Good Signs, Bad Signs (You Know We’ve Had Our Share): A Deconstructionist’s Guide to Gauging Restaurant Quality

The following is a collaboration between my good friend Ruth Tobias of the inestimable Denver-based food/drink blog Denveater (tagged herein as Denv.), myself (tagged as MCSJB), Boston blogger Hidden Boston (tagged as HB), and Denver blogger Denver on a Spit (tagged as DOAS).

The idea for the post, the selection of the contributors, and the editing of all our input into a coherent whole was all Ruth's: many thanks to her for her originality, hard work, and supreme cat-herding effort. She is the first-person "I" in this piece. If you see a restaurant name you don't recognize, it's likely in the Denver area.

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I knew the Director and I were in for a long night at the not-surprisingly-now-defunct Mark and Isabella the second we stepped inside and I saw the slogan on the back of a server’s T-shirt: “Got lasagna?” Faux-snark swiped from an ad campaign that had long since been borrowed to the point of grinding cliché did not bode well for the freshness of the dining experience—and sure enough, from the half-hearted service to the even-less-hearted cooking, the meal was a real drag. It occurred to me then that outside of roadhouses and shacks—clam, BBQ, burger, and otherwise—cheeky T-shirts might be an indication that the powers that be were putting the style cart before the substance horse.

When my theory was confirmed at the meh Via della Pace in Manhattan's East Village a couple months back, it got me to thinking about other indirect but generally reliable signs that a place is going to rock or suck. Cheesy Asian pop in an Asian restaurant, for instance: good. Cheesy American pop in an American restaurant: bad. Frank Sinatra in an Italian restaurant: really bad. Sleek logos: good. Gaudy logos: bad. No logos at all: probably bad (assuming it’s a pretentious appeal to insiderly exclusivity—although read on for an important exception). And so on.

It also got me to asking other food bloggers for their thoughts on the subject; here, the authors of Denver on a Spit, MC Slim JB, and Hidden Boston graciously offer up some worthy words to the wise (hey, that’s you!). Which doesn’t mean you should take them entirely without a grain of salt; as MC Slim JB points out, “It's an old Chowhound adage that deliciousness turns up where you least expect it. I am still routinely surprised to find great food in places I figured would be awful, and bad food where I expected joy. And I keep ‘discovering’ great little joints that have been around for years; I just never noticed them or happened by their neighborhoods. So don't take these rules of thumb as durable: there are always exceptions, and pleasant surprises hiding behind ominous first impressions are among the great pleasures of dining out.”

With that said:

+ (PLUS) SIGNS

English—or Rather the Lack Thereof

This may seem fairly obvious, but a good sign when looking for good food is a lack of English. This can start with the customers. If the customers are all talking in a language other than English, then chances are you have found a place that is at least authentic. This can backfire, of course, because if you go the McDonald's on Alameda near Federal; a lot of people may be talking in Vietnamese or Spanish, but you're still in a Wack Arnold's. If the waitstaff doesn't or barely speaks English, then that could be a good sign, too—but that could also happen at McDonald's. So probably the best indication is that the menu is in another language—especially if all or parts of it are not translated. [Conversely, see Dining for Dummies below—Denv.] Also, you probably want to figure out how to order off that part of the menu. Like at Denver’s New Saigon. Ever notice that untranslated page in Vietnamese? The servers often strongly discourage non-natives from ordering from there. Ignore them.— DOAS

A staff that cheerfully labors to overcome language barriers (example: East Boston's Restaurante Montecristo). Actually, that's a red herring: restaurants with little English in the front of the house that don't try to work with my kindergartner's Spanish can be good, too [see: El Taco de Mexico—Denv], but I'm impressed when they bother.—MCSJB

Wheels, Tents and Tunes

Signage—or Rather the Lack Thereof [an exception to my "no logos" rule—Denv.]

Speaking of signs good and bad, a complete lack of signage is often a good sign. Las Tortugas on Alameda just recently added a sign after years without. This is one of the most authentic torta experiences you will have outside of Mexico. A restaurant not only surviving but flourishing without any kind of advertising can only mean good things. Places like these grow by word of mouth. They have no websites, emails or, at times, even traceable phone numbers. If you are lucky enough to find one, then it is likely that you have stumbled upon something special. Likewise, signs you can't understand are often good.—DOAS

Attitude—or the Lack Thereof
Many restaurants feel the need to cater to every whiny need of its customers at any cost. Others, in the tradition of the Soup Nazi, post a list of rules that owners expect their customers to follow. These places know their food is good. If you are worried about pissing off the restaurant owners or cook, it must be good. When dining at Tom’s Diner in Denver, read the rules and don’t be a pain in the ass. The result? Some of the best Southern fare you can hope for in Denver.—DOAS

A warm, sincere-sounding greeting from the hostess stand immediately upon entering. A flustered, supercilious, or inattentive maître d' is a red flag.—MCSJB
[See: Wild Bangkok—Denv.]

