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https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2018.1476797

1

‘Restaurant reviews aren’t what they used to be’: Digital disruption and the

transformation of the role of the food critic

Morag Kobez

Abstract

This study uses data collected from interviews with professional food critics to

analyse how the proliferation of amateur blog and Online Consumer Reviews (OCR)

has disrupted and transformed the tenets of mainstream media restaurant reviewing.

The article argues that the proliferation of digital platforms has fundamentally

changed the practices of the professional restaurant critic – including changes to the

process of carrying out reviews, the ethical framework guiding this process, and the

format of reviews. Professional restaurant critics have been forced to accommodate to

the new pressures brought by digital media. These changes mark the discursive terrain

of a struggle between professional restaurant critics defending their position and

status as cultural intermediaries in the gastronomic field against the entry of amateur

digital competitors.

Keywords

Restaurant review; gastronomy; digital media; online consumer reviews; food blogs

Introduction

Momentous changes in the media landscape in the past decade have allowed

widespread accessibility for anyone with an internet connection to voice their opinion

through blogs and Online Consumer Review (OCR) sites such as Zomato and Yelp,

leading to assertions of the democratisation of criticism (Watson, Morgan &

2

Hemmington, 2008). This participation by amateurs in critical discourse represents a

blurring of the formerly distinct relationship between professional mainstream media

journalists and their audiences, and challenges the primacy of critics as arbiters of

taste (Kristensen & From, 2015, p. 8).

The purpose of this article is to investigate how the proliferation of digital

media platforms has disrupted and transformed the tenets of traditional restaurant

criticism. Analysing data collected from a group of eminent Australian food critics, it

argues that the proliferation of restaurant reviews on blogs and OCR sites has

fundamentally changed the role and practices of the professional critic – including

changes to the process of carrying out reviews, the ethical framework guiding this

process, and the format of reviews. More broadly, these changes have affected the

role of professional restaurant reviewers as cultural intermediaries in the gastronomic

field, when viewed through a Bourdieusian lens. Professional restaurant critics have

been forced to accommodate to the new pressures brought by digital media. Changes

to the process and format of reviews mark the discursive terrain of a struggle between

professional restaurant critics defending their position and status as cultural

intermediaries against the entry of amateur digital competitors enabled by

technological innovations external to the field.

Bourdieu (1984) introduced the term ‘cultural intermediaries’ in his major

work, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (p. 325). Cultural

intermediaries are defined as ‘the producers of cultural programmes on TV and radio

or the critics of “quality” newspapers and magazines and all the writer-journalists and

journalist-writers’, who have assigned themselves the role of divulging ‘legitimate

culture’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 326). Enabled by developments in mass media in the

second half of the twentieth century, the cultural intermediary works in a range of

3

genres, between the creators of art and culture and the markets for them (Shrum,

1996, p. 195).

In any field of cultural production – art, literature, film, gastronomy – the

critical review is constitutive of the discourse that establishes the referents and

standards by which judgements of taste, and differentiations of quality, can be made,

and accepted as legitimate (Booth 1991; Bourdieu 1993; Frye 1970). A ‘discourse’ is

understood here as ‘a set of meanings, representations, images and statements of how

people represent themselves and their social world’. Produced and reproduced

through social interactions, language and intersubjective meanings, textual

representation is the primary manifestation of a discourse. Discourses produce

ideational outcomes related to what people ‘perceive as desirable, acceptable and

realistic’, and material outcomes in terms of cultural practices and products

(Holttinen, 2014, pp. 575–576). As Bourdieu (1993) puts it, ‘the production of

discourse (critical, historical, etc.) about the work of art is one of the conditions of

production of the work’ (p. 35). Bourdieu’s views on the production of discourse are

applicable to cultural products across a range of art forms and fields.

The role of the critical reviewer in relation to these cultural products and art

forms is thus crucial, given that, for Bourdieu (1993, p. 37), ‘works of art exist as

symbolic objects only if they are known and recognized, that is, socially instituted as

works of art and received by spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as

such’. Shrum (1996) argues that ‘criticism is not extrinsic but intrinsic to the artistic

process in the modern world’, and places critics in ‘the stream of discourse that

defines the cultural hierarchy’ (p. 10). Critics construct and create quality through

their ascriptions of value by reference to standards that are constructed in and through

discourse (Shrum, 1996, p. 203). The various fields of art and culture are thus created

4

not only by artists themselves, but also by ‘the producers of the meaning and value of

the work – critics, publishers, gallery directors’, and the whole set of cultural

intermediaries ‘whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and

recognizing the work of art as such’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 37).

