If I were Sifton, I'd be obese by now

A restaurant critic seems to have a lot of freedom to write what he or she wants. I noticed some consistencies in the descriptions of the surroundings in and outside of the restaurant, the intended audience or consumer, important figures like owners and chefs, type of cuisine served, and the food itself. Some of the most interesting pieces, not necessarily reviews, engaged the reader in a conversation. For example, in his blog about the John Dory Oyster Bar, Sifton asks his readers how they feel about the restaurant’s no reservations policy, and he always gets lots of response. Is time in NYC really a form of wealth? I agree with some readers that I probably wouldn’t take a group of five to dinner at John Dory because of the wait, but a dinner for two might be a different story.

I liked the storytelling approach that Sifton uses in one of his reviews, or the pieces in which I learned something about the author him/herself other than food preference. I liked that in “The Cheat: A Winter’s Tale", oxtail stew was the subject, and the restaurants that offered all sorts of variations of it were secondary characters.

Sifton’s cares about his readers, which is obvious from his blog posts and responses to questions about his life as a professional food critic. The internet really is your friend, Sifton proves, and it’s a good place to discuss big issues like health, culture, society—and the greater costs and implications that come from purchasing McDonald’s in general. He has a great online presence, which opens the door to a larger audience.

It was cool to see the way that these restaurant reviews unfolded because the authors (mostly Sifton) approached the subject differently each time. Sometimes he’d start with a description of the food, or the head chef, or traits of the surrounding neighborhood. So, structurally, it seems to me like anything could work, as long as it holds some significance. A difficulty I encountered in Arts Journalism last year when writing reviews was the “in-between” pieces—when I didn’t love, or hate, something, and trying to create that balance on the page without sounding boring or not being able to develop my own voice. In the article about Bar Basque, Sifton writes about a mediocre restaurant experience, and the need to contrast/shift between good and bad doesn’t lose me as a reader, partly because he writes about both so well that I wasn’t thinking about the mediocrity of the experience.

In Sifton’s Q&A, it’s easy to see that he feels all the pressures of his job on a daily basis. I imagine it’d be hard to transition into or out of a lifestyle that requires eating out four times a day, and exercising enough to continue to do so. But he’s very much aware of, and open about, his professionalism and doesn’t mask the complications, which makes him very real to me.