Restaurateur’s View: Food Critics Essential in a Yelping Age

I jumped with joy when standing outside of our tiny restaurant, Chal Chilli, in Curry Hill. I had just received an email notification saying, “Julia Moskin (@juliamoskin) is now following you on Twitter!”. I called my mom and co-founder and tried explaining to her the digital language of Twitter. She didn’t quite get the service but did understand that we had been spotted by a New York Times critic and told me that it had to mean that we were doing something right. Chal Chilli was only four months old back then and at the time we had been in the middle of the first encounter with New York’s other major force for food criticism, namely, Yelpers. My mom and I are a pair of new restaurateurs in New York and we have a few thoughts on the growing hegemony of Yelp and the dwindling power of the established food critics. Bottom line: we are concerned.

My immigrant mother did not get into the restaurant business to make money. She did it because she wanted to mix her spices and make people happy. In terms of money my mother already succeeded in the immigrant dream and the same held true for me. When I joined her in launching Chal Chilli, I was working as a lawyer at Skadden, one of the richest law firms in the world. It was not money that brought us to Curry Hill. It was the love of food. To do something new and bold in the culinary world. However, because we immediately got thrown onto Yelp, rather than being able to focus on devising our culinary identity, we had to cater to the horde, we had to save ourselves from personal attacks from ex-employees who trolled us and called us names, we had to defend ourselves from people who accused us of “caring too much” about them, we had to become beggars to Yelp’s arcane and mysterious algorithm that kept burying our positive reviews and putting the negative ones on the page. Until we paid Yelp money for advertising. Then all was well with Yelp.

We are concerned because democracy is not good for innovation in food. Catering to the casual palate does not encourage experimentation, it requires making oneself similar to all the other known quantities out there, killing one’s experimental spirit. We have founded New York’s first Indo-Thai fusion restaurant. When we started we didn’t actually know how our food would be received. Would it be likened to Burmese food (because Burma is halfway between India and Thailand). Or would we, because we are on Curry Hill, end up getting amalgamated with all the other Indian and Pakistani restaurants despite our desire to be distinct? To recognize our character we needed time. We started out without a fancy Public Relations firm. Instead we relied on New York’s incredible food industry. Just through Twitter and the Toklas Society, an organization appreciated by Ms. Moskin herself, I was able to find out about the who’s who of Food Media. I took a sweet shot and emailed Pete Wells myself. And, he replied within ten hours to tell us he was happy to know about Chal Chilli. Similarly, Melissa Kravitz of The Daily Meal replied within days and her review is the star of our window. Amanda Kludt always greeted me encouragingly at Toklas Events. One cannot even fathom how much the criticism bolstered us, gave us encouragement, reminded us that even though we were immigrant upstarts we were and could be part of the New York dining scene. The criticism kept us from feeling ordinary.

The reason we had felt ordinary till that point because like many small restaurants, our only media critics had been the Yelp members. Yelp means a destruction of the most important element of the culinary world. The educated, technically knowledgeable judge. People like Julia Moskin. People like Robert Sietsema. Their approach to a new restaurant, particularly one that is trying to innovate, is very different than a Yelper’s. Whereas the Yelper will come in, order the simplest dishes, and then complain to high-hell about never coming back to the place all while using up the throwing up emoji, the critic will actually come in, order specialty dishes, eat them, then come back later up to three more times, and really try to get a sense of what is going on. Then, after that, even if a bad review will come, it won’t be insulting, it will be constructive. This is important. The food critic cares about fixing and guiding. The Yelper cares about destroying and replacing. Everyone’s beef should taste like In-n-out and Chipotle. The same doesn’t hold true for the food critic. She knows the impact of spices. Of geography. Of sourcing. Let me put it in language the Yelpers will understand. You are the Borg and the food critic is Captain Picard. One wants to amalgamate, the other wants to nurture.

All this Yelp venting brings me to Moskin’s article on Eater’s acquisition of three new restaurant critics. In her second to last paragraph she wrote, “Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle have scaled back on restaurant criticism and food coverage. New York City has maintained its cadre of professional critics, but in many places, there is now no critical voice stronger than the chorus at Yelp.com, which offers a platform for consumer feedback, much of it anonymous.” And all I want to say is, THANK YOU to all critics of New York for not following West Coast’s lead and maintaining the standards of professional criticism in food. Small owners like us take a pride knowing that New York Times or Eater approved us and enjoyed our creation. We hang the reviews with pride at our walls and glass windows to show the world that we’ve been fortunate enough to be reviewed. Yelp reviews don’t make the walls. We agree that Yelpers come to our restaurants with high expectations but we’re also human beings. We’ve also had bad and good days.

This is welcome. Anything that brings more food critics into the food industry is good for the industry, otherwise we run the risk of becoming responsive to the Yelper, and what that means is that we run the risk of becoming slaves to the dollar, instead of slaves to quality, craftsmanship, and love.

Ayesha Kiani can be found in @ChalChilli.