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Washington Post

When everybody's a critic, they miss what makes restaurants special

The Formica countertop at Ben's Chili Bowl sports a few greasy streaks from the last customer to dig into a chili-cheese dog at the historic U Street diner. The handful of employees working the dinner shift on this July evening are too preoccupied with their tasks — grilling links, calling out orders, running drinks to diners — to take a rag and wipe down the counter, so I grab a few paper napkins and handle the task myself. Given I have no cleaning liquid, my efforts do little more than dull the splatters. When I ducked into the Bowl, less than a week before it closed for renovations, I didn't expect to become a volunteer member of the cleaning crew. But I also didn't mind. The original Ben's is not a regular restaurant, not to my mind. The Ali family's long history of civic engagement — decades of good deeds, much of it invisible to the average patron — invites me to recalibrate my role as diner. If I occasionally have to pitch in, I accept it as part of the implicit covenant with Ben's: You don't sit back and wait to be pampered. You help each other, like neighbors do. You embrace its shortcomings as you would a relative or friend. Clearly, many people don't agree with this proposition, judging by the crowdsourced reviews and the comments section on just about every story published about Ben's. Folks complain about the chili. They grumble about the hygiene of the place. They claim they got sick there. They fuss about the price tag to feed their family some hot dogs and fries. They view the place almost exclusively through the prism of their own creature comforts. On some level, I get it. The restaurant didn't live up to the expectations diners had set, and the many tourists who visit Ben's don't have any relationship with it to moderate their opinions. Yet, on another level, I see little but a lack of perspective. In other forms of entertainment, people willingly embrace the concept of genre and calibrate their expectations accordingly. I'm pretty sure the moviegoers who laid down cash for 'Deadpool & Wolverine' last summer didn't walk into the theater expecting a meditation on clerical authoritarianism in Iran. They were ready for a big sweaty summer blockbuster, dripping with action and sarcasm for the Marvel Cinematic Universe that it embraces and scorns. And that's what they got. In the same vein, no one expects a summer beach read to be Dostoyevsky or a community theater program to have the same production values as a Broadway show. But when it comes to hospitality, Americans have a difficult time meeting restaurants where they are. People clamor for something more or better: They want an understaffed neighborhood restaurant to have the same attentive service as a two-star Michelin destination. They want a greasy spoon to evolve with their refined tastes, nurtured by a generation of food television and social media influencers, regardless of how such changes might affect the business's bottom line or betray its own history. A Gallup survey from September details our deteriorating relationship with restaurants. In 2023, 61 percent of Americans were very or somewhat positive about the restaurant industry. Last year, those good feelings dropped nine percentage points. Historically, Gallup noted, restaurants have averaged a 61 percent positive rating and a 10 percent negative one. The negative rating stood at 16 percent last year, up four points from 2023. All the goodwill that restaurants generated during the pandemic, as their employees risked infection to keep us fed, has largely evaporated. Nearly half of Americans have no positive feelings whatsoever for restaurants, a percentage that staggers the mind given the industry's raison d'être is to provide patrons with an inviting place to unwind and satisfy their hunger. The industry is obviously failing on a grand scale. Restaurant economics are one clear source of public irritation. As prices for operating a restaurant rise — rent, labor, ingredients, insurance, you name it — these increased costs are reflected not just on dinner bills but with that little addition to the bottom of the check: the mandatory service charge, the bane of the modern diner's existence. Americans have not been shy about expressing their displeasure over surcharges, which can run 20 percent or higher. In a YouGov poll last year, 70 percent of respondents found it unacceptable when a restaurant automatically applies a 20 percent service charge to the tab. A Pew Research Center poll from late 2023 found that 72 percent of Americans were opposed to service charges of any kind, regardless of how big or small. That is a plausible explanation for America's growing disenchantment with dining out. But as I try to make sense of it myself, I see larger cultural influences at play, too. Last summer, Jaya Saxena wrote a thorough and thoughtful piece for Eater about Yelp and the culture of criticism that it helped foster. She examines the evidence at hand and arrives at a sound conclusion: 'It is now possible to publicly rate, positively or negatively, just about any experience you have,' Saxena wrote. 'This can cause a tiny change in how one might approach these experiences: Instead of focusing on how you feel about it now, the perception shifts to what you might say about it later. A culture all about reviews welcomes constant real-time evaluation, which puts you in a different mindset than just being.' You can, without question, approach any restaurant from a purely intellectual/critical perspective. You can use your knowledge, honed to a fine edge from gastronomic literature, personal experience and YouTube videos, to deliver a dispassionate dissertation on why a restaurant falls short of the mark. But that approach only goes so far if you really want to understand a restaurant and your relationship to it. At some point, you have to ask yourself: Did I surrender to the experience and allow my irrational mind — the one ruled by emotions, physical sensations, childlike urges — to have its say? The reasons we love restaurants sometimes defy cold logic. Just as important, tabletop critics need to evaluate their own evaluations: Does their criticism place too much emphasis on certain elements of the restaurant experience at the expense of the bigger picture? I go back to the analogy of the genre movie: Sure, a critic can pick apart a 'John Wick' flick — the bombastic action sequences, the leaps of logic, the cartoon characters — while ignoring how the film drops you into a universe of its own creation, daring you to come along for the ride, flaws and all. Genre movies often require a suspension of disbelief — which is just another way to say they require you to dial down your critic — to be fully enjoyed. The same can be said of restaurants. Some of my favorite places to eat have created a world all their own. I'm thinking not just about Ben's Chili Bowl on U Street, but also about Murry & Paul's in Brookland, Peter's Carry-Out in Bethesda, Great Wall Szechuan House on 14th Street NW (RIP), Quarry House Tavern in Silver Spring and many others. These places have history (or did, in Great Wall's case), the kind that sparks the imagination once you step inside them. They create community. They invite you to settle into their ecosystem, full of quirks and defects and a million little moments of unpredictable joy. Many of these places will not stand up to the scrutiny of those who carry a hammer and see everything as a nail. I was talking to Jackie Greenbaum the other day. You may know her as the restaurateur behind Quarry House and other neighborhood gems. She floated a theory that combines both restaurant economics and the culture of complaint cultivated over the past two decades. 'The desire to criticize is directly proportionate to prices, in my opinion, and price increases,' Greenbaum told me. 'It sets up an environment where you're looking to justify a $29 Caesar salad, for instance. It's my experience as a diner as well: 'I could make this better at home. What's so special about this?'' I think Greenbaum's argument is strong, though I'm not sure price increases alone explain the public's repeated criticisms of Ben's. Many diners just don't like the place. But until they stop treating Ben's as a science experiment, viewing it under the microscope of their own dissatisfaction, they never will understand a restaurant that benefits from suspending your critic for an hour and soaking in everything this historic business represents, including a chili sauce that has passed the lips of presidents and civil rights leaders alike. There's something special about that that no review will ever capture.