Cursing the stars

Josh Sens rails against his own restaurant ratings

Greetings, dear reader, and welcome to another issue of the Prairie Home Companion of city magazines, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the restaurants are above average. See for yourself in our dining listings—a catalog of pizzerias, taquerias, and bistros; of sushi bars, burger joints, and brasseries. From A16 to Zuni Café, we cover scores of restaurants around the region, and if our restaurant ratings are to be believed, only a rare few in the past decade have deserved a single star. As the man mainly responsible for assigning these grades, I wish I could say this makes me proud. Instead, reviewing my reviews leaves me uneasy, which means one thing: I’ve got a bit of explaining to do.

I’ll start with the quick cop-out, the pat disclaimer: I don’t care for restaurant stars. I regard them as crude instruments ill suited to the function we assign them, blunt tools that dull the nuance of opinion, battering subjective musings into hardened “facts.” As a dining public, we turn to stars as shortcuts, but they do us all a disservice, misleading readers and, often, mistreating chefs.Pretending that they represent an equitable standard, we sprinkle them on restaurants that offer $170 tasting menus and ones that sell $2 tacos, as if one star system alone could ever guide us faithfully through a dining universe so vast and varied.

Add to these flaws the fact that stars can carry a force strong enough to spin a restaurant off its axis, and you’ve got a clear imbalance in our foodreviewing culture, in which the glare of symbols outshines the subtleties of the written word. That bugs me.

I felt this about stars long before I became a restaurant critic, having spent part of my childhood gazing up at their distorted glow. When I was growing up, my cousin David Waltuck was the chef and co-owner of a New York restaurant, Chanterelle, that was notable enough to draw more than one review from the New York Times. All these years later, I can’t tell you what the writeups said, but I still recall the bylines and the stars That hung beneath them: four from Bryan Miller; two on his revisit; then four from Ruth Reichl; then three from William Grimes. Clearly restaurants have their ups and downs. But so do critics.Their tastes shift along with their moods. The fiction propagated by a fixed star system is that when a rating drops, only the restaurant deserves the blame. Either way, the impact of the stars is real. When Chanterelle lost theirs, the phone stopped ringing at the same frenetic pace.

The Times and its rating system were on my mind nine years ago when I was hired to do the job I do today. In a meeting with my bosses to discuss the ground rules, I voiced my thoughts on stars.

“I don’t like them, either,” my editor confessed.“Great,” I replied. “Can we get rid of them?” She shook her head. Michelin has been using stars to sell tires since 1926, and the practice has since become standard for restaurant critics. And now that Yelp and other user-review sites have turned the power of the stars over to anyone within range of a keyboard, stars will be with us until the Milky Way burns itself out. My task, my editor told me, was to arrange them in coherent patterns, to make sure that they aligned with my opinions. I had only a faint inkling then of how tricky that would be.

One indication came a few months in, when I wrote a tepid review of Campton Place, back when Daniel Humm was in the kitchen. After crossing the last t, I did the math our system called for to calculate the stars. I assigned a number rating to each of five categories: food quality, variety, service, ambience, and value.Given that I’d found the waitstaff stiff, the setting Stuffy, and the food overwrought, albeit varied, basic math suggested that the prospects weren’t good. Throw in the fact that the prices were as high as any in the city, and it all added up to a “below average” rating, which, in our calibrations, is not a star but the faint outline of one. (Don’t bother looking for this icon in our pages; it’s the Comet Kohoutek of our celestial symbols, showing up roughly once every 50,000 years.)

That’s what the numbers said, anyway. But was Campton Place really below average? Or merely something less than it set out to be? This question gave me pause, and all the more when I flipped through our listings and saw two-star noodle shops and barbecue shacks. Sure, they served good grub, but the intentions of their cooking hardly matched the grand ambitions of Campton Place. So whatever my motive—not wanting to seem harsh, lingering self-doubt, the absence of any more-fruitful ideas—I bumped the restaurant’s rating to two stars.

In the weeks that followed, I received mountains of feedback. Not from the chef, but from loyal patrons of the restaurant, who questioned my ethics, my IQ, my taste. The irony: If anyone took issue with anything I’d written, they didn’t say so.According to their missives, they were outraged at the stars, which, according to our key, meant the restaurant was “very good” and thus were far more generous than anything I’d said. (I should note that Humm has since gone on to work at Eleven Madison Park in Manhattan, where the New York Times has awarded him four stars for his work. Maybe those readers were right after all.)

Looking back, I realize that Campton Place marked the start of a shift in my unconscious practice that put me on the path toward star inflation. Instead of standing by the below-average rating and its original meaning, I shied away from it, bowing to the perception that it was Anton Ego–cruel. In retrospect, it isn’t hard to see the bind this put me in. Whereas four-star restaurants are as rare as unicorns (perfection, after all, is elusive), one-star, or “good,” restaurants are as common as ground squirrels in a city with such a vibrant dining culture. By making one-star ratings a last resort, I limited myself to a narrow middle ground. The result, all these years later: a Gathering of stars so tightly clustered in the center, you need access to the Hale telescope at Palomar Mountain to tell them apart.

As time went by and this nagging problem made itself increasingly apparent, I tried to resolve it through food writer sleight of hand: the half-star increment, the restaurant critic’s version of Spinal Tap’s “go to 11” amp. Two and a half stars became a kind of catchall fallback, one I applied to everything from Comstock Saloon, a boozy North Beach hitching post where I liked the bar food, to Fifth Floor, a luxe hotel restaurant toward which I felt lukewarm. What I’d hoped was that half stars would help me convey nuance, shades of culinary gray. But their ultimate effect was, at least in my mind, to underscore the arbitrariness of symbols.

A reminder of this came last year when I reviewed Quince, after its relocation to Jackson Square. I thought it was a good restaurant, a very good restaurant, beautiful to look at, brimming with ambition, and I composed what I regarded as a fairly fawning write-up: more Paula Abdul than Simon Cowell. Then I gave it a grade of two and a half stars, the midpoint between “very good” and “excellent.” Once again, my inbox was flooded with indignant feedback, the bulk of it focused on my final rating. Even those respondents who parsed the review itself left me with the impression that it wasn’t the words but the stars that really rankled. I can’t prove this, but I feel it strongly, especially since I dug a copy of the review out of my files: Rereading it now, I think it comes across as something close to hagiography.

But that’s the thing with stars. Taken out of context, as they so frequently are, they defy interpretation, yet manage so easily to flatter or offend.And, as with real stars in the sky, people often notice them long after they’re gone.

So vexed have I become with this small part of my job, I’ve turned more than once to outside help. One memorable suggestion came from Clark Wolf, the veteran restaurant consultant, who Recommended that I use my time productively by building a bridge and getting over myself.

“I hate to break it to you, but people aren’t paying that kind of attention to what you write,” Wolf told me. “You think they have the time for that?You think you’re going to get some kind of literary prize for this? Give the restaurant the number of stars you think it deserves and get on with it. And if you can’t handle doing that, find another job.”

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