Off the Shelf: Restaurant Reviewing with the Best

A decent amount of my reading material is food-related, and while I was in culinary school, I almost exclusively read food-related material.  I particularly loved the book "Becoming a Chef" by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, which provides a great overview of the various routes to development as a professional cook. 

It is almost textbook-like in its depth, but it reads like a novel.  It can be read as a how-to guide for culinary development, or it can simply provide insight into the lifestyle for those who are interested.

I recently came across the book "Dining Out" by the same authors, and I dove into it immediately. 

The book does for restaurant critics what "Becoming a Chef" does for chefs.  It provides an in-depth look into the world of restaurant reviewing, from the perspectives of both critics and the chefs and restauranteurs they review.  The book discusses the various career paths taken by critics, but it also analyzes the very practice of reviewing restaurants.  The authors raise a variety of issues that really got me thinking about how restaurants are judged, from the role of the critic (defender of the public's wallet versus aesthetic/artistic critic, similar to a music or theatre critic) to the merits of a quantitative (i.e., star) rating system to the importance (or lack thereof) of a critic's anonymity.

The book was published in 1998, so some of the information about specific restaurants may be out-of-date, but the critics interviewed for the book are still probably some of the best critics in the history of US restaurant criticism.  I learned a lot and really started thinking about the ways I judge restaurants, and I would recommend the book to anyone who is interested in learning more about this impactful (and rapidly-changing, especially thanks to social media) profession.