The hot spots we omitted from our guide to new Bay Area restaurants
Cesar and I are hitting the ground running this week with the launch of a new guide that we hope will prove useful to the most intrepid diners among you. It's called The Now List: 25 Bay Area Restaurants of the Moment, and we'll be updating it quarterly. What can you expect? Each of the entries on the list will have opened within the past 12 months, and at least one of your critics will have verified that it's worth a visit.
There's a tension with lists like this, one that is far from new. In the early 20teens, there was much chatter about the impact food blogs were having on the 'proper' timing of restaurant reviews, which in the pre-internet era might run six months after a grand opening. In a 2010 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Robert Sietsema, then the seasoned critic for the Village Voice, wrote that 'a critique written months after a place open[s], no matter how much fairer and more complete, now seem[s] anachronistic.' Three years later in Slate, Luke O'Neil argued that restaurants should be treated like books or films, subject to review on opening night. Julia Kramer, then a critic for Time Out Chicago, pushed back, arguing that waiting at least a month before a first visit provides needed critical distance from 'the cloud of hype — including hype that I/TOC may have had some role in creating.'
Fifteen years later, my editors and I are still having these debates. What is fair to restaurants? What is fair to diners? How do we continue to be part of the conversation when influencers and other news outlets that don't employ restaurant critics are posting quasi-reviews within days of opening?
I recently watched a social video from The Almanac, a local news site that serves the Peninsula. Its food editor reviewed the new Menlo Park restaurant Yeobo, Darling, on opening night, and it was a mostly negative assessment. 'I don't want to be too quick to judge,' she said at the video's close, 'so I'd recommend giving it a few months to get itself in the groove before checking it out.' Knowing the impact a negative review can have on a small business, as a journalist, why not take that advice and give it, if not a few months, at least a few weeks before weighing in?
This is a rhetorical question I of course know the answer to. Readers and viewers are hungry for intel on the hottest new restaurants, and so the faster a writer can drum up an opinion, the better. But what is that opinion worth if it's based on a single visit on opening night? Something, surely — but, biased though I am, I still think there is greater value in a review that is grounded in multiple visits over the course of weeks or even months.
And so here's what you can expect from the Chronicle's restaurant coverage: My food reporter colleagues Mario Cortez and Elena Kadvany will continue to publish reported stories about new restaurants. Although these articles may contain descriptions of the space and menu items, they are not reviews. Cesar and I handle those, and we generally wait at least three weeks and often longer before visiting a new restaurant. We pay two subsequent calls, sometimes only one if the price is prohibitive. In certain instances where we think an establishment is of interest to our readers but probably not a candidate for a full review, we might visit sooner, as in the case of the Jagalchi food hall.
And now — the Now List. All my blathering is context for why you'll see some potentially surprising omissions. Yeobo, Darling isn't on there. Bijou isn't either, nor Carabao. These aren't slights; they simply haven't been open long enough for us to visit. Of all the hit/heat/hot lists, the Chronicle's Now List will never be the most trendy. But we do think it's the most well-considered, and I hope you'll take a look.
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