DINE AND DASH

In July Pete Wells, the restaurant critic for the New York Times, announced that he was stepping down from that job after 12 years. His principal reason was what the work had done to his cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. He noted the short life spans of legendary food writers like A. A. Gill and Jonathan Gold. But he also said, simply, that "I realized I wasn't hungry anymore. And I'm still not, at least not the way I used to be."

All this rang true in my experience.

For most of my years working for newspapers and magazines, I have principally been an entertainment writer, focusing on movie reviews with occasional forays into writing about theatre, television, music, books. But I've also written about dining, for various publications, for decades.

I was a fill-in restaurant reviewer at Phoenix New Times, where I also had a weekly food review/interview column called "Lunch Meet." I've reviewed or profiled many East Valley eateries for the Wrangler News, and more recently I wrote a monthly column called "Four Corners" in Phoenix Magazine, in which I reviewed four different restaurants from four ends of the Valley, for slightly over four years, until it was shut down by COVID. I've also written many food-related entries for "Best of the Valley" and features like that.

And fun and delicious as all of this was, I too have suffered burnout. I don't expect any sympathy for this, of course; as Wells hastens to add: "The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain."

This is understandable. Restaurant reviewing is a quintessential example of Nice Work If You Can Get It. Nobody doing data entry or telephone customer service, let alone paving roads in the Arizona heat, should have to endure somebody whining about what a drag it is to eat at nice restaurants for free and then write about it.

The day I was offered the food writing gig at Phoenix Magazine, I was driving home from the doctor's office where I had just learned I had diabetes. I immediately accepted the offer. My pancreas was just going to have to learn to cope.

All the same, after a few years even that nice work can grow old. First of all, not every restaurant is good. It's not fun--at least, it isn't fun for me--to write negatively about a small business into which people have poured their heart and soul and fortune, and on which their dreams are riding.

Besides, poor food can be hard on you. Substandard, misfired meals can clobber your digestion and leave you feeling hung over and help expand your waistline, all without the compensatory pleasure of a culinary success. As Wells says, after a few years you may find you're not so hungry anymore.

Even when the food is good, however, writing about it, for me, was often difficult. Applied to food, adjectives tend to wear out fast through repetition. I adore a good burrito, but it's hard to find a new word to describe even the most heavenly burrito on the planet.

Truthfully, I have sometimes found this same syndrome creeping into my movie reviewing. For most of about nine years, that was my main job--going to see movies and then writing down my thoughts about them. No doubt, if you're a cinema lover, it beats work.

Still, it's not certain that spending your days sedentary, in a cold dark room, eating greasy popcorn and Dots and Junior Mints and drinking Dr. Pepper, is the surest ticket to health and well-being. Certainly there are many movie critics who lived to old age, but two of the most famous departed on the early side, Gene Siskel at 53 and Roger Ebert at 70.

After long stretches of movie reviewing, a sense can sometimes set in that you've seen, and reviewed, all the movies, just with different titles and actors, just as when you're reviewing restaurants, a sense can set in that you've written up all the burritos, just with different dining rooms surrounding them. In my full-time critic days, people used to sometimes say, wow, you're lucky, you get to see all the movies. 

I would agree that I was very lucky. But then remember, I would add, it's not that I get to see all the movies, it's that I have to see all the movies.

Again, I do understand how absurdly fortunate I've been to spend so much of my working life in these amusing pursuits, and I'm inexpressibly grateful for it. My only point in all this, I suppose, is that no matter how cushy a job is, in the end it's still a job. So I wish Pete Wells a happy, and hungry, post-reviewing life.

VIEWS ON REVIEWS

An old acquaintance of mine, now a college professor, recently paid me the huge compliment of asking if I’d send his students some notes on how to write a movie review (obviously he’d heard of the staggering fame and fortune I’ve attained from that occupation). Here’s what I wrote:

"There’s no set method to writing a movie review. One approach is to see yourself as a consumer reporter on the movies, carefully recounting the film’s attributes and offering your guess as to how much the 'average viewer' will like it. I used to look down my nose at this approach when I was younger, but I don’t any more. The 'average viewer' is a myth, I think, but even so your reader should be able to locate his or her own tastes in relation to that myth.

The opposite approach is to make the review a personal essay, with the movie basically serving as source material for you to riff on—in other words, to make it all about you. This is a less 'useful' approach, certainly, but it can also be enjoyable if the reviewer is a good writer. But I think that most sensible writers instinctively try something in between these two extremes when attacking the task of writing a movie review. Any device or conceit that helps you structure your review comfortably may be worth a try. Don’t feel like you have to cram every point about the movie into some short review—if you can’t find a place to discuss the cinematography or the music, or you just don’t feel any compelling need to discuss them, don’t worry about it. Focus on whatever aspects of the movie made the most vibrant impression on you, for good or bad, and try to say why. Sometimes I imagine a sort of fictitious 'Gentle Reader,' a friend who has asked me about the movie over dinner, and my review is my organized attempt to 'answer' them.

It can also be helpful to ask yourself what the movie you’re reviewing is trying to be. If it’s a horror movie or action movie or lowbrow comedy, it’s not fair to knock it for not being high drama. It’s fine to note that a certain genre isn’t to your taste, but you should usually make a good faith effort to decide if the movie in question is good of its kind.

The central thing to remember is, first and foremost, to make the review itself worth reading, and easy and fun to read, whether the reader is interested in the movie or not. I once heard Roger Ebert (I think it was) quoted as saying something to the effect that 90 percent of people who read a movie review do so just for the experience of reading the review; that they would never think of going to the movie, regardless of the reviewer’s opinion of it. So that’s my advice: create a piece of writing that’s worth reading, no matter what the movie is or what you think of it."