Goodness gracious, can this get any more amateurish?

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.

Outsourcing? In *MY* Local Newspaper?

Looks like the SF Chronicle once again forgot that there are many local experts waiting for their support. Mackenzie Chung Feegan, huh? Well... hm.

From a technical standpoint, she's not bad. She manages to produce some work worthy of aplomb once in a while- I remembered her name from this gentle evisceration some years back that had me giggling like a stoned hyena. I know exactly the kind of person highlighted there- the uninformed, out of their depth Asianesque dabbler I've spent my entire career supplanting and trying to either educate or eradicate.

But... the Chronicle needs a food critic, and she's not one.

That's okay sometimes. Successful food critics can come from anywhere. Sometimes it's political journalism, other times music, or from what might seem like nowhere at all to some. Understanding the environment and intended audience is every bit as important as the technicalities of the literary and artistic approach, and the willingness to develop that understanding is the key to longevity in such a position.

The job needs someone who can write, of course. But for a location like this, it needs a great deal more. The SF Bay is a hub on par with NYC or Tokyo- places steeped in cultural subtleties borrowed from all across the world and gently nudged (or sometimes vigorously muscled) into something uniquely local. 

To do right by such a place, it calls for someone attentive, alert, and well informed on the industry and area alike. It also needs someone patient enough to ignore the cash-heavy hype that ebbs and flows around restaurants in the Bay Area, and disciplined enough not to endorse without suitable cause.

Given that she's migrating from a Senior Editor role at Bon Appetit magazine in NYC, I'm very much disinclined to believe that last bit. So it's a thumbs down from me till proven otherwise.

In fairness though, I put in for the position myself some years back. The Chronicle ignored me entirely and gave it to Soleil Ho instead. Writing chops aside, I didn't think she was up to the very specific rigors of it at the time, and despite her critical acclaim (including a Beard award in 2022 for her restaurant reviews), I was proven correct.

Let's see if I go 2 for 2, shall we?