A chef-owned place that closes when the chef goes on holiday (example: Trattoria Toscana near Fenway). The level of professional pride reflected in the implied motto, “If I'm not here cooking, it's not my food,” is generally encouraging.—MCSJB

Tableware—or the Lack Thereof
Environmental awareness has not yet expanded to encompass all restaurants equally. So if you are comfortable enlarging your carbon footprint from time to time in exchange for some good food, then an unfortunate good sign is often paper plates, plastic forks and Styrofoam cups (big ones).

Meanwhile, napkins are fluff. In my own home, napkins are for when guests like parents come over. Paper towels are absorbent and good for dabbing the corners of your mouth, wiping up big saucy spills from the table and sopping up the grease you can't lick off your fingers. A roll of paper towels on each table is a solid sign of good food. The opposite of the paper towel is ultra-thin, almost transparent tissue-paper napkins. I have not seen a lot of these in the States, but in many countries this is the standard. If you grab for a napkin, then need to grab four more to sop up a pea-sized spill, you have chosen well.

[See: Tin Star Cafe Donut Haus—DOAS]

Roots, Part 1: Where Everybody Looks the Same [to the tune of the "Cheers" theme]

Not in the way that all white people look the same, but as in a staff that shares the same genetic makeup. Is sis hosting while bro serves and mom barks orders from the kitchen? Stay. It's going to be good.—DOAS

Son out front, mom in the back. I've run into this setup in many tiny, traditional restaurants, and the results are often wonderful.—MCSJB
[See: Lao Wang Noodle House—Denv.]

Roots, Part 2
A cliché that happens to be true: a crowd of ex-pats in a restaurant serving their homeland's cuisine, e.g., many Thai immigrants dining in a Thai restaurant. Somewhere there must be throngs of Cantonese speakers with lousy taste—the Chinese equivalent of Chili's fans—so their presence at a Hong Kong–style live-tank seafood restaurant shouldn't impress me. But I haven't run into them yet.—MCSJB
[See: Star Kitchen—Denv.]

Places with wheels always get my attention. There is something about an operation that has the potential to be portable that tickles my tastebuds. In Denver, many of my favorite meals come from food carts or out of taco trucks, running the range from Gastro Cart’s gourmet goodies to my favorite hidden loncheras (luncheonettes) in Aurora. Everything tastes better when it comes from a vehicle parked on a street corner or empty lot. As the food truck and cart boom grows in Denver this spring and summer, this might change, but for now, it's a great place to start.

Or: There is a big white canopy tent in a parking lot next to a restaurant. Under that tent is a hunk of red stacked pork loins roasting on a spit with open flame. There are juices dripping off the meat. You probably want to go there.

Also: nothing says Mexican street life (and that in many other parts of the world) like bootleg CDs and DVDs being sold on the street. If there is someone with a rack of CDs leaning against his or her car in the parking lot of a restaurant, that really can only mean good things for the food inside. If there is a guy hawking cheap plastic toys as well? Jackpot. For a special bonus, does the owner let people come in off the street and peddle stuff inside of the restaurant itself? This takes the parking lot theory to a new level, and is not limited to CDs. Tamales, cheese, and tortillas are all fair game. Denver's Taco Mex has it all.—DOAS

Cleanliness, Godliness
A spotless open kitchen where every cook has a tidy mise-en-place. Not every fine dining restaurant that exhibits this orderliness will be good, but an open kitchen without it inevitably disappoints. Also: spanking-clean bathrooms. A restaurant that minds this particular corner of the store reveals something honorable about its character.—MCSJB

– (MINUS) SIGNS

Staff: Aptitude and Attitude
"Hi, my name is ____ and I'll be your server tonight." Not the server's fault, I know: this is part of the restaurant's robotic training regimen. But it still sets my teeth on edge every time. A rote phrase of greeting is an unpromising way to start the meal.—MCSJB

Bouncers. Your place may serve food, but it's primarily a nightclub, and nightclub owners virtually never run worthwhile restaurants.—MCSJB

The host who points to your table rather than taking you to it. When hosts do this, it implies that a) they hate their job; b) they don't really care about the customers; c) they are incredibly lazy. In all three cases, it sends up warning signals to the diners.—HBPimped-out servers. Restaurants that drape female servers in tight, revealing uniforms are usually trying to distract you from some unflattering facts about their food. Staring at you, Hooters. —MCSJB
[See, er: Hooters—Denv.]

