I will soon write my final restaurant review. I’ll miss restaurant criticism, but will feel some relief too.
When I cook at home, I fuss over ingredients and don’t mind paying for a more desirable version of the same ingredient. Food production can be back-breaking and underpaid work, so I’m cool with spending good money for good product. In most restaurants you surrender control over your ingredients. You’re letting the market decide for you, in an economic climate where half of new restaurants fail in year one, and three-quarters are toast after five. In order to avoid that statistic, a typical restaurant isn’t going to spend more than it has to. A “bad value” alert goes off in my head when a meal made with mediocre raw materials costs more than the one I could have prepared with better ingredients.
There are many wonderful exceptions to this observation, like the farm-to-table type restaurants that do amazing things with quality ingredients, and I review the bleep out of these. But the 99 percent of restaurants that don’t use ingredient provenance as a selling point are in my purview as well. This is a good thing, because many ethnic restaurants are in the generally affordable category, and these can be among the most interesting and delicious in any price range.
When I was reviewing a great Vietnamese restaurant recently, I considered the “salted and pepper shrimp,” but I had just read about how seafood from Thailand is often fished with slave labor. Not wanting to eat a shrimp harvested by a slave, I asked if by any chance they were Thai. The server had no idea.
But duty is duty. I had a feeling about those shrimp. And I was right. They were tempura-fried in rice-flour batter, caked with a chunky salt crust, dusted with black pepper, and topped with stir-fried green onions and jalapeños. They were juicy and crunchy and dazzling, and I made a note-to-self to pick up some Gulf shrimp and try this at home.
Because the bottom line is, if you’re going to be a high-maintenance food snob on a mediocre income, cooking at home is the only sustainable option. You can pay more for pastured meat; local, organic vegetables; eggs from pampered chickens; pesticide-free, hand-grown produce and seafood harvested by non-slaves, and still pay less than you would at a cheap restaurant, while sending positive ripples down the food chain.
I will miss the ethnic restaurants, the fancy places, and my favorite guilty pleasure, the sushi spots. But I won’t miss the systemic food waste of the industry.
That Vietnamese restaurant makes a great bowl of pho beef noodle soup. Part of what makes pho is the accompanying side salad of basil, cilantro, sprouts, and other fresh herbs and veggies. This restaurant serves large and beautiful side salads, several of which I sadly watched being cleared away from a nearby table when its occupants had finished their pho. Those beautiful, fresh, untouched herbs were going into the trash. I wished there were someone in the kitchen re-washing those herbs and sending them back out with the next order of pho, but that, of course, would be illegal.
“Unfortunately, health codes prevent reserving of ANYTHING served to people,” emails Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland and an expert on food waste. A restaurant will throw out 4-10 percent of its inventory before it can be served, he said. On top of that there is plate waste, like that uneaten side salad, or untouched bread rolls.
There’s a cool new software program, Lean Path, that helps restaurants reduce food waste. But even that won’t solve the restaurateur’s dilemma in choosing between serving a big pho salad and then throwing away perfectly good fresh produce, or serving smaller pho salads. As a critic, I’m supposed to berate the pho houses that serve skimpier, less waste-generating side salads.
In order to cook every dish on the menu, a restaurant kitchen must keep a long list of items in stock, including many perishable ones. And if some dishes aren’t ordered, ingredients get tossed. This problem is compounded in restaurants with large, diverse menus, which have a longer list of ingredients. Some chains have rules that high-demand food be tossed if not used immediately – McDonald’s French fries hit the dumpster if they aren’t sold within 7 minutes of being cooked.
My job as a critic isn’t typically to discuss food waste or the rights of farm workers, the ills of sugar or the environmental devastation caused by industrial livestock. I need to make sure there is enough chile on the enchilada. And to my taste, there hardly ever is.
Being a restaurant critic has been an honor, and a lot of fun. When this gig is up, I’ll be focusing on restaurants that offer something I can’t make. I’ll stick to restaurants that can educate and inspire me to raise my game at home.
If I could just make a good-enough bowl of pho, I might never leave the house at all, except to buy ingredients for more pho. Instead I’m still an apprentice, hoping to figure out how to re-create it in the comfort of my own home, where not a single basil leaf will be wasted. It’s going to take a lot more research to get there.