Bourdieu introduced the sociological concept of ‘field’ to denote and delineate

‘the state of a cultural enterprise when the relevant production and consumption

activities achieve a certain degree of independence from direct external constraints’

(Ferguson, 2004, p. 104). Fields are the sites of internal competition over the

negotiation of ‘positions, boundaries and collective identities’. At stake in these

struggles is the ‘legitimate appropriation’ of cultural capital relative to the logic and

discourse of the particular field in question (Grove, 2007, p. 159). For the agents

operating within a field, Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ explains how the discourse

that constitutes a field, its norms and standards of value, ‘become embodied and

internalized in the cognitive structure of agents’ (Husu, 2013, p. 266).

Ferguson (2004, pp. 104–106) argues that from around the middle of the

eighteenth century in France, gastronomy has developed into a cultural enterprise

exhibiting embodied norms and standards, and sufficient independence from direct

external constraints so as to be considered a cultural field. A distinction is made

between cuisine, which refers to production of the culinary experience, and

gastronomy, which refers to the experience and interpretation of its consumption. The

experience of consumption is evaluative and rendered in text, creating a critical

discourse that co-constitutes the gastronomic field (Ferguson, 2004, pp. 105–106).

Cultural fields and the discourses which produce and sustain them are sites of

social struggles over status. These fields and the genres that constitute them are not

fixed (Shrum, 1996, p. 11). Demarcating the boundaries of a field, its players and

5

criteria for value and distinction, and the legitimacy to make or influence such

classifications, is subject to continuous contestation (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 42, 137).

The impetus for change and struggles over transformation of a cultural field may arise

externally – from political upheavals and social movements to technological

innovations – or internally, from deviations in style, materials or interpretation

(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 231). These changes, bringing new entrants and practices to the

field,

are inevitably accompanied by a whole effort at symbolic restructuring aimed

at winning recognition in representations and therefore by a permanent

struggle between those who seek to impose the new system of classification

and those who defend the old system. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 310)

These dynamics are evident in changes to the conduct and end product of mainstream

media restaurant reviewers as they seek to defend their positions in the gastronomic

field by accommodating some of the new pressures brought by digital media.

The article proceeds by first locating the study in the literature on restaurant

critics and reviews, digital media and blogging before outlining the methodology of

the study. The main part of the article analyses interviews undertaken with Australia’s

leading professional restaurant critics to explore their views on how a transformed

mediasphere has changed their reviewing practices. This section identifies how the

contemporary digital media environment has disrupted and transformed the role of the

professional restaurant critic in a number of crucial ways: the demand for immediacy;

the loss of critic’s anonymity; the erosion of objective evaluation; and a move from

long-form, critical reviews to ‘listicles’ and ‘clickbait’. The conclusion draws some

6

implications from these themes for the nature and practice of professional restaurant

reviewers as cultural intermediaries in the gastronomic field.

The evolution of restaurant reviews

In order to investigate the disruption of contemporary professional review-writing

practices it is necessary to first trace the origins and development of the entrenched

governing principles of the genre. Restaurant reviewing sets out to make judgements

of both gustatory and metaphorical taste – about which restaurants are good or

legitimate in a way that has the potential to have significant influence on both diners

and restaurateurs (Lane, 2013, p. 343). French writers Alexandre Grimod de la

Reynière (1758–1837) and Jean Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) are generally recognised

as the founders of food, wine and restaurant criticism, of which the connoisseurial

review is a central element. Grimod and Brillat-Savarin reintroduced the classical

Greek term ‘gastronomy’ to early nineteenth-century France – denoting guidance on

the art and science of dining in the belief that gastronomy enhances pleasure,

enjoyment and social refinement through the provision of knowledge and information

(Santich, 2004, p. 17). Similar to art and literary critics, gastronomic reviewers, now

as then, see themselves to have a pedagogical role in educating the palates of their

readers (Ferguson, 2004, p. 94).

Davis (2009, pp. 18–20) describes Grimod as the spiritual forefather of the

modern reviewer, and responsible for making restaurants culturally relevant through

his consumer-oriented advice on good food and the restaurants in which to find it. He

is credited with publishing the first series of reviews, L’Almanach des Gourmands

(The Gourmet’s Almanac) – containing evaluations of the experience of eating in a

range of Parisian restaurants beginning in 1803 (Blank, 2006, p. 45). His writing,

7

balancing criticism and commentary, was as attractive to readers as the culinary

experiences that were its subject, and the L’Almanach sold extremely well (Ferguson,

2004, p. 96).

Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste also discussed food, but by introducing

the culinary chef-diner paradigm, he placed gastronomy within a broader intellectual

and social sphere (Ferguson, 1998, pp. 616–617; 2004, p. 96). Where for Grimod and

others the culinary text was instrumental in that it was representative of the ‘food

event’, Brillat-Savarin made the text an end in itself (Ferguson, 2004, p. 97). Davis

(2009) describes these two figures as self-made arbiters of taste who established the

field of gastronomy, as they set about devising and writing the code that dictated taste

and distinction in relation to eating in France. Michelin Guides built on these early

reviewing foundations from the time of the first guide, which was published in 1910.

The guide combined reviews of high-end restaurants and hotels with road maps to

allow travellers to find quality dining experiences while on the road (Brown, 2012).

The Michelin Guide is still considered the most influential gastronomic guide in the

world (Lane, 2013, p. 344), among a range of other longstanding and respected

guides.

More than a century after France began formalising the field of gastronomy,

efforts toward developing a culinary discourse of its own began in the United States.

Having studied the formative works on French cuisine, former New York Evening

Post Music Editor Henry T. Finck wrote one of the first in-depth examinations of the

culinary arts in his 1913 book, Food and Flavor (Haley, 2011, p. 63). Johnston and

Baumann (2010) observe that a reverence for French cuisine dominated American

culinary culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Gourmet magazine continued

the tradition of putting French haute cuisine on a cultural pedestal for around two

8

decades, following its launch in 1941. Julia Child’s arrival on the food media scene in

1962, with her bestselling book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and popular

television show, provided middle-class viewers with an education in French cooking,

eroding much of the snobbery and elitism surrounding haute cuisine (Civitello, 2007,

p. 336).

From its origins in Grimod and Brillat-Savarin’s France, gastronomy

encompassed not only the primary culinary activities of food and dining, but also the

critical discussion surrounding them. This remains an enduring feature of the culinary

landscape to the present day. Ferguson (1998, pp. 601–602) points to the importance

not only of the cuisine served in restaurants, but also of the gastronomic discourse –

the words and texts describing that food and experience, and giving it an existence

beyond the sphere of immediate culinary production. The role of the professional

critic has long been crucial to maintaining this critical discourse within the

gastronomic field, and more specifically here, the restaurant dining experience.

The professional restaurant critic

The role of the professional restaurant reviewer as cultural intermediary is to provide

a description and evaluation of the experience of visiting a restaurant that, if done

well, allows the audience to feel as though they have already been to the restaurant. It

is generally accepted by reviewers in the gastronomic field that this should encompass

details of individual dishes, in addition to atmosphere and service (Blank, 2007, p.

45). Less straightforward is the imperative of the restaurant critic to convey aesthetic

judgements, constitute culinary customs and standards, and help shape understandings

of the contemporary foodscape (Ferguson, 1998; Lang, 2014).

The development of an ethical and procedural framework governing

9

contemporary professional restaurant reviews is generally attributed to Craig

Claiborne, who began his pioneering role as The New York Times food editor in 1957.

During his 30-year tenure, Claiborne founded and entrenched the star-rating system,

whereby restaurants are awarded a number of stars to indicate their comparative

merit, and developed the principles upon which most mainstream media restaurant

reviews have since been based. He is also considered the first contemporary writer to

legitimise the field of restaurant criticism (Kapner, 1996; Sietsema, 2010). Part of

Claiborne’s contribution was his establishment of several fundamental reviewing

tenets, which have remained normative for professional restaurant critics today.

Claiborne maintained that restaurant critics ought to remain anonymous during visits,

never using real names for reservations, or drawing attention to their party to alert the

restaurant that a review was in progress. He asserted that the publication should pay

for meals, and that if the reviewer was recognised and offered free meals it would

represent a clear journalistic conflict of interest to accept such an offer (Voss &

Speere, 2013).

