When I tell people I write about restaurants for a living (or for at least part of my living; I’m not privileged enough to live off my stomach entirely and I doubt I ever will be), they always ask the same questions. I know what they’re going to say before they even open their mouths; they get a curious look on their face and I just know what they’re going to say next. It’s one of four things.
They ask, “Do the restaurants know you’re coming? Do you tell them who you are?”
Then they ask, “Do you pay for the meals yourself?”
And then, “Do you get to bring your friends?”
Finally, “Do you get to choose where you eat?”
Sometimes the order changes, but they always ask all of those questions. I don’t know, if our positions were reversed, whether I’d ask the same things, but I’d bet good odds that I would. I like asking people about their jobs, and the four big questions really speak to what people, including me, are always curious about: secrets, money, companionship, free will.
So I will answer them for you here. No, restaurants never know that I’m coming; I make reservations under different names and try my best to not tip them off. One of the hardest things about the job, weirdly enough, is keeping track of the dishes’ prices, which I’m expected to include in the article; thank god for cell phones with decent cameras is all I can say. (And menus posted outside restaurants—nothing relaxes me more than seeing one posted outside when I arrive for a reviewable meal.) Once in a while they figure it out—most often on a repeat visit, post-publication—and I find it deeply embarrassing.
Do I pay? No, I have a budget, a pitifully small one, too, which means I rarely review high-end places, unless I’m doing the lunch special or am able to convince a friend to pitch in. Sometimes I don’t mind going over budget and letting the cost of the meal eat into what I get paid; I treat them like subsidized meals. Like I said, restaurant reviewing makes up a pretty small piece of the fractured and terrifyingly unreliable pie that is my freelance writing income, so I feel okay with that.
Do I get to bring friends? I kind of have to, though I rarely let them chip in (I’ll let them get the tip if we go over-budget.) But a meal for one isn’t enough to fill up 725 words; I need to taste more, get more of a sense of what they’re good at (or bad at), in order to write an informed review. Plus it’s fun to share lots of different kinds of food and talk about it.
And yes, I do get to choose where to eat, although this is the hardest part of the job. Montreal has a lot of restaurants, and there’s plenty to discover, but it’s not as big as New York or Los Angeles; there’s less material to go around. I like to review new restaurants, with the occasional exception where I re-assess some old institution or another or there’s some major turnover in the kitchen. But I see myself, critic-wise, as a discoverer, a finder-outer, a recommender. I get a lot of pleasure out of having someone come up to me and say they got turned on to something they liked—be it a movie or a restaurant or whatever—because of something I wrote.
I applied for this job on a whim. My paper’s food critic had announced her departure, and I, already working there as a film writer, thought, hey, I like food. In the beginning, I admit I was not specifically qualified beyond knowing how to write. But I have a fickle and addictive personality. I like to discover new things and figure them out and get really into them, and it’s a best-case scenario situation for me when I can turn that sort of obsession into something profitable—not necessarily financially profitable, but just something that benefits me somehow.
I don’t write about restaurants as much as I used to and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the trouble of researching and travelling around town and rounding up friends and everything else. I know, I know, I should have such problems, but once you do something enough times, on a deadline, it loses its glamour and just becomes work. (I’m not complaining, I’m really not.)
But even if I do move on, nothing has benefited me like this weird little job has. It has changed my life in some profound ways. It has changed the way I think about food completely, what its place in my life is, and how I experience eating it. I think about every bite now—not just what it tastes or feels like but how it was made, what its intentions are, if that makes sense, what its effect is on me both physiologically and emotionally.
I used to worry that writing about things like movies or music or food would remove my ability to enjoy them uncritically. It’s so the opposite. When you have to really, really think about what you’re tasting or listening to or watching it engages you on a very profound level I hadn’t really thought possible before. “Critical distance” is a misleading phrase; it doesn’t really exist in that moment. You get closer, not further away. And you don’t need to be a critic to experience that either; you just need to allow yourself to be open to whatever the experience is trying to communicate. Because everything you let in has something it wants to tell you.
