I'll start with a quote from a recent article:
San Francisco Chronicle food critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan dropped a bombshell of a story about visiting the three-Michelin-starred restaurant the French Laundry, wherein chef Thomas Keller asked her to leave. This is, of course, one of the cardinal sins of a business built on hospitality, especially if the diner hasn’t done anything worthy of getting 86’d other than existing as a restaurant critic.
Let's take it from the top. Fegan is a B-tier,
underqualified critic that elbowed her way in via Bon Appetit and serves as a
perfect example of what happens when a publication doesn't actually care about
putting someone who has expertise in a position that mandates a vast amount of
it. Now as I mentioned back
when she first took the position, I expected a subdued but steady
degradation and eventual failure, much like her predecessor. Not being terribly
aggressively online, as well as preoccupied by the overbearing and perpetual
sense of impending disaster that seems to refresh as readily as someone's
Facebook page, I haven't bothered to keep terribly tight track of that over the
past two years. But to discover tonight that the article referenced in
that quote probably helped seal the win on a James Beard Award? I am, to put it
mildly, appalled.
Hospitality is rather more nuanced than most would be
comfortable understanding. It is the foremost duty of a host and their environ
to curate the experience for all those permitted entry. If someone is where
they shouldn't be, that's a problem. Calling the use of a privilege, duty, and
burden as essential as that a 'cardinal sin' should be grounds for a
flogging. "...especially if the diner hasn't done anything worthy of
getting 86'd other than existing as a restaurant critic." Well, if
they shouldn't exist as a restaurant critic, maybe that might
have been a clue.
Maintaining the balance of what goes through a restaurant's doors is a delicate dance, and the steps are more subtle the higher the stakes, something I know quite well. While I don't have a 3-starred restaurant in my background, I've worked in 1-starred places before and had the head chef of a 2-starred place offer me its head pastry chef job half an hour into preparing for a demonstration class together. Nowadays it's very easy for someone noisy and shameless to get a thoroughly wrong message in the eyes and ears of hundreds of millions of people, so giving someone the boot is not actually a problem- nor should it be.
That, however, is weighed against perceived public
image. The French Laundry- a fantastic restaurant but one reliably
overhyped. Years of steady media attention crafted a legacy it's never felt
quite worthy of- rather like Chez Panisse, another inexplicably iconic
California spot. I'm not talking out my ass here- a friend went for
dinner there over the weekend, so my most recent intel on the place is as
fresh as it gets. When something awkward and controversial happens such places
often suffer in the courts of public opinion, and those at the center of the
discord often reap the benefits.
That seems to be what happened here.
Perhaps the winds are shifting, and Thomas Keller's star has dimmed. The hungry and envious backing those in conflict with the French Laundry restaurant consortium have managed to sneak in an eye gouge here, and put an award where it really should never have gone. This undermines the James Beard Awards somewhat severely in my eyes. After all the hullabaloo a few years back and their supposed newfound attention to detail, I don't like this mess one bit.
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