I am a poet; I read poetry, I write poetry, I attend poetry readings, and I write poetry book reviews. But, as of late, I’ve also become a bit of a food writer. On top of teaching, service, all of the aforementioned poetry activities, and living “daily” life, I also took on the role of the Fort Collins (Colorado) Italian Restaurants Examiner, and other food-related projects are in the works.

 

Why add so much more work for not-so-much pay? Of course, the answer isn’t simple. The most obvious answer is that I love good food, but that can only be the beginning; after all, the majority of humans love good food. Good food isn’t just “tastes good”—otherwise, I’d be writing about apples and carrot sticks.  Yes, good ingredients are essential, but good food, to me, is much more than its ingredients; anyone can use good ingredients, but it’s the manner in which the ingredients are put together that makes good food.  That’s partially why we go out to eat; we expect quality but even more importantly, we expect a harmonious convergence of ingredients.

 

And, let’s be honest, a lot of people don’t have the skills to put the ingredients together in phenomenal ways.  Cooking, to me, is an art, just as poetry or painting is. It takes skill, dedication, attention to detail, and practice.  There’s also some kind of innate x factor that all artists have—call it talent, if you will, but it’s more than that; maybe it’s passion or a kind of “magic” energy. Whatever it is, that x factor is what separates most home chefs from restaurant chefs. I can make a great dish at home, but compared to a real chef’s dish, mine is a crayon drawing held next to a Renoir, so I hold a great appreciation and awe for the restaurants that have the best chefs.

 

What better way to thank those chefs than to write publicly about their successes?  Restaurant reviews are appreciation for an experience: the quality of the food, drink and service. They are no different from reviews of any other form of art; play reviews cover the experience of the theater, art and writing reviews cover the experience/feeling the pieces convey.

 

Interestingly (albeit, sadly for poets), restaurant reviews probably have more “real world” impact than book reviews, which only tend to circulate among a certain small population who share similar interests.  Almost everyone eats out, and more people—and a much larger variety of people—probably eat at Italian restaurants than read Robert Creeley. The restaurant reviewer is in the unique position of offering a kind of (subjective) service to the public, with which the public can get a “taste” of the food before they decide to dine at a new place. The reviewer also provides a service to local and family-owned (non-chain) establishments: it gives them free advertising when they often don’t have big advertising budgets.

 

Admittedly, every experience at a restaurant isn’t going to be a success, which means reviews can’t always be positive, and that free advertising for the local business becomes more of a scarlet letter than a billboard.  But that’s also part of the (subjective) service to the public. One negative review probably doesn’t deter a lot of diners, but if many different reviewers write negatively about an establishment, then the evaluations seem a bit more objective and even more informative to people reading the reviews.

 

Most reviewers aren’t looking to write negative reviews, either. They want to have a good experience at a restaurant. They look forward to eating good food. And many people such as me want to give credit to the often-overlooked artists behind the steam.

 

Ultimately, reviewers are writers, and reviews in themselves are quite possibly of a certain kind of art. Most artists work because they are passionate about their tasks, happily obsessed, and this obsession is no different for a reviewer. The pleasure comes not so much in the publication or readership, but in the act of writing the review itself. In a way, I suppose, restaurant reviews are a type of ekphrasis, where in attempting to write of the food and experience, we are attempting to recreate one art through the medium of another art.