SLAMMED Magazine

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

by Phillip Innes

Many consider San Francisco second only to New York as a restaurant destination, although Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans might have something to say about that. And understandably, there are some from the Bay Area who consider San Francisco second to none. Certainly, the produce and wine that are available from nearby farms can be matched by no other major city in America.

Since the Bay Area has such an alluring restaurant scene and since it’s such a lovely area in which to live (virtually my entire family has relocated there), I also expected the glut of people desiring work there to produce a group of writers matched by few cities anywhere. I expected the top daily to hold a stable of restaurant critics to rival the New York Times. It’s on that assumption that I turned my lens onto the Bay Area right after New York.

The Top Dog: The San Francisco Bauer Area

When the Times job—considered by many the top restaurant critic position in the nation—was up for grabs, one name bandied about was Michael Bauer of the San Francisco Chronicle. But apparently the Times couldn’t give the post away. According to Alexandra Wolfe of the New York Observer, four people were offered the job and turned it down, one of whom was Bauer.

San Francisco’s near deliverance was New York’s narrow escape. I got the impression, as I scorched phone lines and fiber-optic cables between the East and Left Coasts, that there are more than a few in the Bay Area who wouldn’t have been sorry to see Bauer go. Speculation was rampant as to why Bauer turned the Times position down. Most of it focused on the notion that he would lose money because his Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants guide is so lucrative.

After analyzing his work and position, I have other theories. First, the Times critic operates under a microscope where every slip is magnified and second-guessing is rampant. Second, Bauer managed to create his own little fiefdom in San Francisco, a feat which he could never duplicate in New York. And third, in San Francisco, the fall-off to the second most influential critic seems much greater than it is in New York.

In fairness to Bauer, when this article went to press, the Association of Food Journalists (A.F.J.) had just announced Bauer as a finalist in its over 350,001 circulation restaurant criticism category for 2004. (Does the Times even enter? Many publications collect their fill of an organization’s awards, then cease participating.). His selection couldn’t have been for any of the 35 reviews I labored through trying to divine how Bauer became San Francisco’s most influential restaurant critic. Well, perhaps for his review of Quince.

When Bauer puts his mind to it—which isn’t nearly often enough—he’s a decent writer. At Yan Can, thecrispy pot stickers… had the look of a 90-year-old Florida snow bird who had spent too much time in the sun; salt comprised four of the five spices in the five-spice chicken; and the chiles hit the palate like a hammer. An Elite Café waiter was so lethargic I wanted to jolt him with a defibrillator to get his heart pumping. Of Poggio, he writes: I thought I had walked into Jack’s during its heyday when the waiters were as crusty as three-day-old baguettes.

More often, the writing is sloppy, as if Bauer were phoning in his stories. Subjects change mid-sentence from singular to plural. On most nights, shrimp is available, but they never made their way to my table. His mastery of verb tenses isn’t much better. A recent visit shows that the place is in the doldrums. It felt as if the doors were open but no one was at home. Sometimes Bauer leaves one scratching one’s head. Of Slanted Door, he notes there are a few familiar specialties, but they’re done better than just about anyone else.

A writer must exercise control over the imagery he generates, especially where food is concerned. “I hear that sound and immediately think of horses” may be tasteless, but at least it appears intentional. Loins aging and making the package slip down the throat like a fresh oyster apparently were not.

Of one eatery, Bauer wrote: To become fully realized the restaurant needs to do three things: edit, edit and edit. The same could be said of Bauer. Revisiting Azie, he concludes it’s adapted nicely to the times but the contraction of “it has” is poor writing. In his A16 review, he uses “captivated” or “captivating” three times in five paragraphs.

Bauer describes Willi’s Seafood & Raw Bar as stylishly delicious? Only if you’re the Lucky Charms leprechaun. Of another restaurant, he stated: That became my new philosophy when ordering: The longer the description, the more muddled the flavors. Of course, that’s not a philosophy, it’s an observation. And how about this howler from his Espetus review? You can take your grandmother from Delaware, your aunt from Idaho or your cousin from Arkansas and they’ll both have a good time.

Bauer’s writing is frequently slapdash, as if he hasn’t been challenged in far too long. So often he starts a metaphor, then mixes it. In the process, their firstborn seems to have been pushed to the back burner. God help any children in his care! I wondered if he understood how to finish a metaphor or, better yet, continue a theme throughout an entire article until I read his Quince review. In that piece, he set up a (frequently used) stage metaphor, then continued it beautifully throughout.

I found this disturbing, because I’m more offended by someone who can’t be bothered to write well than isn’t able to. After all, if a person can’t write, then the editor who hired him should shoulder a sizeable portion of the blame. Of Globe, in yet another mixed metaphor, he says …the spell has worn off, the sign of a place that has been on autopilot for too many years. Bauer should know something about that.

Fortunately, Bauer’s observations are often better than his writing. The difference between San Francisco and New York cuisine comes down to this: The West Coast is more ingredient driven and the East Coast is more technique driven. As a general rule, setting Third World cuisines aside, I would agree. Trendiness often fosters disdain for customers at popular restaurants… Or: It’s another truism in the restaurant business—a chef with limited space and equipment often does better than those who have everything they want. Or: Anyone who has been to Cuba recently will tell you that the restaurant food isn’t very good. Again, mostly true.

Bauer’s observations are valuable because he has been in his position 18 years. But his longevity is not only his greatest strength, it’s also his Achilles’ heel. The biggest problem with Bauer, and why some seem to feel it’s time for him to move on, is that he knows everyone—he’s too embedded. On my first visit, I… [observed] Jean Alberti, former chef-owner of Kokkari; Daniel Rasic, former chef of La Table; Hiro and Lissa Sone of Terra in St. Helena; and Stan Bromley, general manager of the Four Seasons. On other visits, I spotted a whole different crop of notables… Bauer name-drops to give his readers confidence in his knowledge of the restaurant scene, or perhaps to show his own importance. But rather than inspiring confidence, in many restaurant industry observers, such statements instill concern.

There were a number of restaurant ratings I questioned, admittedly only as a frequent visitor to the Bay Area. In talking to industry insiders, I found I had plenty of company. Part of the problem seemed attributable to the Chronicle’s rating system. Comparing it with the Times’ is instructive. That venerable paper employs an (at least) two-tiered rating scheme in which higher echelon restaurants are subjected to strict scrutiny and stingily awarded stars, while bottom feeders are allowed to skate with mere verbal evaluation.

I’m not a big believer in a single rating scale for all restaurants, advocacy of which is usually accompanied by the oft-expressed creed that all restaurants should be evaluated according to how well they fulfill their objectives, however limited these might be. The world’s best hotdog stand does not deserve the same rating as El Bulli or the French Laundry.

Under the Chronicle’s rating system, not only is grade inflation rampant but a café of modest ambitions which exhibits a little whimsy might get three stars (and has), while restaurant nobility such as Ana Mandara which shoots for the moon and comes up short only in the area of service can score lower (and has). Restaurants which might earn just one star from the Times, or as cheap eats might not even be subjected to its star system, have earned three stars from the Chronicle. As one restaurant industry observer put it, “The Chronicle measures apples and elephants using a two-penny scale.”

