Field Notes: March

Toritos de Pucará, a Nikkei restaurant in Madrid and a distillery in the Valle de Uco.

A regular round-up of culinary news and notes from around the Americas, and beyond. If you have any tips, drop me a line thenewworlder@gmail.com.

The New York Times has been publishing restaurant review stats on Instagram

For a few hours I thought I hallucinated it. I saw on a restaurant review certain stats that are never ever revealed by a publication:

- Number of visits
- Total dishes eaten
- Most expensive dish
- Least expensive dish
- Total spent

I made a note of how odd it was and when I went back to the review to find it there was nothing there. I assumed it was probably a mistake and asked the question on Threads if anyone caught it, and someone pointed out they started doing this on Instagram, where I must have seen it. Buried in the slides, there it was.

Since the recent retirement of Pete Wells, interim reviewers Priya Krishna and Melissa Clark have been experimenting with the format of the restaurant review. For example, they have appeared on camera to talk about the restaurants they reviewed, formally something the typically anonymous reviewers would never do. From what I can tell, they have only released the general reviewing data in a few reviews and only on Instagram (you won’t find it on the actual review), and the review of Ha’s Snack Bar was the first time they revealed the total cost of all of the visits.

It could be further refined (and more useful) by breaking down how many diners were there and if the cost includes drinks or tips, but if this is the start of a new era of restaurant reviewing transparency I am all for it. Between the secretive world of Michelin, which pays their own way but never reveals the number of visits, what they ate or the money spent, and the global ranking organizations where receipts are never asked for and are built around sponsored trips, this seems like a format that makes complete sense.