A server who sits at your table when s/he takes your order. Why do they need to sit at the table? Are they tired? Are they looking for new friends? Either way, it is irritating and vaguely disturbing, especially if the table is tight to begin with.—HB
[See: The Wine Loft—Denv.]

Schtick
The involvement of a professional athlete: their name on the marquee or their ownership stake touted in the restaurant's marketing. I can't think of a single restaurant of this type I've visited that wasn't overpriced, mediocre, or both.—MCSJB
[Elway’s is an exception, but one that proves the rule.—Denv.]

“Tony Gabbagool” shtick. Certain Italian places (example: Strega in Boston’s North End) hype their affinity for heavily-stereotyped American Mafia culture, some going so far as to hire former Sopranos bit actors to promote their restaurants. It's stale, stupid, and borderline-offensive, not a harbinger of quality.—MCSJB

A floor show. Benihana-style teppanyaki, strolling violinists, Fire + Ice falderol (you select ingredients and sauces to be stir-fried in front of you on a giant griddle), and other gimmicks often hide lackluster ingredients behind the zazzle.—MCSJB

Kitschy mismatched bric-à-brac: stuffed game-animal heads, old road signs, etc. Another casual dining trope that says, "Boil-in-bag food served here."—MCSJB

Dining for Dummies

An English-language menu that only captures a subset of the entire Chinese menu, usually featuring only Americanized dishes. This doesn't mean that Chinese restaurants with limited-for-dumb-Americans menus don't have good food, but I may never know if all they offer me is junk like crab Rangoon and General Gau's chicken. (Pointing at other customers' orders can help, but only until your next visit when you want to get that dish again.)—MCSJB

Tent cards, those little pre-printed cardboard pyramids on the table promoting a drink special (Hypnotiq Cozmos!), appetizer (Shrimp Poppers!), entree (Fettuccine Alfredo in a Bread Bowl!), or dessert (Mom's Homemade Chocolate Lava Cake!). They're a staple of national casual dining chain hellholes, and thus inspire foreboding.—MCSJB

Similarly: An insert for specials looks older than the regular menus.—HB

A menu with photos of the food (this mainly applies to traditional American places, as pictures of food at ethnic restaurants aren't always a bad thing). Usually the pictures are stock photos, which means they have nothing to do with the restaurant (unless perhaps the point is to show diners what a hamburger looks like). All they do is take up space on the menu, which may be the questionable goal of the restaurant.—HB
[In Italy, picture menus are usually accompanied by the words "Menu Turistico!" If that's not a sign to vamoose, I don't know what is.—Denv.]

First Impression (with your teeth)
Wonder-Bread-like dinner rolls with portion-control oleo pats served at an American-Chinese restaurant. Get ready for magenta spareribs and gloppy chicken chow mein.—MCSJB

Roots, Part 3
No ex-pats dining in a restaurant serving their traditional cuisine.—HB
[See: P. F. Chang's—Denv.]

Got it? Good. Now you’re ready for the Dining Deconstructionist’s Bonus Guide, by MC Slim JB (with yet more commentary by Denveater):

SIGNS THAT PEOPLE BELIEVE TO BE REVEALING BUT AREN'T

Reviews as Signage
A glowing review posted in the window. This is only useful if the review is recent and the reviewer trustworthy, not some pay-for-play schmuck like The Phantom Gourmet, or a faceless mob of Zagateers who might also adore P. F. Chang's. Further, some restaurants have been caught posting counterfeit reviews, using Photoshop to convert pans into raves.

Agreed: A “They love us on Yelp!” sticker might as well read, “We paid our monthly advertising bill!” As for Zagat, here’s a little tip from a former editor of the Boston/Cape Cod guides (yes, me)—a sticker reading “Zagat Rated” means, uh, the place has been rated. Likely iffily. If it had been rated highly, the owner would probably have opted to frame the whole review. And to underline Slim’s emphasis on recent reviews: I always do a double take when all the clippings and plaques are years old—who knows what’s changed since then? Case in point: Mare in Boston’s North End, which is lined with banners boasting major accolades—from 2006, when the legendary Marisa Iocco was in the kitchen. The current chef may well be a gem, but those banners don’t reassure me; they aren’t sparkling for him.—Denv.