But of greater concern is Bauer’s lack of distance from the restaurant scene he judges. A 2001 San Francisco Magazine piece by Maile Carpenter took the former president of the A.F.J. to task for this very problem. “We used to have a picture of him hanging in our kitchen,” Carpenter quoted Kevin Cronin, co-owner of Tra Vigne, “but everyone knows what he looks like, so we threw it out.”

Another concern expressed in that article was the disproportionate power Bauer wields and how he wields it. “I think he’s mean-spirited and I think his intentions are pretty nasty sometimes,” said one of Carpenter’s anonymous sources. “If you don’t play with Michael,” added renowned restaurateur Gary Danko, “he doesn’t want you around.”

So entrenched is Bauer, so well-connected, that people I contacted were only willing to express their concerns off the record. This former Kansan and Texan seems to have the Bay Area cowed. Carpenter also found most of her sources “terrified to say anything negative about him on the record.”

Wrote Carpenter, “We are eating in Michael Bauer’s town. His reviews have thrown chefs into a tizzy trying to please him, and in the madness of figuring out what he likes week after week, it seems some have been scared into padding their menus with safe pop hits.” Concluded Carpenter, restaurateurs “have gone crazy trying to make their restaurants more… Baueresque.”

The bottom line on Bauer? One industry observer put it this way: “He’s a mediocre writer, a mediocre mind, a man of no inspiration and limited taste.”

In the Middle of the Road: The Rest of the Chronicle Staff

Where the 14 Times critics I evaluated last issue evidenced a stunning array of talent ranging from terrific to terrible, the Chronicle seems to have packed its 10 critics (that I counted) into a middle ground ranging from pretty decent to not so great.

My home state, Connecticut, has accounted for more than its fair share of influential food writers—Bryan Miller, Jan and Michael Stern, Tim and Nina Zagat, and Mark Bittman, to name a few. In the Nutmeg State, the Times critic for Connecticut occupies the most influential position, followed closely by the Hartford Courant and Connecticut magazine.

Bill Daley left the Courant critic position at the end of 2002 for a job at the Chronicle. (He has since moved on to the head critic position at the Chicago Tribune, which owns the Courant and which unfortunately swallowed the chain of alternative newsweeklies where I got my start.). One can’t help wondering what the Chronicle promised him. What seems to have happened, judging from a sampling taken over the last year or so, is that he was exiled to the same sort of ethnic beat that an alternative reporter whose paper was trying to avoid spending might frequent.

Daley is a capable but not especially graceful writer, which is enough to put him at or near the head of the Chronicle critic pack. The opening of Y. Ben House Restaurant, in which Daley remembers being Shanghaied for real Chinese food by a teacher named Sister Madeline Chi, was genuinely good. As was the following sentence: So intent we were that we soon forgot the old man at the next table, who had swiveled around in his chair to stare long and hard at the chopstick-wielding gwai lo. (Although the sentence would be stronger were the “we” and the “were” switched.). And I liked his description of deep-fried sea urchin with battered shiso leaf: The shiso leaves act as a sort of base, except such a description gives this light, almost ethereal dish a gravity it doesn’t have.

Daley’s observations are often on target. At Watercress, he noted: It looks as though the decorator ran out of money or interest. He also observed: there’s not the East-West interplay one might expect. But I laughed out loud when he complained of having had one too many out-of-town elbows in my ribs lately. Had he lived in the Bay Area two years then? The roll looked oversized and clumsy, sort of like a beached sea lion. He’s no chameleon, but give the guy credit for trying to blend into the northern California landscape.

However, Daley too easily falls into trite wording. In one sentence, he manages to use the phrases may be outshined; takes the cake; and dishes out. Dishes have or need oomph, punch, zing, zest, zip, snap, spark and bite until you just want to scream. And he can mix a metaphor with the best of them: spawning a satellite restaurant in Palo Alto a year ago.

Another problem, which I witnessed all too often in Connecticut, is Daley’s willingness to equate authentic food with good. The greasy spoon down the street may offer authentic American food, but you wouldn’t wish it on anyone. A mediocre Szechwan (my own cooking specialty) restaurant on the Connecticut shoreline received high praise from him despite the fact that virtually every dish there tastes the same. So even though one wants to give him credit for translating the Chinese character for “double happiness”, one can’t get past his excitement in finding at Spices 1 a beef and broccoli that’s one of the best renditions I’ve ever had or saying at So that its beef and broccoli is a respectful rendition of the classic. Beef and broccoli’s not a classic by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a dish for gwai los.

Finally, Daley needs to be careful using words like “ho-hum” (not because he uses it as an adjective and it’s not—I endorse creative use of terms where artful and intentional) because the language of boredom can easily generate its own ennui. I think Daley found being relegated to B-list restaurants excruciating, but tried to be a good sport. I have no trouble picturing a bored Daley in this passage: The thing that captivates the imagination most is the “touchless” paper towel dispenser in the bathroom. Wave a thumb near a sensor and a couple of inches of paper toweling drops down for you. Cool. For God sakes, couldn’t the Chronicle have given this guy some real restaurants to review? Didn’t he suffer enough?

Tilde Herrera seems to be doing good work for the Chronicle. Her observations usually inspire confidence: I’ve worked in restaurants long enough to know that many hands will touch my food before it arrives at my table, but I’d just rather not see it. Hear! Hear! Of an Indian buffet, she notes: It’s a good deal… but expect the overcooked quality that often comes from storing food on steam tables. Of Left Bank, she complains: Gratinéed oysters suffered beneath too-huge mounds of spinach, bacon and enough panko breadcrumbs to suck every trace of moisture from your mouth. And at Gordon Biersch, she wouldn’t order the dismal crab and artichoke dip again unless the kitchen used more sweet crab meat and less acidic artichoke hearts that tasted straight from the can.

She positively hates it when restaurants stray from their stated cuisines. Of Vivace, she says: Call me a purist, but the inclusion of a few Asian appetizers is irritating. Does an Italian restaurant really need to offer crispy shrimp or tuna rolls? Yet this self-avowed purist terms Fung Shang Café a fusion restaurant when the dishes she cites are pan-Asian, not fusion. Once and for all—fusion is when ingredients and techniques of different cuisines are fused in the same dish. If a restaurant offers authentic dishes from several cuisines, it’s pan-Asian, pan-Latin or pan-whatever. Oddly, she seems to know this—she terms Cascal “pan-Latin” while complaining, predictably, that it offers pizza and pasta.

Also, it can annoy readers who must pay their own way when a critic acts as if she suffers from the same disadvantage. When Herrera writes that paying the high prices can be hard to stomach when the food is just OK, I can’t help thinking—true, but you’re not paying. Similarly, she writes: When we got the bill, we were still charged for the Korean BBQ beef. We didn’t mention it because we just wanted to leave. I know all too well what journalists and freelance writers earn. Herrera didn’t beef about the unwarranted charge because she wasn’t the one paying.