In addition to those tenets set down by Claiborne, Lang (2014) suggests that

contemporary critics seek to review restaurants at the forefront of new trends

alongside those that epitomise the highest standards. In their study of restaurant

reviews in newspapers across five US cities Titz, Lanza-Abbot and Cruz (2004) found

that most reviews were consistent with the ethical framework established by

Claiborne. Like Claiborne, the majority of restaurant critics in the study possessed

journalism degrees. All participants reported that their employer reimbursed their

dining expenses, that they avoided receiving free meals and forming personal

relationships with restaurateurs, and in most cases gave new restaurants at least a

month before visiting for the purpose of review (Titz et al., 2004, p. 51). Other ethical

10

considerations included a responsibility to the public to act as ‘whistle blowers’ if

restaurants were not delivering on their promises (Titz et al., 2004, p. 53). Davis

(2009, p. 740) holds that valuing reviewer anonymity originates from an identified

need for distance, detachment and integrity in making accurate and acceptable

aesthetic judgements.

Digital media makes everyone a critic

The formerly distinct role of the critic became blurred, however, as social and digital

media has taken hold in the early decades of the twenty-first century (Gillespie, 2012,

p. 3). Rousseau (2012, p. 63) asserts that digital media has been a democratising force

contributing to the development of a landscape where professionals and amateurs

compete – and this has significantly influenced the field of restaurant criticism. In

recent years, the professional critics’ dominion has been challenged by restaurant

review bloggers writing about their dining experiences, reflecting a shift from media

consumption to production (de Solier, 2006).

Attempts during the past decade to describe the phenomenon of media content

produced by non-professionals have variously been labelled as ‘citizen’, ‘democratic’,

‘participatory’, ‘grassroots’, ‘amateur’ and ‘hobby’ journalists, each of which apply in

the restaurant criticism space (Allan, 2009; Fröhlich, Quiring & Engesser, 2012;

Goode, 2009; Nip, 2009). Regardless of the epistemic nuances and diverse

vocabularies surrounding user-generated content across different disciplines, the trope

of transformative participation by amateurs is a feature common to them all. The

development of social and digital media in the late twentieth century was the vehicle

for what Ferguson (2004, p. 151) describes as the most striking feature of the

contemporary culinary landscape: the ubiquity of food-related content on digital

11

media. Widespread access to social and digital media allows ‘the people formerly

known as the audience’ to contribute to the burgeoning body of reviews published

online (Rosen, 2006), thereby challenging the traditional boundaries and hierarchies

of the gastronomic field.

One of the earliest avenues for amateurs to join this field was by publishing

restaurant reviews on blogs. In their earliest form, blogs required specialised

knowledge of HTML code and visual editing software like Dreamweaver. It was not

until 1999 that template-style blog-publishing and hosting services became widely

available – Open Diary being the first, quickly joined by Pitas, Blogger, LiveJournal

and Weblogger (Haas, 2005, p. 387; Rettberg, 2008, p. 29). With the arrival of this

‘push-button publishing’ blogging began to take off, and by the early 2000s had

become entrenched as a medium or genre. Blogging systems have since been

developed to the point where users can quickly and easily publish blog posts on the

move, using inexpensive, highly mobile devices such as tablets and mobile phones. In

addition to self-expression, blogs provide opportunities for dialogical or interactive

exchange. This element of interactivity – the ability for readers to publish comments

and responses below each post being a crucial attribute that turns the blog into a

potential arena for discussion and debate (Lomborg, 2009).

Much has been written about the rise of social and digital media in the fields

of media and communications, journalism, sociology and others. Less scholarly work

has been carried out in relation to food and digital media, although this is growing.

Povleson’s (2016, 145) work investigated how media use and day-to-day food

preferences intersect among a group of informants, a minority of whom are

considered ‘foodies’. The study found that participants perform unique and complex

personal media routines reflecting their difference taste regimes in relation to food

12

and dining. In the twenty-first century, the digital arena has become populated with

amateur restaurant reviewers, who Rousseau (2012, p. 62) describes as an ‘army of

bloggers’, with which professional critics must now ‘compete’. De Solier (2013) finds

that blogging plays a central role in foodies’ identity formation in post-industrial

society. She argues that the pursuit of blogging as serious leisure is a means for

transforming the consumption of food into cultural discourse, allowing foodies to

view themselves as culturalists rather than materialist consumers (de Solier 2013,

115). Whereas restaurant reviewing blogs can often be situated within the realm of

serious leisure, with specialised skills and knowledge acquired over time, OCR sites

like Yelp.com and Zomato are, according to Rousseau (2012, pp. 60-61), more

representative of ‘everyman’. In this way, they are ‘the bane of both professional

critics and restaurateurs, exemplifying as they do the most democratic of social media

platforms, where everyone and anyone really can have a say’ (Rousseau, 2012, pp.

