Reviewing restaurants with respect to “reality” rather than “hyperreality” means enveloping oneself in the insecurities of an audience that has little to no experience with “fine dining.” It means preserving the magic, educating the consumer when necessary, but never letting one’s cynicism infect the experience (let alone the political axes one has to grind). A critic should challenge their reader without ever blowing smoke up their ass.
Hospitality
In the age of airborne viral transmission, the relationship between “server” and “served” has never been more consequential and, ironically, impersonal.
Ciccio Mio is the red sauce joint of your dreams, the greatest common divisor of every good thing that every Italian-American restaurant has done in the century (or so) since the diaspora wove the trodden souls of Naples, Palermo, and Genoa into the fabric of domestic life. Does that mean Ciccio Mio is the best Italian restaurant in Chicago? Why, yes, it does. Tied for “best,” at least, depending on just what one considers “Italian” and whether diaspora culture the whole country over is destined for preservation or renovation. “Authenticity,” you guess, is the name of the game, and Hogsalt’s newest restaurant brings one of modern dining’s most contentious questions to the fore.
Bavette’s Bar & Boeuf excels in Chicago’s crowded steakhouse scene by consciously subverting so many of the nasty tropes that have plagued this genre of restaurants nationwide. There is little glitz and even less glamour…
If critics of the screen and stage can single out individual actors for praise and criticism, then why can’t restaurant critics?