Karola Saekel appears knowledgeable. As a writer, she has her moments. A cactus-stemmed margarita glass could double as a bird bath. The fun quotient isn’t high among Chronicle food reviewers, so one appreciates the following: We were going to ask for spoons… but then decided it was more fun to use the large mussel shells as impromptu spoons. I also commend her for not being too aloof to respond to readers’ restaurant suggestions.

Rather than serving up an ending, Saekel’s pieces frequently fizzle out with inconsequential notes about drink prices and availability. Metaphors get mixed when there are easy solutions, as in a new kid on the block is making waves. A parading view of University Avenue denizens obviously should read “a view of parading University Avenue denizens.” When, later in the same piece, Saekel concludes you may want to find out how to say “yum” in Laotian, one wonders why she didn’t. And from a Connecticut viewpoint, it’s amusing to hear someone complain like the proverbial good man or woman, a good breakfast place is hard to find. You folks in the Bay Area have no idea how fortunate you are when it comes to breakfast.

Miriam Morgan, Chronicle Food Editor, exhibits less personality than Saekel in her writing, which is often why writers become editors in the first place. (Sorry, Denny—I mean all of the other editors, certainly not you.). The word cozy could have been coined for the Alpine Inn. The word boring could have been coined for that introduction.

Morgan’s endings aren’t much better. Half of her pieces conclude with some variant on: if X, Y or Z were tweaked a little, this restaurant could easily rise to the next level. In between, she overuses the annoying word “yummy”, loses track of the occasional antecedent and employs trite sayings like sang with its own clear flavors and cried out for a hit [or hint?] of spice.

She has better moments. Early in the evening, when the tables aren’t yet full, the restaurant exudes the promise of a good time. Or: The mild fish would have benefited from a stronger searing to caramelize the outside and offer a textural contrast and some smoky moments. Although suddenly, in one critic’s review after the next, caramelize seems to have become synonymous with brown, sear or crisp—it’s not. I checked several standard food dictionaries, and caramelization still requires the liquefying of sugar.

Stett Holbrook pays attention to structure (alas, something one can’t take for granted), usually providing a punchy start and finish. His writing can be quite good: The presentation of some plates redefined the word busy. One entrée… looked like an aerial view of Coney Island. And one appreciates an observation like Amaroma’s dining room colors are those of the Roman soccer team.

At times, Holbrook can draw an intentional laugh, as when he writes of Pete’s Brass Rail & Car Wash: There is no brass rail. Nor is there a car wash. There’s no Pete, for that matter. He’d better be able to find the laughs, for how else could one bear a beat in which one must cover Red Smoke Grill and Red Tractor Café in (so to speak) short order?

At times, Holbrook loses me. He talks about California ingredients such as salmon, tuna and quail. And I thought all we had to thank the Golden State for was the Redwoods and Hollywood. Chola’s occupies a nondescript mini-mall, but he probably means it occupies a space in the mini-mall. He brings the depth of his food knowledge into question when he complains that the papaya in Da Lat’s green papaya salad was more white than green—the green in green papaya means unripe, and the flesh should be more white than green. Furthermore, after telling us Namaste’s kitchen is not shy about adding chilies to most dishes, why waste column space stating the obvious: consider asking your server to tone it down if you like your food on the milder side.

Kim Severson writes well most of the time. I’m not exactly sure when the belly dancing offered at Oakland’s Tanjia changed from artful entertainment to artful panhandling. She seems to know her way around ethnic food. False banana… is a sort of taro-like root. At times, she falters, as with the inexplicable observation: two dense triangles of garlic toast… are sort of like a pita loaf’s beefier big brother. Come to think of it, she sort of over-uses “sort of.”

Tanya K. Henry’s writing is just tolerable. Little things irritate. A natural writer instinctively understands that an anchovy-infused creamy dressing is better expressed as “a creamy, anchovy-infused dressing.” In the clause the presentation was amateur at best, “amateurish” would be better. A shocking pink prickly pear ice cream looked and sounded more intriguing and interesting than it was is redundant. The ubiquitous hotel décor of a dizzying ménage of colors on the carpeting and chairs and white blond pillars fills the room is just plain awful. No editor in sight, I suppose.

At times, she seems to know what she’s talking about. Unfortunately, the duck with mango, orange and ginger suffered from too much of everything. A Chinese five-spice rub and soy sauce dominated the dish and made it so salty I could barely taste the duck. But there’s little joy in reading her columns. With more attention to detail the Lighthouse can more fully deliver. The same could be said of Henry.

I only had five pieces (instead of my usual minimum of 10) with which to critique Amanda Berne, but that’s two more than many writing awards competitions use. Opening sentences should be especially strong, but hers tend not to be. She emulates her editor’s favored method of concluding: With some tweaks, it could shine. Her writing is sometimes clumsy: the black-eyed peas were equally as bland. Either “equally bland” or “just as bland” would be much better. Other starters see-sawed in quality. No, each starter was either good or bad, but taken as a whole, they may have been uneven. She likes to use adverbs to modify the unmodifiable: totally acceptable and virtually forgotten. Something is acceptable/forgotten—or it isn’t.

Sometimes Berne overuses the imperative: stake a claim, take note of, try… But she draws a chuckle when she says some Indian dishes had just one note, and that note made my mouth plead for water. And her analysis of the balance of tastes needed to make Osha Thai’s cooking work was right on the money.

And finally, there’s GraceAnn Walden, a scoop columnist who pens the Cook’s Night Out column in the Chronicle (and who also contributes to Where Magazine, which is placed inside of hotels and greatly influences tourist, if not local, spending habits). Walden can go 10 paragraphs deep without disclosing the restaurant she’s visiting, all of the while fawning over the chef who’s accompanying her to dinner. It’s kind of a two-for-one deal. I wonder if the restaurants she visits are pleased to get some small mention or annoyed to get so little column space.

As a reader, I mostly found myself in the annoyed camp, wanting to know more about the food eaten. Sometimes the free advertising for the guest chef extends even to a list of his clients, which made me queasy. But I have to admit that I was seduced by some of the information obtained from Walden’s guest chefs. Peter Tamano’s description of cooking lamb for the lamas was a delight. And Jason Xu provided the rebuttal to Daley’s fascination with beef with broccoli: “There’s no broccoli in China,” says Xu with a chuckle.

The San Francisco Treats: The Top Five

It must be obvious by now that writing ability is a large factor in winning my pick as best critic of any major metropolitan area. One simply can’t ingest a critic’s restaurant opinions without being subjected—start to finish—by his or her writing. This is true, even if it’s a broadcast opinion.

Furthermore, the quality of the writing is the single criterion that’s most amenable to analysis. Some aspects of fairness are difficult to judge, unless one catches glimpses into critics’ hearts and minds (hence, my reluctance to hand out high marks in this area). Food knowledge can be feigned fairly well with sufficient research. And liveliness, welcome as it is, can exist in splendid isolation from the other traits necessary to make a superior restaurant critic.

