’t make a lot of money. If you’re lucky enough to land a job with a newspaper, you’ll make about as much as a high school teacher; if you free-lance, you’ll be lucky to top what a barista makes at Starbucks. Being a restaurant critic is like being a poet: you better do it for the love and passion for your subject or you better not do it at all.

Food writers are not restaurant critics. A food writer is someone who writes articles or books about food. A food writer might write an entire book about a specific food topic: Salt by Mark Kurlansky, or diet and food politics: The Ominvore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, or food fads: pick up any monthly food magazine like Bon Appetit or Saveur. Food writers write about themselves (M.F.K.Fisher), or recipes (Julia Child), or their travels (Anthony Bourdain, Joseph Wechsberg, etc.); restaurant critics write about what they taste, and then evaluate the final product of professional chefs who charge the public money for the fruits of their labors at businesses licensed to sell cooked food.

All restaurant critics are food writers, but rare is the food writer who is also a restaurant critic.

Most restaurant critics work on a weekly basis. (There may be a critic out there who manages to eat, digest, think and review multiple restaurants in a week, but if they exist it’s a fair bet they are either independently wealthy, really, really fat or crazy.) Many periodicals assign their critics to double-duty and ask them to file reports and articles on various foods and food trends for publication in between their reviews of restaurants. In this respect, most critics, if they are good writers (more on this below), are able to toggle back and forth as part-time food writers. Most cookbook authors and food writers wouldn’t be caught dead writing hard-boiled, opinionated prose about some phoning-it-in celebrity chef. But that’s just fine with real critics, because you wouldn’t want a food writer to write a proper restaurant review any more than you’d want a cheerleader to be a football coach.

In a typical week, a critic will visit at least half a dozen restaurants — most for the first time, some to get a second look — as they keep their writer’s pipeline stuffed with potential articles, reviews in progress, and possible subjects for future reviews. Back in the Stone Age — and by “Stone Age” I mean the late 20th Century — it was de rigueur for a critic to visit a restaurant multiple times before filing a review. These days, due to the news-a-minute, immediate gratification impact of the Internet, almost no publication, save for maybe a few major newspapers, requires a critic to eat more than one meal in a restaurant before giving their opinion of it. (This is extremely unfortunate, because restaurants are not movies. Every movie critic sees the same movie; a restaurant is an organic being, dependent upon the coordination of many people to do its job well. All it takes is for a dishwasher to call in sick, or a waitress to have a fight with her boyfriend, or a cook to check into rehab for you to have a lousy time. Only by eating in a place multiple times can a real critic take the measure of a place. (Every place in EATING LAS VEGAS – The 50 Essential Restaurants (past editions) has been visited multiple times by me. Every place in the upcoming issue will have been visited by me more times than I can count. No other critic in Las Vegas can make this claim. No other food writer or critic in the history of Las Vegas can come close to it. No brag, just fact.)

Also, due to to Internet: anonymity has gone the way of the tasseled menu and the hat check girl. Every single real critic (those writing for respected publications, or known to wield any real clout in their city) is known to every major restaurant in town. Pictures of them are posted in restaurant kitchens, and the anyone with a mobile phone can look up anyone’s picture in 30 seconds.

With all of the above as a given, your average (professional, respected, loved or hated) restaurant writer has two parts to their job: eating and writing. The eating part isn’t as easy as it seems. You have to have (or develop) an iron stomach, adventuresome attitude and a fine-tuned palate. You must learn to eat things you loathe and learn enough about them to objectively judge their net worth. (Yours truly will never like beets or Vietnamese food, but has eaten enough of both that he could start a farm or a pho parlor.)

Eating a single meal in a restaurant is no more enough to correctly opine on its merits than looking at a single painting is for you to judge an artist — even if you’re a knowledgeable critic. If you’re going to judge a steakhouse, you better have eaten in dozens of them all over the country. An amateur is one who says, “I went to Mama Leone’s and really liked the lasagna.” A restaurant critic has made lasagna in her home kitchen, watched professionals make it on TV, eaten lasagna in the great Italian restaurants of the world, and traveled to Bologna to see and taste the real thing. Any idiot can tell you whether something is good. I don’t know beans about art, but I can tell you that that Rembrandt fellow sure looks like he knows what he was doing. A good critic knows (and tells you) why something is good or bad.

After all of that is lined up — the porn star stamina, the iron stomach, the insatiable appetite, serious cooking skills, traveling the world, eating the world, reading the great food writers — then it’s time to get down to what real restaurant critics really do: write the review.

And that’s the hardest part of all.

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