The Assault Of The Critic – The Saints Counter!

‘Sinner’ TP is justified in his outburst against the tirade of the ‘so called’ food critics. No, I am not patronizing my friend, but just letting it be, since he is definitely one of the them who has been affected by one too many Critic.

I have however no such inhibitions. In fact I realized it way too early in my career that I was getting into a career, which any Tommy, Dick or Harry can get into a debate on and also give expert opinions on. I took it in my stride and let the tongues wag. I would let them go ahead & describe what the most ideal pastry should be like. They would just go berserk with their yapping & while all this happens I present him a pastry. It’s silence after that for some time. I had heard what he likes & had incorporated them all into that small piece of culinary art. It’s just a smile after that.  I had learnt that good chefs speak less & listen more! That but isn’t the virtue a ‘critic’ brings to the table. 

The ‘Critic’ infact is a wrong term coined by the media in recent times to denote someone who actually does the tough job of scanning the markets for interesting food & beverage outlets, concepts & combinations & trends. They then run the terrible risk of consuming them earlier than most (now that’s treading uncharted territories) & reporting their version of the experience. In a way they act as a EWS (Early Warning System) in our trade.

In an experience based industry there’s yet to come up a more authentic way to present the fares of a restaurant than to get genuine people to write about their personal experiences. Genuine people do write, but only on the comments cards of the restaurant & the world cares two hoots about it. In more recent times some more boisterous souls post things online about their culinary adventure for two reasons. One; to tell people that he/she was there.  Two: to get people to believe it that he/she could afford to be there. Well, fact is neither the comment card nor the facebook post reaches 200,000 people on a guaranteed basis. Unless the person tweeting is King Khan himself, but when he does it, people do take notice. However shortly after the Khan’s gone the owner of the restaurant is seen with his pants down & the world gets more reasons to gossip about orientations and the cost of being in business.  Actually the cost of that one tweet or pic weighs too much for the buckles to hold up the trousers.

So you are back to where we started from. With the Food Critic. For the only other thing with some kind of credibility attached in our country is the media.  As a marketing man I have gone scouting to many a publication only to invite its ‘food critics’ to come & report our fare. Undoubtedly a positive report has lead to higher awareness of your product & a significant increment in the demand for your fare.

Does doing that much transform a Food Reporter/Correspondent into a food critic though? NAY!!! To be a critic means a whole lot more. To criticise someone (positively of course) one must have through knowledge of the subject, which unfortunately most food critics don’t. That’s what my friend ‘the sinner’ is blaring out loud. So is he wrong in saying that? Well if he is, then so are all the others in the media. For doing the same job of reporting news from main streams like politics and business, you still call the journalist a reporter or a correspondent. It somehow doesn’t seem to make them neither a ‘political critic’ nor a ‘business critic’.

Food is a matter of personal preferences and it’s a known fact that preferences changes with time. During my stints in Dubai & Abu Dhabi, I used to find my options very limited being a vegetarian. What were available were just Falafel Rolls with pickled vegetables & Zaatar Bread. Both have very unique tastes. On day one I liked neither. However as time progressed & I was forced to eat them time and again, I developed a taste for them. Now, if I were a critic I would have trashed it on day 1 and sang songs about it on day 40. Fact is the dishes remained the same only my opinion had changed. 40 days into the land I had understood the geography of the place & realized how difficult it was to grow vegetables in that arid land. I then suddenly developed a lot of respect for the locals who understood the sensibilities of the few vegetarians in their country & putting up something on the menu, so that we dint go to bed hungry. Now, I wasn’t appreciating the food as much, but it was the thought behind the effort that seemed stupendous. It’s these finer aspects of a cuisine that critics minus in-depth understanding of cuisines lack. 

The emotion a Chef goes through when you compare his food with someone else’s is very similar to that of mothers, if you compare her child with someone else’s. Besides Food Critics must know that there’s an upcoming breed of ‘media critics’ on the anvil ;-) and as King Khan famously said “no great movie was ever made by a critic”. 

Serious critics must spend 2 days in a restaurant set up to be able to understand the business they comment on for a living & more. Let the 1^st day be in a tandoori kitchen preferably in MAY or JUNE here in Delhi NCR. On the 2^nd day just spend some time with the promoters and finance guys to understand the crazy maze of legal and bureaucratic  processes that the industry is made to endure just to be in business. It’s good to be in the know and write about what goes behind putting up the show that you see.

Such content however neither raises eyebrows, nor increases TRP’s. If that’s the only look out though, god be with you!

It was the Sinner 1^st & now the Saint has also keyed in his take on “the assault of the critics”. As the Saint & the voice of reason, I would like your comments whether the food critic is a bane or a boon to our business.

Cheers............. DK (The Saint)

Every Saint Has A Past & Every Sinner Has A Future !