I have tried to be inclusive, but I recognize that this list of critics is more representative than exhaustive. I was unable to include broadcast talents like Joey Altman of KRON-TV and Gene Burns of KGO-AM, because the websites for their stations don’t publish separate reviews, as some stations do. People tell me both do a credible job, and while their coverage may not be especially critical, when you work with just one or two minute sound bites, there’s not much point wasting them on bad restaurants.

San Francisco turns out to have more than its fair share of fine writers. In New York, I felt first place was clear-cut. In the Bay Area, determining first place was as difficult as separating the finishers in one of those bicycle races where a small lead pack of riders crosses the finish line with identical times.

But separating the contestants in a photo finish, Josh Sens of San Francisco Magazine seems to have won by a nose. His writing is so graceful and witty that one almost doesn’t notice its classic underpinnings: an attention-getting opening sentence or paragraph, solid transitions and a punchy conclusion that usually relates back to the opening. Remember the countless book reports we all had to write in public school? Turns out we were all critics-in-training, but some of us apparently were goofing off in the back of the class.

At 36, Sens is probably pretty far removed from the classroom, but he was clearly paying attention. Although I could pick any piece, I commend his Campton Place review (titled “Midlife Crisis”) to those who could use a lesson in structure. It begins: Stepping into the newly renovated Campton Place is like bumping into a long-lost classmate at a high school reunion. It continues: And then one day, like your classmate, the restaurant awoke a little timeworn, needing a gentle tug along the belly and a tuck under the chin, and decided to get some work done. Speaking metaphorically about the underwhelming restaurant, it ends: Think back to that reunion encounter with your long-lost classmate. You shared some laughs. You talked about old times. But you also realized that you probably wouldn’t stay in touch.

Clever transitions sucker-punch the reader. A paragraph ends: It’s a feast for the eyes, but it saves its greatest pleasure for the tongue.

The next begins: It is also an exception. At Campton Place, many dishes are more interesting to read about—and look at—than they are to eat.

Throughout his pieces, readers are treated to Sens-ational descriptions ranging from elegant (Chinese long beans, which stretch across the plate like lounging fashion models) to witty (the sort of dishes that make one marvel at how the French can eat such heavy food and still stay awake through movies so sorely lacking in explosions).

His reviews are so reliably great that I could have thrown them down a staircase and picked out the one that fluttered farthest. Here is a snippet from his review of the Farmhouse Inn in Forestville. Here the traffic fades, seas of green vines lap gently against the roadside, and the Farmhouse Inn stands like a pop-up from a lifestyle magazine. Of the chef, Steve Litke, Sens says: His cooking risks triggering the kind of avalanche of adjectives that can make food writing such a deadly affair. Sumptuous. Delectable. Mouthwatering. Sublime. All of these apply in ways very close to their original meaning, before they were swept into the valley of cliché. Which is one place Sens’ readers never have to fear being swept.

One thing made me hesitant to give Sens my first place award, and that was his relatively limited annual output. It’s not his fault, of course, that San Francisco Magazine is a monthly, nor is it his fault that the publication gives him only one restaurant to review a month when many monthlies give their critics two or three. But his limited output means he’s just not “putting it out there” as much as some critics, or digging deep enough into the Bay Area restaurant scene. But despite this reservation, I awarded him first place because I loved his work.

Jonathan Kauffman of the East Bay Express puts it all on the line weekly, providing plenty of potential fodder for my cannons. I foraged furiously, but there was little fodder to be found. He has incredibly few “off moments”—the use of the word “culinary” twice in the same sentence, where it could easily have been avoided, or an image like a strongly dressed Caesar salad [that] hit the palate with the force of a slug in the arm. This image would work better if it didn’t make one’s mind shift from one spot on the body (the roof of the mouth) to another (the shoulder).

I find nothing to indicate that Kauffman plays favorites with restaurants, intentionally or otherwise. His knowledge of food is well-demonstrated with observations like their Friulian brandy-mustard cream sauce… bespoke that region’s proximity to Slovenia and Austria. And what passage could better demonstrate the liveliness of his writing than the following? Scooping bits [of ceviche] into my mouth, I kept expecting little star-shaped balloons from a Batman fight scene to pop out: Zing! from the limes. Pow! from the onions. Thwack! from the chiles.

If Kauffman’s writing isn’t quite as refined as Sens’, it comes incredibly close. He varies his sentence structure nicely. The café is filled with light. Banks of high windows and skylights let it flow throughout the restaurant. His descriptions are vivid, as in a roasted brick red salsa with the loud, low thrum of a Harley Davidson. He certainly knows how to finish his metaphors. The rumor mill began spinning. I guess San Francisco is the logical place to find a critic using the perfect earthquake metaphor. Some of his dishes rocked my world. But just as many suffered from small faults of execution that left the final product teetering over the precipice of mediocrity.

Kauffman made me burst out laughing so often that others at the sushi bar where I was reading his articles must have thought I was losing my mind. Of Amber, he said: Never mind that you’re surrounded by folks who were serious contenders for homecoming king and queen. They look good surrounded by such style, and unless you’re sporting flannel and a mullet, so will you. Of a pressed chocolate sandwich, he wrote: It’s the kind of snack you’d imagine millionaire stoners ordering up from their personal chefs.

As with Sens or Le Draoulec at the New York Daily News, one can pick out any review. The opening: Things sprout, twirl, and fan out of Vanessa Dang’s spicy salmon tartare at La Rose Bistro. It’s a pastel Kandinsky of a dish, bright and playful. Some analysis: The heyday of dumb fusion seems to have passed. And later: Almost every plate looks like food porn. And the conclusion: Cooking in cashmere and emerging from the kitchen without a single splash mark—baby, that’s style.

And so, dear readers, is that.

Another terrific writer who finishes with the frontrunners is Meredith Brody of the San Francisco Weekly, who attended culinary school in Paris and covered restaurants in Los Angeles and New York before taking this Bay Area post. Her control of tone is masterly. I have a couple of friends down in L.A. who fill this particular bill because they don’t really possess taste buds—they have other talents. Of the movie Super Size Me, she writes: the pointed commentaries are interlarded with witty graphics. When David’s describes its cheesecake as baroque, she intones: It is baroque, and it needs fixing. Although this reviewer has been around a while, clearly we are witnessing The Prime of Ms. Meredith Brody.

So many critics owe so much to their parents. Brody’s parents ate out frequently. The next morning, my father would describe to me every course they’d had in near-erotic detail as he shaved. I’d love to meet her mother, who’s a patient and understanding foil for her writing. I knew it would require more than a dull dish to make her reject me. Critics owe much to friends also—Brody’s (like mine) must brace themselves against having their foibles exposed for the larger good of public humor. Robert is not looking forward to my version of this. “Oh,” I say to him, “don’t worry: The column is fiction.” And critics’ family and friends can count on being overruled. My father diplomatically said his hamburger was good; it wasn’t.