Crowds—or the Lack Thereof
A full parking lot or a line stretching down the sidewalk. All this certifies is that the joint has connected with some lowest common denominator. As with amateur reviews on Yelp, unless you know the tastes of the enthusiasts, you can't trust the endorsement of the crowd. Most outlets of The Cheesecake Factory have nightly lines out the door, too.

No customers. Plenty of wonderful restaurants, e.g., East Boston's lamented Oran Cafe, never find a following, thanks to a bad location (rough neighborhood, hard to reach, no parking/public transit nearby, unpromising setting like a gas station), seedy physical plant, inept or nonexistent marketing, and/or sheer bad luck. Or maybe it's just really, really new. You may be the first to discover it, to truly appreciate and evangelize it.

Roots, Part 4
A match between the nationality of the chef and the restaurant's cuisine. There are excellent Japanese restaurants with Chinese chefs, swell Cajun restaurants with Vietnamese chefs, fine French restaurants with American chefs, fine molecular chefs who aren't from Mars. Conversely, many bad Italian restaurants brag about their Italian-native chefs. Non importa, amico mio.

Addendum: Corny Décor. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths in a trattoria, serapes and sombreros in a taqueria, golden dragons galore in a dim sum palace: you’d think such clichés would amount to gigantic red flags, proving the equivalent of foot-tall mounds of Alfredo, stale tri-colored chips with neon kway-soh dip and sweet and sour mystery meat. But for some reason, they don’t, at least not often enough to judge by.—Denv.

Yet Another "10 Worst Dining Trends" Blog Post

Top 10 lists are justifiably popular: they're simple, quick to read, and fun to argue about. In the food writing world, a recent Chicago Tribune article interviewed various culinary hotshots like celeb chef/owner David Chang of NYC's Momofuku to compile a list of “ten worst dining trends of the last decade”.

Predictably, this inspired of a lot of knock-offs and disputatious blog responses: I know I disagreed with a lot of it, like its broad-brush dismissal of molecular cooking. So I'm belatedly chiming in with my own not-especially-original list that includes a few tropes that regular readers of this blog will recognize as old hobbyhorses of mine. Here's my Boston-flavored 10 Worst Dining Trends of the Past Decade:

• Egregious markups on ordinary wines, especially American ones. As I've documented at length elsewhere, certain restaurants in Boston get away with murder on this score, apparently because their clientele is too undereducated on wine pricing or entranced by atmosphere to realize they're being swindled.

• Bashing of molecular cooking. It's easy to be dismissive of foams and other chem-lab approaches to cooking, at least as employed by chefs who use them as gimmicks to mask their lack of traditional cooking fundamentals. But to my ear, a lot of anti-molecular gastronomy rhetoric sounds like culinary anti-intellectualism, effectively “Haw, haw, that foo-foo food stuff is fer fags!” The truth is that molecular cooking as employed by masters like Grant Achatz or Wylie Dufresne can be a beautifully artistic (and delectable) application of food science. Still, innovation in the kitchen has always met with reactionary resistance: cooking raw animal flesh over fire was probably pshawed by some cavemen. In the less-distant past, once-edgy technologies like the food processor, stick blender and dehydrator were used only by professionals. In short, your mocking of molecular cooking today may look pretty stupid five or 10 years from now when you're buying a home sous-vide machine.
  

• The rise of casual-dining chains, with their emphasis on portion size over quality, their dumbing down of regional and traditional cuisines (more on this below), and their crushing of more worthy, idiosyncratic, locally-owned independent restaurants.

• The grotesque swelling of portion sizes, pioneered by the chains and often forced upon independents as a competitive response. I hate the consequent expectation now carried around by most diners that they will leave with enough leftovers to make three more meals.

• The ongoing debasement of distinctive regional specialties and traditional cuisines (again with national chains as a major culprit). The ignominies of American Chinese food are an ancient example, but there are plenty of newer abominations against authenticity: par-boiled grilled meats char-grilled with a finishing sauce burnt on and called “barbecue”; breaded chicken wings referred to as “Buffalo wings”; chain-level Tex-Mex posited as Mexican cuisine; the suburbanization of Thai food; P.F. Chang's.

• The proliferation of national luxury-steakhouse chains, a format that I find boring and mostly a ripoff. For example, Boston already has a half-dozen good locally-owned platinum-card beef palaces. No city of our size also needs a Smith & Wollensky, a Plaza III, a Fleming's, a Ruth's Chris, a Palm, two Morton's and three Capital Grilles.

