Buffalo Rising Online

NorPark,

You really aren't alone. I hear that complaint from owners, chefs and foodies a couple of times a week. A critic yields a lot of clout, especially in a one paper town. The responsibility to the readers and the restaurants is tremendous.

There was a lot of debate when Okun added the disclaimer to her articles about the ratings being based on her one time visit. Additionally, there isn't a waiter or owner in town that doesn't know what she looks like. That makes it pretty hard to get an honest take on a restaurant's abilities.

It's all very interesting from my perspective. Restaurant culture in Buffalo is changing rapidly and the average Buffalonian is much more educated about cuisine than he/she was a decade ago. In the last three years alone the evolution here in the city has been remarkable. Soon the Buffalo News will need to up the ante when it comes to how food is judged and graded.

Hoss,

We absolutely, positively don't take payment or trade for any of the pieces here on YUM. We also, unlike other local organizations, pay for every single meal at a featured restaurant unless something is offered to us during a pre-scheduled interview.

Most of the time I eat at the restaurant first, without them having any idea who I am. Sometimes, especially for the main restaurant features in the print magazine, I'll eat there two or three times. I then call and schedule an interview. Often when I call I ask if the chef would be willing to prepare something for photographs. I would prefer not to do this, but the lighting in restaurants is bad, especially at night, and I think that the restaurateur is as happy as I am to be able to offer our readers clear and well-lit photos of their work. Many of the more casual reviews consist of me and my camera having a meal in private. The recent review of Lombardo's is an example of the first kind of feature I've mentioned- a meal in secret followed by a scheduled interview. In that same issue I covered Nektar's brunch, where I ate and snapped away without announcing myself and wrote the piece without an interview.

As for positivity- we feel that our job on BR is to inform you about restaurants and the people that run them, and to focus on what businesses are doing right. BR has made it very clear that its objective is to promote Buffalo and critical reviews don't, at this time, fit into that picture for us. Our choice to avoid negativity has nothing to do with a fear of losing advertising dollars. Reputable restaurants, in my opinion, would want to advertise with a paper featuring a qualified critic either way. It has to do with how we feel about the city and our place in it as a whole. Our readers are the best critics out there. We feel that as a blog, the readers have the option to weigh in, to use this as a forum for offering up stories of their own experiences. Collectively their overall opinions are a better, more well rounded picture of a restaurant than one person could ever paint.

On that note, there are quite a number of restaurants that I have eaten at and then decided not to cover because my experience was so bad I couldn't sort out a single thing worth writing about. As I said, a business can be featured for a specific thing they do well, but don't think that just because a piece is about a single element of a specific business that that means that they necessarily fall into the category of "a bad restaurant we could only write one good thing about." We feature 365 articles a year on food in Buffalo, not to mention the pieces that run int he magazine. We have to be very creative about how we cover things in order to keep YUM full, fresh and interesting.

I'm not going to say that it isn't sometimes difficult to hold my tongue about things I dislike or disagree with, but that is not my function here at BR. We've consciously decided to leave that up to you. Buffalonians become more and more food savvy every day and they've never had the wool pulled over their eyes easily. Though every restaurant has a bad night and should be given a chance more than once, you guys are the real "critics" in this forum.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or you need clarification on anything. I'm happy to try and clear up any misconceptions about how we run YUM. If some of my explanations are a little fuzzy, I apologize. It's late and I've had a good meal and a delicious (and potent) Tom & Jerry! Again, if I can offer any other insights, please let me know.

Andrew-

Thank you. Wow, I'm blushing. Someday I'd love to talk with you about food and photography; maybe we could have lunch.

I understand your point about the one-visit review. Perhaps it is the standard. I know that I wouldn't be comfortable handing out stars after one visit. Unfortunately, people pay more attention to the stars than the words that follow it; those little buggers can make or break a restaurant and shouldn't be taken lightly.

As far as Okun's ability to dine incognito, perhaps my connection with the industry side of the restaurant world leads me to believe that everyone knows what she looks like. Buffalo is certainly not NYC where the big critic's photo hangs above the time clock, but I don't know anyone that's been in the business for any length of time that doesn't know what she looks like. Again, that may just be my perception. In a town like Buffalo where who you know and who knows you is a major part of life and the ease at which you maneuver through it, I think that being a recognizable critic has distinct disadvantages. In another city, maybe it would be a different story. I know that once I've revealed myself through an interview to a restaurant owner, my next visit is almost always different. I've had an owner send champagne to my table when I was simply in having dinner.

You're right about the presence of a critic not being able to change a bad menu or cover up awful service. If it could, I'd like to dispatch one toot sweet to a good number of local stinkers. I admire you and everyone else speaking up for Okun, and full well knew that talking about her reviews was going to be a difficult subject. If I didn't hear about it from so many foodies and people in the business so often, I would have kept it to myself.

So what do they want? I hear the term "real critic" all of the time. I know that here at BR, I'm not one. I see myself as a feature writer. So what does "real critic" mean to people? Some restaurants deserve scathing reviews, but certainly the idea that being a good critic is only about being really negative can't be right. Does Okun appear to not have the knowledge base or restaurant experience that people want? Are her choices of restaurants and what she chooses to eat at them too safe? Are her pieces light on real content? Maybe it's simply a problem of being a one critic town and they're really just wishing for another perspective.

I have my own opinions, but I'm more curious to hear from all of you.

I think you're going to have a hard time finding dry-aged beef for sale to the general public. I could be wrong. There are tips online for "dry-aging" beef in your refrigerator. I'd give The Meating Place on Grant Street a call. And, I'm with Golden Lark- the butchers in the Broadway Market provide all kinds of meats and cuts unavailable or hard to find at the supermarket- rabbit, duck, oxtails, etc. The local Asian markets have a good handle on snake, insects and fowl, but it's all frozen.