A food critic's manifesto

Starting another blog among tens of millions led me to ponder why I’m in the food writing game, and scratch out a rough manifesto. Here are some principles and goals that guide my professional and amateur food writing:

• Do it for the love of it. I started simply as someone who explores every corner of the restaurant scene obsessively because that’s one of my keenest pleasures in life. Chowhound.com gave me a platform to share my obsession and trade tips with a community of like-minded locals. Notoriety on Chowhound led to my current professional gigs. But it’s still an avocation, the pursuit of an amateur: literally, someone who does it for the love of it, not to pay the bills (though it does help with the dining-out bills).

• Shun influence. I strive to preserve my anonymity so restaurateurs are less likely to see me coming and thereby try to improve my experience over that of the typical diner. I don’t accept free meals and other industry compensation. I read everything I can on the local food scene, but don’t attend press dinners and other promotional events. I maintain a professional distance from the industry, though I correspond with many owners, chefs, cooks, bartenders, and servers.
  

• Help consumers first. My primary goal is to help diners find the best places at every price level, and the best ways to enjoy them. Less often, I steer diners away from the mediocre and the overhyped. In both cases, I’m advocating for consumers. While I’m happy if worthy restaurants benefit from my praise, there’s already a large PR, advertising, and marketing industry devoted to promoting the industry’s interests. As the diner’s advocate, the critic must call the good and the bad as he sees them, fairly and truthfully, even when that means taking stands that might adversely affect a restaurant’s business. Good restaurateurs take negative criticism constructively; bad ones simply attack the critic (it’s easier and cheaper than fixing problems). Enduring the latter’s enmity is part of the job.

• Be entertaining. There is an ever-swelling ocean of opinions out there, so I labor to make mine clear, pungent, occasionally provocative, but always readable. Whether they agree with me or not, I hope readers will want to keep reading my work.
  

What’s up with the odd moniker, MC Slim JB?

Pictured: an actual MC
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

I know my pen name is obviously unconventional for a food writer, so I get asked about its origin a lot. It dates back to the days when my friends and I, very young punk-rock kids, became fans of old-school hip-hop: The Sugarhill Gang, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, et. al. We sat around dreaming up stage names: what would your emcee (rapper) or deejay (turntablist) name be? Good for a laugh, but as I was unlikely ever to rap outside of the shower, my microphone controller name “MC Slim JB” went into a drawer alongside my spinner name, “DJ Phattee Phat Phat" or somesuch.

I dredged up the MC moniker sometime around the turn of the century for use as my alias on Chowhound.com, where most posters go by nicknames. As a frequent poster on Chowhound's Boston Board, I came to the attention of two local print-media editors: Scott Kathan of Stuff Magazine, and Eric Solomon of Boston’s Weekly Dig. Both approached me the same week with offers of freelance food writing work. Kathan, my first editor, suggested I write under my Chowhound nickname, saying “MC Slim JB has some credibility with local Chowhounds, and I’d like you to bring that Chowhound sensibility to your food writing here.” Solomon saw similar value in the name for use at The Dig.

After my food writing debut with a Stuff cover story and over 30 pieces for The Dig, I felt the name had brand equity worth preserving, and so pitched it as I went on to write for Boston Magazine (where predictably it made the editors nervous) and The Boston Phoenix (which valued its name recognition). My current gigs at The Phoenix (a cheap-eats review column) and Stuff Magazine (a fine-dining review column) are what I am now best known for, all as MC Slim JB.

So through no real plan, a jokey lark from my youth ended up as my nom de plume. As it happens, choosing an alias for Chowhound instead my real name proved a happy accident, as the anonymity it afforded has made it easier to avoid special treatment, the extra service and kitchen attention that well-known critics get. (The great Ruth Reichl outlines this phenomenon in her excellent, funny restaurant-critic memoir “Garlic and Sapphires”.)

Anonymity is a fragile thing; no critic goes unrecognized forever. But thanks to the MC Slim alias, many restaurants still don’t know me by sight, and I strive to be an unobtrusive, ordinary-Joe diner. This improves the chances that my experience will be the same as that of any diner walking in off the street, not the “as perfect as it can be” version that recognized critics tend to get. With any luck, there will always be restaurants that don’t connect the dots between that person sitting at the counter and the food writer with the odd hip-hop name.