The Critic
Two things happened in the past week or so that might not seem related at first glance but I assure you they are intrinsically linked, like the dust from the Sahara that fertilizes the Amazon.
The first is the retirement of my friend Ignacio Medina from food writing, after 43 years in the profession, and 48 years as a journalist. He announced it on the website 7 Caníbales, where he has been the editor for the past few years.
The second was a tweet made months ago by Steve Plotnicki, the founder of Opinionated About Dining, also known as OAD, an organization that ranks restaurants by surveying thousands of well-traveled culinary experts. Though written months ago, the tweet (“A million (dead) from Gaza for one from Israel would be acceptable to me”) went viral last week, leading to a wave of condemnation by its participants, chefs on the list and food media.
Medina, for much of his career, has been a critic. Writing about restaurants from his home country of Spain and adopted home of Peru, while also covering much of Latin America, he has often been ruthless. He is someone that could not care less if he is liked or accepted, and his writing is often blunt, sometimes even uncomfortable. If a chef served him a poorly executed or ill-conceived dish, he wouldn’t shy away from giving his opinion. He would dissect the reasons why it did not deserve to be served to paying clientele. It didn’t matter how famous the chef was.
Medina routinely gives voice to the voiceless, championing the underpaid farmers and oft-ignored back of the house kitchen staff that support the very foundations of the restaurant world. He has been especially vocal about restaurant lists, rankings and celebrity chefs even as the culinary world has gravitated more towards them. His critical analysis, even when I completely disagreed with it, has sparked countless important conversations. I have never doubted the value in what his writing has brought.
Yet, this same style of writing has gradually stopped fitting into a system that has shifted more and more towards elevating different platforms and its participants than what they claim to stand for.
“I practice a profession that the market is no longer willing to remunerate with dignity,” he wrote in his farewell. “I am passionate about my work, but it has stopped being a profession and has almost become a hobby that I cannot afford. Every year I invest in it practically three times what I earn.”
He criticizes the public, the chefs, the media and the world at large for not wanting to know anything more than what is “the best.”
“Nobody completes the sentence with three essential questions: in what?, according to whom?, is it true?,” he wrote. “The sector gets bogged down in deciding who is the best churro maker in the neighborhood yet is incapable of explaining what their churros are like, and much less how they make them and how they could improve them.”
What will happen if all the Ignacio Medinas of the world disappear? What will happen if no one is there to question the structures of power and those that lead them? We got a glimpse of it last week, when Plotnicki’s tweet resurfaced.
When the tweet was originally made, a few writers called it out, and the tweet was removed (though Plotnicki remains unapologetic about it), but otherwise there was silence. The participants kept filling out their evaluations of restaurants and the restaurants on the list kept posting on social media where they ranked. Even this past week, when the tweet resurfaced on Threads and then gained additional traction on Instagram, there was quick condemnation and a handful of top voters resigned, a few chefs spoke strongly against it, but it was followed mostly by silence. Regardless, you only had to look at Plotnicki’s still active Twitter feed to see his views, there for the world to see. In the past week, I’ve received dozens of messages about poor interactions with him: his alleged mistreatment of restaurant staff all over the world, consistent poor behavior in professional settings and routine vile, hateful language. It was an open secret, yet it has been mostly tolerated.
While in the case of the mentioned tweet, some have quietly claimed that they don’t want to involve themselves with the complexities of politics in the Middle East. While this is understandable, this situation is not that. Let’s be clear, this has nothing to do with a nuanced conversation about the security of Israelis and the rights of Palestinians. It’s about basic human decency. As Andoni Luis Aduriz of Spain’s Mugaritz, one of the few chefs to have spoken out, forcefully came out against it, that under no pretext is this OK. "Life, whether from one person or one million, must always be respected," he said.
Whether you want them to or not, the choices the executives of platforms like OAD make represent the participants. The actions these organizations take matter. Knowingly saying nothing does not mean you are above politics, but it is an endorsement of their actions.
In Medina’s story, he points out the irony of it all: there have never been more people interested in food. Everyone’s grandmother is posting food photos on Instagram and people in London suburbs are searching the internet to understand what an ancestral sauce from the Amazon like tucupi is. These platforms are growing bigger and bigger, and the chefs they promote now have voices that can rival the influence of industrial foods that are leading the planet to ruin. Critics are needed now more than ever to help us understand the vital issues in our food system and to make sure that those voices are used, as well as called out when they are not.
The very idea of food is nourishment. It’s the antithesis of hate. It is love. If we cannot stand up against hate and stand up for basic human rights, then what is it all for?
We need critics now more than ever. Lists are PR competitions dominated by a select group of cooks and journalists that travel the world invited by huge restaurant business. Only a few are brave enough to say what they think about a mediocre meal. We need Ignacios and others like Pancho Ramos (https://www.instagram.com/donpanchoramos/) and Leno (https://www.instagram.com/lenobsas/) who share their honest oponion about where they go and what they eat. Thank you Nick for sharing this.
Loved this piece Nicholas. When I saw you condemning the tweet on IG, I had to Google what OAD meant because I was not familiar with the organization or its leader. It's intorelable, whichever way you want to look at it.
I completely agree that the work of a professional critic is very relevant nowadays to give us a nuanced and critical overview of food phenomenons. They are, at the end of the day, journalists.