Where overuse of adverbs is normally a writing flaw, Brody turns it into an art form. Grilled salmon with lemon butter was perfectly acceptable, and came with creamy mashed potatoes that unexpectedly enhanced the fish. A tomato-pepper compote was compulsively edible. A peasant duck pie’s filling was unrelievedly dark and salty. Located in Pasadena, conveniently inconvenient to my house, is her favorite, cholesterol-threatening burger joint. I was too full to eat the éclair that was waiting mutely. Although her follow-up quote of Vladimir Nabokov’s description of an éclair left on a plate as “lonely, despised, unwanted” proves that, no matter how great the writer, there’s always another level.

Despite Brody’s elegant writing, she seems to have picked up a coterie of on-line stalkers. Their animosity is palpable. Poking fun at Meredith Brody is like clubbing baby seals: too easy. I agreed with several of her critics that the headline, “Jew Eat Yet?” was tasteless, but assumed that she, like most columnists, rarely gets to write her own headlines. Her detractors probably had a point about gnocchi colored a verdant green.

But I find Brody’s writing almost always evocative. The fog was rolling in, seemingly right into the restaurant. I think her blog critics sell her short. Perhaps she even sells herself short. In her review of 1550 Hyde, she winds up with a friend’s e-mailed synopsis of the restaurant, then concludes: I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Actually, she could and she did.

Paul Reidinger, who handles the more upscale eateries for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, is a terrific writer most of the time who occasionally loses his way. His openings are often wonderful. To say that Oxygen Bar… has atmosphere is to put the case with heroic circumspection. Oxygen Bar is atmosphere, quite literally; from its sky-blue walls pop plastic tubes from which various interesting and eclectic people arrayed on low vinyl sofas take the heavily oxygenated, recreative airs, while a tall drag queen ushers the famished to a sushi bar at the rear. Another example: Along the quays of most Mediterranean port cities you will find, most mornings, a fish market, a veritable carnival of colorful, weirdly shaped creatures from the deep, arrayed on beds of ice as if trawled from some Day-Glo nightmare.

Such openings are the hallmark of award-winning writing. The following passage, written for Valentine’s Day, on the other hand, is the hallmark of Hallmark writing: The many-hued blossom we call love is both fragile and hardy. God, did he channel Rod McKuen for that one?

Sometimes Reidinger’s transitions are awkward and his pieces don’t flow as well as they might. And I didn’t know what to make of the following: His octopus terrine isn’t quite a conventional terrine—a layering—but it is an attractive mishmash of chopped squid tossed with black olives and frisée in plenty of olive oil. Doesn’t sound like it’s octopus, either.

Reidinger’s pieces are packed with good observations: One of the great pleasures of eating simple French food is its reassuring monotony. Or, one of my pet peeves, perfectly expressed: We… found the celery to be pushy. It so often is. Vivid writing maintains reader interest. The green and white [autostrada] sign will be familiar to anyone who has driven, or been driven, or melted in dread, on Italian roads.

But Reidinger is easily distracted, particularly by the political. While alternative food writers find it difficult to avoid periodic injections of politics into their food pieces, it can be vexing, particularly since they’re already preaching to the choir, and the other writers in their publications tend to do more nuanced explorations of issues. Where is the subtlety in: We need look no further than to the ongoing political antics in Washington, D.C., a city of marble colonnades in which Congress slumbers, the Supreme Court schemes, and the president is continually reaching for his six-shooter while hungry hawks circle overhead. Puleeze! No one in the Bay Area enjoys being portrayed by the rest of the country with the same lack of nuance.

Reidinger also needs to check his math when he writes vegetarianism, in my experience, is unknown in people over 50. I’m certainly no vegetarian, but I can attest that those of us in our mid-40s were already a half-generation behind the first wave of vegetarianism. (Unless they’ve all succumbed to a diet that gives them that unhealthy pallor?). Anyway, anyone wanting a positive review from Reidinger would be advised to stock up, not on vegetables, but on buttermilk and grappa, his other two obsessions besides politics.

My final frustration is with a parenthetical clause in his Butterfly Mission opening: there to keep company with other disgraced restaurant writers, who shall remain nameless? Don’t be a tease. You write for an alternative publication, so name the names. That’s what alternative weeklies do. And that’s what I do.

Patricia Unterman is the critic for the San Francisco Examiner, which before a recent split with the Chronicle was that paper’s evening edition. Unterman’s food-related bio is as long as one’s arm. She was the Chronicle critic for 15 years, she is the author of the San Francisco Food Lovers’ Guide and publishes a bi-weekly newsletter called “Unterman on Food.”

I’m grateful when I come across a critic whose writing is so clearly competent I don’t have to scan it for problems of grammar and syntax. Her descriptions of dishes at Mi Lindo Yucatan had me salivating, while she informed with observations like Yucatecans cook more turkey, a native American bird, than chicken. Particularly marvelous were her descriptions of the Italian immersion that Poggio owner Larry Mindel has achieved and of Marche’s Paris-Brest dessert. Of Bizou, she astutely observed that the butcher paper-covered tables may be small and pushed too close together; the wooden bar narrow; the noise level high; but this is a room in which everyone wants to be.

I was also impressed with her general command of her subject matter. I have some small quarrels with Unterman, however. I suppose chauvinism is forgivable, as when she states in her Koi Palace review that the Australian crab is the only crab that rivals our Dungeness crab for meatiness. I lived my first 11 years in Oregon and my father, a marine biologist, studied (and partook of) Dungeness crabs, so I share Unterman’s enthusiasm for the crustacean. But I also know there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of crab species worldwide, so I wouldn’t dare make such an unequivocal statement. She’s better explaining that nothing is wasted in the Chinese kitchen: the geoduck sashimi comes from the long, trunk-like siphon that extends from the clam, and the geoduck body appeared as fritters…

Unterman seems a little out of her depth with some ethnic cuisines (but at least she doesn’t avoid them, as some critics are wont to do for fear of exposing gaps in their knowledge). She calls Habana a Cuban rather than Cuban-themed restaurant. From the dishes she describes, the popular eatery seems more pan-Latin than Cuban. Also, she sparked my curiosity by writing that owner Sam DuVall managed to collect a gallery’s worth of Cuban memorabilia… during his many visits to Cuba over the past 20 years, then left my curiosity unassuaged. I visited Cuba during the Elian Gonzalez brouhaha and didn’t find our freedom-loving government particularly welcoming upon my return. How did DuVall manage to assemble his extensive collection?

I compliment Unterman on tackling the complex cuisine of the Philippines (source of my nom de plume, by the way). She’s probably correct when she says the cuisine is not represented with depth or subtlety in local restaurants, but I cringe when she starts her tour at Max’s, a popular Manila chain. Boston Market is a popular American chain, but no self-respecting Manila critic would review it. And, cough, Boston Market might be better. At least she didn’t review Jollibee, which has opened nine American outlets and which I think of as the Philippines’ revenge for America’s fast-food imperialism. But it’s hard to believe the Bay Area has no high-end Filipino food like Cendrillon in New York or Rambutan in Chicago.

It’s true that hot chilies are rarely eaten in the Philippines, but they’re frequently put in dishes and dips to impart a slow burn. Some parts of the country, including my wife’s, like their food quite spicy. With over 7,000 islands, it’s only natural that the cuisine of the Philippines is highly regionalized, like India’s or China’s.

