Bret Thorn, Nancy Kruse discuss responding to critics

NRN senior food editor Bret Thorn breaks down a feud between chef John Tesar and critic Leslie Brenner.

Food is now front-and-center in the American psyche. This food renaissance has happened at a time when people have more opportunity than ever before to express themselves to audiences large and small. Naturally, that means they’re talking a lot about restaurants.

They’re pinning pictures of food on Pinterest and posting them on Instagram. They’re tweeting and Yelping their opinions and posting them on Facebook. They also get mentioned in mainstream media.

As fans of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” know, host Jon Stewart has a running gag in which any time something unpalatable, gastronomically strange or bad for one’s health is mentioned, he equates it with Arby’s, for no apparent reason.

Restaurateurs have the option of responding to such things, but should they? And, if so, how?

Over the past couple of weeks, the food writing world was tittering over a tweet that Dallas chef John Tesar hurled at Dallas Morning News restaurant critic Leslie Brenner after she gave the restaurant a perfectly respectable three stars out of five.

Nation’s Restaurant News standards won’t allow me to quote the tweet in full, but Tesar dropped an F-bomb on Brenner and said her reviews were misleading, poorly written and self-serving, adding, “and you really suck.”

That should have been the end of it, but much of the food world weighed in. Some chefs tweeted support for Tesar; others suggested he relax a little bit (He didn’t. Instead, he banned Brenner from his restaurants).

Jonathan Gold of the Los Angeles Times wrote in defense of Brenner’s review, and Josh Ozersky declared in Esquire that Tesar’s temerity to insult Brenner meant the beginning of the end of the power of the critic.

It all seems very unseemly to me.

I prefer the response that chef Ilan Hall, who won the second season of Bravo TV’s “Top Chef,” gave to a negative review by Eater critic Robert Sietsema of his new Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurant The Gorbals.  

The review came out the same week the restaurant opened, which seems premature to me, but it’s no longer an uncommon practice.

Hall tweeted: “@robertsietsema thank you for your comments. The first week of opening a restaurant’s tough and your feedback is incredibly valuable to me.”

Cordial and civilized, but also, if I’m interpreting it correctly, subtly pointing out that the place had been open for less than a week and maybe the critics should lay off for a moment.

And how has Arby’s responded to Jon Stewart?

From what I understand, Arby’s corporate management sent him and his staff some of their food. Stewart later commented after one of his random attacks on the chain that Arby’s food was actually pretty good.

Tesar’s reaction isn’t my style, but it did get both him and Brenner a lot of attention. And either because of or in spite of his online temper tantrum, he apparently is getting his own reality TV show.

Details of the show are sketchy — we don’t know the name or network or when it will air — but Tesar told the website Culture Map that he has signed a deal with a Los Angeles production company to do a show similar to Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares,” “but with less screaming.”

Nancy, we’ve already discussed how restaurateurs might respond to the relatively low-impact barbs from Yelp reviewers and bloggers, but do you have any advice for how to respond to criticism from more high-profile sources?

Keep it classy

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The following is Kruse Company president Nancy Kruse’s response to NRN senior food editor Bret Thorn’s take on responding to criticism.

I think, Bret, that the best way to respond to criticism is not to respond — at least not immediately and not in the heat of the moment. Emotional reactions often take on a life of their own, and they can degenerate into grudge matches, like the juicy Tesar-Brenner feud in Dallas.

Chef John Tesar has painted himself as a defender of the industry, courageously standing up for young chefs too intimidated to defend themselves, and excoriating the critic for being “an evil, bitter dictator.”

Yikes.

Critic Leslie Brenner has fired back, explaining the principles upon which she writes her reviews, saying she stands by her evaluation of his operation, and wondering why, if conventional restaurant critics are becoming as irrelevant as Josh Ozersky and others claim, she has caused such a huge uproar.

This kerfuffle is nothing new. In fact, it goes hand in glove with professional criticism. Theater, movie, art and literary critics all regularly come under fire from disgruntled recipients of less-than-favorable reviews. But it does seem to me that restaurant criticism has much broader reach.

As you point out, restaurants have become central to our culture. They are a form of entertainment that engages consumers on the broadest scale. That engagement has taken on new meaning with the advent of the Internet, which allows anyone who plunks down his money in a restaurant to bruit his experience to the world. Yelp, Urban Spoon and other local review sites have made everyone a critic.

I don’t believe for one minute that either the growth of citizen reviewers or this particular critical contretemps augurs the end of professional criticism. There remains a huge gap between traditional restaurant reviewers, who generally adhere to established journalistic standards, don’t accept freebies from chefs, pseudonymously visit a restaurant multiple times and fact-check their material before printing, and the legions of online commentators who don’t generally do any of these things.

On the other hand, the online commentators convey an immediacy that conventional print or broadcast reviewers can’t match. Going forward the two forms of criticism will coexist and run on parallel tracks, each providing a unique and valuable point of view.

How should a restaurant handle criticism from any source? First, a dispassionate look at the operation is in order to identify opportunities for improvement. Even Tesar admits that not everything in Brenner’s review was off base, and vows to do some work on the weaknesses she identified. Second, if response is warranted, take a leaf from Ilan Hall and take the high road by keeping it civil and classy. Third, and most important of all, remember that the single biggest driver of restaurant traffic is, has, always been and will remain word of mouth, which means that every customer is a potential brand ambassador. Successful restaurateurs will continue to build their businesses one satisfied patron at a time.

As for our two combatants, both will survive this skirmish just fine.

Leslie Brenner is a multi-award-winning writer whose “American Appetite” is a very good book that looks at the evolution of the culinary revolution in this country and has pride of place on my bookshelf.

And it appears that John Tesar may be coming soon to our TV screens again (he appeared in the 12th season of “Top Chef,” in 2012). If that’s the case, he had best prepare himself. Television critics can be a pretty tough bunch, and consumers can vote their opinions with just a click of a remote.

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
 
Nancy Kruse, president of the Kruse Company, is a menu trends analyst based in Atlanta and a regular contributor to Nation’s Restaurant News. E-mail her at [email protected].