• The term "foodie". I think this label had some positive connotations once, but it has since been claimed by the kind of fools who think beating their friends to the latest overpriced It Place somehow makes them special, and dopes who watch 40 hours of Food Network programming a week but would never dare venture into Chinatown. Nobody I know who is really adventurous and single-minded about finding extraordinary food calls herself or himself a foodie anymore. (One might argue that the rise of the “foodiot” – a term coined by Joe Pompeo in a funny New York Observer piece for the kind of annoying food-obsessive who won't shut up at parties or on their blog about where and what they've been eating lately – is equally lamentable, but I'm not calling that particular kettle black.)

• The Phantom Gourmet, for: a) fooling some naïve viewers into thinking the show provides unbiased restaurant reviews when it actually spends most of its time giving tug-jobs to its advertisers, b) spreading the notion among viewers sophisticated enough to recognize the Phantom's grifting that all restaurant reviewers might be whores, and c) those hairdos.

• Food-centric reality TV, epitomized by the appalling crapfest that is Hell's Kitchen. The patently bogus, manufactured drama, as well as the casting of hosts like Gordon Ramsay and some chef contestants for their sheer obnoxiousness, are lowering the bar further for reality TV's already subterranean level of insults to viewer intelligence.

• The death of restaurant dress codes. I understand it's difficult for restaurants to turn away any business in these brutal economic times, and that dress codes merely reflect our society: we customers are the ones wearing sweat pants, hoodies and flip-flops to church, the mall and the workplace. But I still think it's a damnable shame that our top-flight destination restaurants can't enforce some minimum level of decorum (as in, “Take off your baseball cap in the dining room at L'Espalier, asshole”) for the benefit of other patrons who are celebrating big-number anniversaries, birthdays or other special occasions. Too bad it's a fallen world.

Wear Sunscreen in the Restaurant, or, Words of Advice for Hungry Young People

Allston Christmas
Photo courtesy of The Boston Herald

Here are a few dining-out tips for you kids who've just arrived in the Hub of the Universe to start school, from a longtime chaser of the high life who's lived in Boston forever -- like, since before PlayStation II, when the Internets were all 110 baud (don’t Google that now, pay attention):

• Get the hell out. Boston is no New York City, but it’s still a pretty great restaurant town, in part because you students support some excellent cheap-to-moderate places. But you'll still have to duck the many miserable ones aimed at the sorry philistines among you. If you have the iota of adventurousness necessary to rise above a life of mediocre food, you'll have to occasionally get on your bike or the subway or the bus to visit places like Chinatown, East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, East Cambridge, East Somerville, and Allston. If you get off your ass, you can eat fantastic food for your entire four or five or twelve years here. Don’t blow this opportunity by settling for so-so burgers, pizza, and burritos. Example: check out the Super 88 Market at the corner of Commonwealth Ave and Brighton Ave in Allston. Its ten-stall food court offers phenomenal cheap eats from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. It’s a low-risk, incredibly tasty way to start exploring. 

• Don’t overlook old media. While you still can, take advantage of professional restaurant reviews in publications like the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and The Improper Bostonian, where I currently serve as professional restaurant critic and food/drinks feature writer. 

• Check out local bloggers and social media. In addition to the MC Slim JB blog, Boston has many useful food and drink blogs -- start with my WORTHY BLOGS / LINKS section on the lower left -- and unlike this one, most have attractive photos, video clips, and illustrations. Hundreds of Boston restaurants, bars, food retailers, and the writers who cover them are now on Twitter and Facebook: you'll quickly figure out which ones are worth following/friending and which are annoying, one-note self-promoters. Two helpful primers on my blog include an intro to Boston's craft cocktail scene and a humorous look at the Phantom Gourmet, a cheesy local TV show that reviews Boston restaurants (sort of).

• Consume amateur reviews warily, and be a good critic yourself. I cover this topic extensively in my essay, "11 Reasons Your Yelp Reviews Suck, and 11 Things You Can Do About It." TL;DR: Be careful whom you take dining-out advice from, and recognize that you probably know less about restaurants than you think, so try not to be a prick.

• Try to observe some of our quaint, Colonial-era dining customs. Take off your baseball cap in the dining room, don’t spend the entire meal blabbing or texting on your phone, limit your public drunkenness to the pre-projectile-vomiting stage, learn how to tip properly, curb the public displays of affection, and consider that other patrons might not find your bare armpits, navel, or toes an appetizing sight, especially at swankier venues. I won’t tell you to sit up straight, but you really should do that, too.

So welcome to Boston, kids: it’s a wonderful place to eat, and we’re really glad to have you here. Now get off my lawn.