The banana catsup she describes is an atrocity because of its sweetness. Filipino food can be extraordinary in the hands of a cook who doesn’t over-sweeten, over-fatten or employ MSG. But Unterman’s right on the money pointing out that an adobo roll succinctly illustrated the melting pot nature of Filipino cuisine: a Chinese pork bun, American-style manufactured egg bread, and Filipino vinegar-stewed pork, all rolled into one.

I have one other bone to pick with Unterman—she’s chef and co-owner of the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco and runs Vicolo Pizzeria behind it. By what stretch of the imagination is this not a conflict of interest? Presumably she draws her customers from the same population as do the restaurants she critiques. If the same were true of Bauer, I would be hearing a low grumbling from many quarters. So I put the question to my Bay Area contacts, who explained that Unterman had once weathered accusations of conflict of interest, but that her restaurants are neither new nor particularly cutting-edge and have established clienteles. They used adjectives like “intelligent,” “insightful” and even “majestic” to describe her.

The Best of the Rest

Like Walden of the Chronicle, one person who barely seems to find time to talk about food is the Bay Guardian’s Dan Leone, who has driven me nuts on the cheap eats beat for years. He’s more force of nature than food writer. Sometimes he’s hilarious, and sometimes he’s as sophomoric as ipecac mixed into a Mudslide or a doorbell rung to announce a flaming package of newspaper-wrapped dog doodoo on the doorstep. When he manages a little subtlety, his humor can be quite effective; when he doesn’t, the best use of his column might be, as some are fond of saying, to wrap fish or line a birdcage.

It’s not unusual to find out what restaurant he’s nominally writing about in the last paragraph of his rant, as in his “Toothsome Cowboy” piece in which he detailed his efforts to avoid the dentist. When I’m reading about food, thinking about food—and often—eating food, I don’t want to read: I spent hours in front of the mirror, packing little pieces of parsley between whatever teeth weren’t already packed with visible residual beef jerky fester. In such a piece, it’s a close call whether a restaurant would even want to be mentioned.

He’s so tongue in cheek that it’s hard to separate the intentional bad writing (I even forewent my usual toothpick.) from the possibly unintentional (But he seemed to prefer to stand still as a log pile.). During his better moments, like his description of getting his foot caught in an old box spring in the Mission District or his van trip to Wyoming in the snow, I find myself reading passages out loud to friends and family who happen to have the misfortune to be within hailing distance. In real life, I prefer not to be noticed—which is a lot to ask when you’re wearing a five-by-six-foot bedspring on a city sidewalk around lunchtime. And during his worse moments, like his indecipherable description of a knife fight at Treat and 25th (it will probably win an A.F.J. award), I find myself doing the same thing for the opposite reason.

Where other writers stumble over Filipino food, not Our Man Dan. You can’t stumble when you handle a cuisine in the following manner: We ordered pork sinigang, which is a sour soup broth with tamarind, big chunks of onion, tomato, something green, something white—all this and pork, big huge pieces of tender pork, sticking up out of it like rocks in a river, only tastier.

His starts are hard to resist: Man, I love my wife. Or, I’m not a religious dude. Or my favorite, Do I look like I lost weight? His endings may be bizarre shouted asides like, Jesus Christ, what the hell’s happening to the Cliff House? In between, you get a whole lot of Leone, whose work somehow reminds me of those 1987 public service announcements: This is your brain on drugs… Readers, fasten your seatbelts!

AsianWeek’s Picky Eater is a young Chinese-American woman. Generally, I liked her work. Too much youthful naïveté is demonstrated for her evaluations to be anything but fair. The column is pretty well-written, except for occasional problems of syntax like I’m really biased to the one my dad makes, or on its own, both chrysanthemum and go chi are very good for taking away “heat” in the body.

There are many nuggets of wisdom. [Chinese] restaurants that serve just one regional-style cooking offer the most authentic food outside of China. She calls Taipei Restaurant on the carpet: The mu shu wrappers were flour tortillas! Talk about unintentional fusion. And she did a nice job of questioning the health benefits of the food at vegetarian kosher Shangri-La.

The column is consistently entertaining. Of House of Nanking, our anonymous heroine opines: Those who give it rave reviews think sweet and sour pork the color of Hawaiian Punch is a staple dish in China. I laughed at the following image: the metal-grated chairs only made me feel more like I was in a pigeon cage. She sets up perfectly an incident in which she bites into xiao long bao, a juicy dumpling, and nailed my friend in the eye.

It’s interesting to watch one restaurant critic after the next stubbing her toes on Filipino food. Most people don’t realize that the second most populous Asian-American group in the United States is Filipino, after, of course, Chinese, and Tagalog is the second most spoken Asian language. The Picky Eater starts well in her review of Barrio Fiesta. She correctly identifies Chinese influences in the cuisine. She does a nice job of describing the Filipino technique of eating with one’s fingers, called kamayan. Of pancit Canton (hard to miss the Chinese influence there, isn’t it?) she says a squeeze of lemon juice to the noodles was a good thing, but misses the opportunity to say that kalamansi is used when available. Given that she was served kalamansi juice, one suspects no fresh kalamansis were available and frozen kalamansi (perfectly acceptable for drinking) was used. Finally, she calls kalamansi a citrus fruit from Southern Tagalog, but it is grown everywhere in the Philippines, and ironically, it is believed to have originated in China.

Although the column is quite informative, I can’t give it high marks for knowledge for two reasons. First, it focuses exclusively on Asian food. Second, while the author knows her Chinese food inside-out, she stumbles over some Asian cuisines, especially Japanese and Indian. Asian-Americans are often expected to be experts in all things Asian, but rarely are. After all, how many whites are knowledgeable about Australian, Danish, Dutch and Uzbeki food? The depth of the Picky Eater’s knowledge is proven, but not the breadth.

The Contra Costa Times boxes a ludicrous amount of information after its reviews, space that would probably be better used by its writers. The one touch I liked was separate little wine reviews of the featured restaurant by Jim Meyers. The paper employs two reviewers, Sierra Filucci and Nicholas Boer.

Filucci, who apparently is the food editor of Kitchen Sink Magazine, writes rather well. New restaurants emit a palpable intensity. Sometimes it’s panic, sometimes it’s confidence. Or, later in the same piece: The taste buds don’t get exhausted by the globe-hopping. There are a few minor hitches: Just don’t stray from what the café does best, like I do. “As” clearly would be better.

However, she seems guilty of softening all her blows, which of course is a warning sign of advertorial copy. She is often overly effusive with her praise. I’m blown away. Mistakes are always forgiven. Negative criticisms are almost always offset by another individual who disagrees, often her husband. My husband adores the grilled squid salad… but I want the flavor of the squid to jump out a little more. Or they switch roles: I’m pleased with the tomato sauce, which has a bit of smoky depth, but my husband thinks it tastes more like canned. She engages in shameless pleading for customers on the restaurant’s behalf: Many restaurants are struggling in the lethargic economy, and Pete says he hopes for better business soon. This kind of family-run place needs a loyal following to stay afloat, and if anybody deserves it, Pete and his Mom sure do.