60-61). Typically, evaluations on OCR sites are both quantitative – in the form of an

average numeric score, ranking or star-type rating aggregated by an application or

website, and qualitative in the form of consumers’ comments (Kumar & Benbasat,

2006).

Methodology

This study involved interviews with professional food critics in order to obtain data

about how the prevalence of online amateur restaurant reviews such as those

discussed above have changed their practices as cultural intermediaries in the

gastronomic field. Primary data was collected through in-depth interviews with 11

mainstream media restaurant critics from Australian Gourmet Traveller Restaurant

Guide; Delicious; Fairfax Good Food Guide and The Australian. These sources were

13

selected because they are widely read, and longstanding sources of restaurant reviews

in Australia. Australian Gourmet Traveller is Australia’s leading monthly food, travel

and lifestyle magazine, which has been published for more than 40 years, with a

readership of 216,000 (January-December 2016) (Bauer Media, 2017). Delicious is a

monthly food-lifestyle magazine which has been published for more than 11 years,

with a readership of 570,000 (March 2017) (Magazine Networks, 2017). Good Food

Guides are annual guides which have been published for the past 35 years with

distribution as follows: Brisbane Times Good Food Guide: 5,000; Sydney Morning

Herald Good Food Guide: 60,000; The Age Good Food Guide: 60,000 (C. Ruffino,

Personal communication Fairfax, March 1, 2016). The Australian is a daily national

newspaper established in 1964, which has a readership of 636,000, and which

regularly publishes restaurant reviews (March 2017) (Roy Morgan, 2017).1

The sample of critics interviewed was defined by the geographic locations in

which the above guides are published, i.e., reviews of a data set of restaurants in the

most populous cities in Australia. Open-ended interviews were conducted during the

first half of 2017; four were conducted face-to-face in Sydney and Brisbane, and the

remainder were conducted by telephone. Participants were asked questions about the

process and format of reviews produced for traditional print media, and how the rise

of digital media has changed their work processes and end product – both from within

the media organisations in which they operated, and due to external factors. As a

participant in the gastronomic field, both as an amateur blogger and professional

restaurant reviewer, the changes I observed in the practice of food criticism were the

impetus for this research. Preliminary questions as to how amateur participation has

altered professional reviewers’ practice were framed from my experience in the field,

1 Readership figures are for print publications and do not take into account additional cross-platform readership on web apps or websites.

14

and then participants were encouraged to elaborate. The qualitative research design

for this study is a grounded theory approach where recurring concepts and themes

were drawn from the data (Neuman, 2000, p. 49, pp. 145-146), and then interpreted

by reference to the literature reviewed above. From this inductive analysis of the

transcribed interviews, four key themes emerged.

Analysis and discussion

These themes indicate a struggle between new entrants and existing agents in the

field, which has wrought profound changes to the gastronomic discourse. For

professional restaurant reviewers, these challenges are: the push to compete with

amateurs to be first to review new restaurants; the loss of anonymity resulting from

the need to establish a public profile; the erosion of detachment and integrity, and the

growing prevalence of listicles and clickbait.

Immediacy

A key issue raised by respondents relates to questions of timeliness and immediacy.

There is no question that the mass adoption of Internet technology has drastically

affected the timelines in which professional journalists operate, even though the

impact of ‘participative’ or ‘citizen’ journalism has perhaps been overstated (Haas,

2005). The mass uptake of social and digital media has not only allowed anyone with

an Internet connection to publish, but allowed them to do it in real time. This put the

average lay person in the position to disseminate news and information with greater

immediacy than traditional media outlets (Bowman & Willis, 2003, 47).

This immediacy is especially pertinent in relation to restaurant reviews, as

citizen reviewers began publishing reviews of new restaurants on the day that they

15

opened. In an effort not to be left behind by amateurs, media organisations began to

require restaurant reviewers to do likewise. This was at odds with the convention that

restaurants should be given a period of time after opening to develop and mature. It

also resulted in reviews being written after just one visit, rather than several visits, as

was also conventional. The issue of immediacy was mentioned by every participant in

this study as a change that has come about in response to digital media.

