This week, Jesse Mulligan honestly responds to some feedback about last week\u2019s Dining Out review.<\/p>\n
I have an important question for you.<\/p>\n
\n A dear friend took me out for lunch over the weekend. She has done almost all there is to do in the world of food, including putting out
\n a cookbook and owning one of our most famous restaurants. We had a lovely meal and at the end, she said: \u201cNow, Jesse, we need to talk.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
She\u2019d read a particularly brutal review I\u2019d written of a restaurant last week, and she didn\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow would you feel?\u201d she asked, \u201cif that business failed and you knew that you were part of the reason? What you write has a big effect on people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Granny always said if you don\u2019t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all\u201d, goes the logic. And I have to admit, I\u2019d sleep a lot better on some Tuesday nights if I knew I was going to be making people universally happy with my column the next morning.<\/p>\n
So why do we publish reviews that are critical?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about trust. I do believe the words I write impact people\u2019s lives and livelihoods and one of the things I\u2019m proudest of is being able to send readers to a restaurant that is brilliant, but not busy. I reckon 80% of my reviews are me saying, \u201cthis is great! You should come and support it!\u201d and I know from experience that readers do. What\u2019s that got to do with the bad reviews? If I wasn\u2019t honest about the places that need work, you wouldn\u2019t trust me about the places that are wonderful. Would you take the advice of a movie critic who told you every movie they went to was fantastic? No, you\u2019d find somebody willing to warn you away from the bad films, knowing that you could really trust them on the good ones.Having said that, this isn\u2019t Manhattan in the 1980s. One review is (I\u2019m sorry to admit) not going to be the making or breaking of a restaurant. These days Aucklanders are getting their information from Instagram, TikTok, Google and various online-only magazines. I am just one voice among many. Of course, internet reviewers also have to get paid somehow, and that\u2019s often by taking money from restaurants to say nice things. All the more reason for you to have at least one reviewer whose opinion you know you can trust.People like reading them. This has a more complex effect on our decision than you might think. If we know a review is likely to deliver a lot of clicks, we need to be even more sure that its publication is justifiable, independently of that. Restaurants we review tend to fall into one of four categories: hidden gems, big players with big names behind them, restaurants in high-profile locations and those which are getting a lot of hype. It\u2019s the last three that come with an expectation of quality. Readers are likely to go there and expect them to be brilliant. It\u2019s our responsibility to give them an authoritative call on whether that expectation is justified. That\u2019s why you won\u2019t see me reviewing any old neighbourhood place and slating it.Owners of struggling restaurants are the visible victims of my reviews, but what about the invisible victims \u2013 people who wasted their money eating there? The humiliation and despair of spending my limited money on a bad meal was the reason I got into restaurant criticism in the first place \u2013 I wanted to save others from what I\u2019d been through. During a cost-of-living crisis, it\u2019s not difficult to imagine people giving up on restaurants entirely – why would we risk a couple of hundred precious dollars on somewhere that might not be any good? Hopefully my reviews will help them feel good about getting out there to support hospo and those working in the industry.Despite all of the above, we publish critical reviews very rarely and I actually still do sometimes walk away without writing a word. I do it because I can see that a restaurant is really struggling, and the owner is already completely depressed, and I have the time and money to write about somewhere else instead. Because of deadlines and budgets, I\u2019m not able to do this every time (nor would I, for reasons already discussed). But you should know that about once a year we swallow the cost of the meal and pretend it never happened. For perspective, I\u2019ve written around 400 reviews for Viva where the message is \u201ccome and spend your money here!\u201d I\u2019ve written about 20 where the message is \u201cavoid this food at all costs\u201d.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what I think, but what do you think? I am writing for your benefit, after all. Would you prefer me to only review good restaurants? Despite all I\u2019ve said above, does writing about the bad ones still feel unjustifiable to you? Let us know, in our poll below. I can\u2019t promise the referendum will be binding, but I promise to take the result seriously.<\/p>\n
What you\u2019ve asked, and what he\u2019s shared.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week, Jesse Mulligan honestly responds to some feedback about last week\u2019s Dining Out review. I have an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1443,27299,22503,156,18957,17511,179397,2537,685,2538,4977,3403,111,139,69,16121,2539,762,763,544,27300,1961,686,4518],"class_list":{"0":"post-376997","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-about","9":"tag-arent","10":"tag-dining","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-feedback","13":"tag-honest","14":"tag-honestly","15":"tag-jesse","16":"tag-last","17":"tag-mulligan","18":"tag-my","19":"tag-negative","20":"tag-new-zealand","21":"tag-newzealand","22":"tag-nz","23":"tag-responds","24":"tag-restaurant","25":"tag-review","26":"tag-reviews","27":"tag-some","28":"tag-theyre","29":"tag-this","30":"tag-week","31":"tag-weeks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}