I might have labeled the Contra Costa Times’ reviews as disguised profiles, except Filucci’s colleague, Boer, sounds plenty of critical notes, some hard-hitting. Of Poggio, he says: Instead of crisp skin and moist chicken, Lisa gets moist skin and crisp chicken. Desserts, he adds, on both my visits are only okay. Furthermore, he admits when his cover is blown. A profiler, on the other hand, has no cover to blow. If Boer is on the level, I reasoned, then Filucci must be too. I chalked up her softened blows to a tender heart.

Jeff Cox of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat has a chatty style in which he uses “you” and “we” quite frequently. The length of his restaurant columns encourage rambling. If they were shortened, he might write tighter and better pieces. With most writers, readers are better off hearing their best 30 thoughts than their best 100. (Surely you find yourself in agreement reading my piece?).

One of his best 30 thoughts would have to include: The meat was a perfect medium rare—the American style, as opposed to the French style, where the idea of cooking lamb is that someone shouts “Fire!” in another room. His detailing of what an authentic Greek salad should include was informative. And I appreciated his attention to consumer concerns. I noticed that the house wine is James Arthur Field… for $4.95 a glass. You can buy this wine for $7.99 a magnum retail… A magnum holds 10 glasses of wine. You do the math.

Cox’s pieces are lively, which is more than I can say for half of the Chronicle’s writers. He starts one review with a multiple choice test, another with a coin flip. But he can be quite sloppy. The following sentence screams for a rewrite: Given that Sanchez was the top gun at the Culinary Academy, where tomorrow’s superstar chefs are trained, it stands to reason she can turn out dishes to applaud for.

Where to begin? First, while it’s now acceptable to end a sentence on a preposition, good writers do so only when the alternative is unwieldy; here, other solutions were available. Second, arguably “over” is better than “for”; it seems to improve the sentence. Third, and most egregious, according to the opening of the piece, Sanchez was executive chef at Greystone Restaurant at the Culinary Institute of America, while Lenders was a teacher at California Culinary Academy—it appears that Cox split the difference. Finally, assuming he meant to refer to the C.I.A., it’s just one source of chefs, not the source, and I have to say my one meal at Greystone was marred by over-salting.

Visiting a restaurant with a menu that lists eight ingredients, five cooking methods, and seven sauces, Cox describes it as “unique” rather than paying the necessary homage to Craft in New York. And when he describes a ratatouille of French lentils and winter vegetables with balsamic vinaigrette, instead of praising it for not being one of those limp, soggy ratatouilles, he should ask by what leap of imagination is that a ratatouille? I objected, as did some of his readers, to his statement that connoisseurs always add some water to their Scotch.

Too often, Cox’s points seem to war with one another. The land will be a clean slate on which Fort Bragg can write its foggy future. In another example, the problem is the echo of “taste” and “tasty”: The menu says there’s white truffle oil somewhere on the plate, but I couldn’t taste it. All in all, it’s a fun, tasty appetizer. Nor does anything that precedes those two sentences support calling the appetizer “tasty.”

Finally, Cox has real problems with consistency of tone. I hardly knew what to make of the next sentence: The tongue is sharp and sassy—like my high school history teacher’s—from its marinade. Sounds like someone has some unresolved issues.

Describing a chef’s newsletter, Cox writes: To his credit, Petti follows the dictum of a good writer: “Write like you talk.” That dictum would be better expressed as, “Write as you speak.” Unfortunately for his readers, Cox too often does.

Not Much Reviewing Going On?

Monthly publications often take the approach that if they have only 12 shots at talking about restaurants per year, there’s not much point featuring ones that aren’t worth their readers’ time, effort and money. I have no problem with that approach, as long as the publications walk away from any restaurants that turn out to be sub par, and still write truth and nothing but the truth so help them God. Appropriate critical notes should still be sounded. And readers should know the publication’s policy.

A bigger problem is small-market dailies and weeklies that wish to appear as if they engage in restaurant criticism but actually participate in profiling, another name for advertorial writing. It’s highly troubling when the lines between publications’ sales and editorial departments are blurred. Of course, if a profiling publication were to state up front that it never takes a truly critical approach, it would diminish the effectiveness of its glorified advertising. That’s why conscientious publications state their review policies for all to see—and many others don’t.

In addition to failing to print review policies, signs of profiling include overly effusive praise, exhortations to try various dishes, listings of dishes, mentioning the names of several staff members, prolonged bios of chefs or owners and, most important, a lack of hard-hitting criticism. If there’s only one negative criticism in a restaurant review, you should suspect it of being token. Even with multiple criticisms, you should suspect them of being token offerings if they’re always survivable or offset by immediate praise.

Most critics have ambivalent feelings about profilers. Most are not terribly fond of profilers, feeling that this peculiar brand of food writer undermines the tough work that real critics do. On the other hand, most have some empathy for them. There but for the grace of God go I… There are precious few proper critic positions in the nation, and everyone else is involved in some level of compromise.

One smaller publication that, against all financial odds, publishes its review policy and strives to be genuinely critical is the San Jose Mercury News. Its pair of critics—Sheila Himmel and Aleta Watson—do a pretty fair job. Both seem knowledgeable about food, their criticisms on target. If forced to take only one critic from each publication on my ark, I would probably select Himmel, but it’s a close call.

Occasional humor leavens Himmel’s writing. Witness this passage from her review of Blowfish Sushi to Die For: Santana Row’s most urban restaurant thumps with techno music that strikes many young people as pleasurable. They are able to make out in the bar, and even carry on conversations. At Pho 909, she cites how her dining companion’s grandma made banh xeo, savory Vietnamese crepes, on the beach in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Her analysis is often on target: True believers pay attention and follow the chefs. But at Cantankerous Fish (do all of the fish houses around San Jose carry colorful names?), she opines: A fish house must serve hunks of good sourdough bread. Next to which I scribbled, “Why?”

Watson also writes pretty well: Inside [Nicolino’s Garden Café], the calendar appears to have been turned back decades to a time when elegance was measured in red drapes, gilt mirrors and a profusion of flowers. Of Clay Pot, she concludes: Many offerings… fell short of the lively, multi-layered flavors that I have come to expect from the best Vietnamese food.

But my biggest concern about this pair is whether they are truly critical. Some of the signs of profiling disguised as criticism are present, especially in Watson’s writing. When she writes, only the outstanding fish redeemed a paella so bland, you could swear the chef had forgotten the saffron, she blunts her criticism of the paella by calling the fish outstanding while giving the chef an out he may not deserve. And when she says of Passionfish, all missteps were forgiven, however, when our sybaritic desserts arrived, one again suspects advertorial writing. But because Watson was pretty tough on A’Bellagio across the board, I prefer to think she’s just a little too soft-hearted.

One publication that wears its pro-business heart on its sleeve is San Francisco Downtown. I spoke with Publisher Gordon Reynolds, who termed himself “an unabashed supporter of downtown business.” Reynolds volunteered that his publication runs restaurant profiles, not reviews. He added, “Many writers take perverse pleasure in ripping a restaurant. If we don’t like a restaurant, we don’t write about it.”

So why have I included this publication? Because I find its honesty refreshing. Because I like some of Joanna Currier’s writing. And because I believe transitions reveal a lot about the direction in which a publication is headed.

Currier’s descriptions can be colorful. The Private Reserve made from 90-year-old vines was like red raspberries in the mouth. Visiting Koh Samui & the Monkey, she wrote: The Monkey refers to the restaurant’s small adjoining shop of Thai antiques and is a nod to Aom’s astrological sign as well as tribute to the creatures that run loose and are “treated as friends” in her homeland.

Still, Currier lost me at a couple of points. Entrées here are very San Francisco, from the 10-ounce rib filet with spring vegetables to the herb-roasted half-chicken. One could substitute the name of almost any American city in that sentence. Furthermore, using the word “though” twice in the same sentence is clumsy, even if one is parenthesized. If her criticisms weren’t especially hard-hitting, at least the restaurants seemed well-chosen and we have Reynold’s assurance that his profilers walk away from the bad ones.

As this article went to press, Currier had been replaced by Karen Solomon. While evaluating someone based only on her first article is akin to reviewing a restaurant on its opening night, it was all I had to work with. Her writing was workmanlike, but no better: Here, one could dribble on their shirt and laugh. The tone was advertorial. After dining at Town’s End, Solomon said a restful night’s sleep can be predicted.

The same effect could be achieved by reading Solomon’s piece. I don’t say this to pick on Solomon, who may improve, or Reynolds, whom I instinctively liked and respected. Rather, I want to highlight the primary danger of producing overly advertorial restaurant copy, which is that it won’t achieve the desired effect of motivating people to seek out a particular restaurant.

I wasn’t sure if the Marin Independent Journal’s restaurant columns were reviews seeking advertisers or advertisers seeking reviews. One knows one is reading advertorial when one comes across the following: The urge to splurge can be overwhelming. Yield to it. But the columns make amusing reading, and Leslie Harlib writes just well enough to be dangerous.

At times, her prose is quite good. A multitude of candles… flickering in alcoves conjure up thoughts of… the title sequence of “The English Patient.” At other times, it’s not. Tortilla Español is the Ford of foods—common to every bar. Metaphor is definitely not her strong suit. [Blood sausages] are the Darth Vaders of the meat world. Dark, shiny, a little scary until you realize it’s simply rich, succulent meat under that black surface. Obviously, grammatical problems aside, the metaphor would work only if Vader had turned out to be a great guy underneath his intimidating getup.

She has a gift for turning token criticisms into pluses rivaled only by the Cialis commercials that, under the guise of medical warning, tell poor hopeful impotent men that they should seek medical attention if their erections persist longer than four hours. Bet that really scares them off. Baraka offers some of San Francisco’s most innovative food, although you need to get past some drawbacks of the physical space—tables are set pretty tightly together, the bar scene sometimes spills out into the spaces between the tables, and the noise level, depending where you sit, can be potent enough to have its own distinct pulse. In other words—the food’s not only great, but the restaurant’s popular and exciting.

Harlib’s a natural saleswoman for whom I envision a lucrative career as a restaurant publicist, especially since she’s not above using her sexuality to sell her product. I caught myself swaying unconsciously to the drum beats as I waited for my food. Or: My recent experience was pure seduction of the senses. Or: Spain is sexy. Or: I felt almost emotional at the burst of Mediterranean flavors. Or: These were material for moaning with pleasure. Her columns should come cum photo.

I honestly couldn’t tell whether the Palo Alto Weekly writes genuinely critical reviews or not; I’d label them suspect. I also couldn’t tell—at first—whether its critic, Dale F. Bentson, was a man or woman. I read the passage, Lip-smacking and aromatic, I gleefully soaked up the excess sauce with olive bread, and fervently hoped Bentson was a woman because of the image generated in my mind by that dangling phrase. No such luck, it turned out.

I could tell, however, that Bentson was not terribly knowledgeable. His observation that grilled salmon had a healthy pink tinge is troubling without some reference to whether the salmon was wild or farmed—farmed salmon is invariably dyed. His complaint that the barbeque sauce was scarcely evident requires some explanation of the quality of the smoking, because well-smoked meat is best left un-sauced. And his reference to the cheese Tomme de Savorie probably makes savory sense, but it’s actually Savoie.

I could also tell that his writing wasn’t good. I knew what he meant by undemanding contemporary artwork, but it could have been much better expressed. Succulent shards of crab mingled blissfully was quite droll; did he mean shreds or did the recipe for the crab cocktail omit the instruction “remove crab meat from shell?” Of Bistro Élan, he says the cuisine is marvelous; he means the food. He writes: The minestrone was a rich flavorful bowl, the kind your Mama used to make if she had any Italian inclinations. Shouldn’t that read “any pottery inclinations?”

Bentson describes dishes covered in a lightly acidic tomato sauce, submerged in marinara sauce, suffused in marinara sauce, sheltered under the ubiquitous marinara sauce and bathed in a sauce, then expects his readers to buy his observation that the sauces at Osteria perfectly coat the pasta and do not overwhelm it.

Finally, the Napa Valley News has an unsigned review column that I include because it’s instructive. One pities the writer on his/her $30 and under beat when he/she writes that Emmy Lou’s places an emphasis on foods you might have eaten as a kid at a Woolworth’s luncheonette. Then one’s pity dries up when he/she ignores his/her theoretical financial restrictions and visits Market in St. Helena.

There are plenty of signs of profiling. Too much reciting of menu contents. Overly effusive praise. The ability to find something good to say about the dullest eateries. The hostess suggested we spread out and take a table for four. What a friendly place, we thought. Translation: no stampede for this restaurant’s highly ordinary food is imminent.

There are a couple of writing glitches. The word “morphed” is spelled with an “f.” When he/she writes, Gordon’s Café in Yountville has an American soul, but with the flair of a French bistro, one wonders if souls have flair? And when he/she writes of a creamy potato salad that tasted like a pâté, one wonders in what universe is that possible?

Overall, the writing’s not that bad, just stultifyingly lacking in imagination. The writer keeps to one or two sentence paragraphs and employs a sentence structure that rarely varies. Can readers easily become bored when one sentence after the next starts “We this…” or “We that…”? Oui, oui.

Diagnosis

The best thing that could have happened to the Bay Area would have been for Bauer to have accepted the position at the Times. As long as Bauer remains entrenched at the Chronicle, the dining scene will suffer. As critics become too embedded, the work they do becomes compromised. However sweet the post, a critic needs to move on periodically. It’s time Bauer realizes that he has tarried too long.

At this point, Josh Sens, Jonathan Kauffman, Meredith Brody, Paul Reidinger and Patricia Unterman all have more to offer than Bauer. The best prescription for what ails San Francisco would be for someone of their caliber to ascend to the top restaurant critic post at the Chronicle and inject new life into the dining scene.