Freelance critic and former critic for The Age Good Food Guide recalls that

until recently, reviewers were not in the habit of publishing reviews of newly-opened

restaurants, and that this change was at odds with the ethical code she had worked

within for more than a decade:

There used to be a pretty iron-clad rule that you don’t review in the first month

– give the time to settle in and learn the ropes because things can go really

wrong in the first month, but these days it’s common to go in the first week

and I find that unethical and unprofessional but there’s a lot of pressure from

editors to be the first.

There was a perception that professional critics had been forced to publish reviews of

new restaurants in keeping with the immediacy of social and digital, or risk their work

becoming obsolete, as a delicious restaurant critic observes:

If reviewers wait three months, nobody’s going to give a shit. People have

already seen 30 posts and they’ve made up their mind already. Traditional

publishers fell behind and food bloggers got ahead of newspapers and

16

magazines. There’s an attempt to keep up with the instantaneous news cycle of

social media and online.

Respondents unanimously stated that the push to be first to publish reviews was a

significant compromise to the way in which they carried out their role. Their

comments demonstrate that professional critics have begun to accommodate the

pressures brought about by digital media. In the case of the push for immediacy, this

was viewed as both a change to the process of how they carry out their role, and also

as an ethical compromise.

Loss of anonymity

Claiborne’s conviction that restaurant critics ought to remain anonymous was an

enduring principle adhered to by mainstream media food critics throughout the second

half of the twentieth century and in the early years of the twenty-first century (Reichl,

2006). Dispensing with anonymity is another significant change mentioned by the

majority of participants, with one critic emphatically stating that this represents the

loss of their ‘greatest tool’. The expectation of two-way dialogue between critic and

audience is one reason cited by participants for the move away from anonymity.

Media organisations seeking to incorporate elements of the blogging and social media

world now see profile building as more conducive to developing larger audiences than

anonymity. As a result, media organisations have in recent years required critics’

identity to be revealed and publicised. Many publications have dispensed with the

once-pivotal principle of anonymity, requiring instead that their critics establish a

public person, as freelance critic and former critic for The Age Good Food Guide

states:

17

You can argue once critics gave up anonymity, which has been a part of the

job for years – something very valuable was lost. I think there are decisions

that certain publications made in relation to anonymity in order to compete

with that blogging and social media world, where it’s all about building up a

persona … they think they’re the centre of the universe – it’s an ego thing. It’s

much easier to build a reputation than it used to be.

This abandoning of anonymity hinders critics’ ability to portray the experience the

average diner might expect from a restaurant, as described by The Herald Sun food

editor:

… the demands of the media company mean that they build profile and

therefore your image is out there. My picture is on my reviews each week, so

it’s not hidden, you can find out what I look like. I need to be like a normal

guest. To have the experience that other people would have had at that

restaurant. That’s the publisher’s decision though. I think no matter how you

would say you can see through the tricks of the restaurant once you’ve been

made, I think it’s more valuable for the reader to have the anonymous point of

view.

Participants indicated that when restaurants are aware of reviewers’ identity, there

was greater likelihood of restaurants making an exceptional effort to impress

reviewers. This was seen as compromising their ability to experience a restaurant as

18

the average diner would, and therefore their ability to carry out one of their core

functions of providing audiences with accurate expectations of a dining experience.

Integrity

In the digital environment, it has become commonplace for public relations

practitioners seek to communicate their clients’ message via social media influencers,

including bloggers, Instagrammers, Tweeters and You Tubers, among others (Archer

& Harrigan, 2016, p. 67). As such it has become commonplace for public relations

practitioners in the restaurant space to employ a ‘hosting model’, which provides free

meals, with the aim of achieving positive reviews by amateurs.

Respondents repeatedly raised concerns about the detachment, integrity and

credibility of reviews written by amateurs, and the blurring of boundaries between

amateurs and professionals in the eyes of the audience. There was also the concern

that editors demanded that the critical element of reviews be downplayed or avoided.

While several interviewees said they continued to describe both negative and positive

elements of the dining experience in their reviews, others stated that some media

organisations now required them to produce positive-leaning, recommendation-style

reviews. National restaurant critic for The Australian pointed out that there has been

an erosion of the credibility of blog reviews over time, caused by the trend towards

the public relations hosting model:

Reviewing is supposed to be about being honest, you know, you’re not part of

the sales industry. The blogging community was fantastic when it started and

it was free and there was that wonderful dawning of that kind of ‘60s

mentality that ‘yeah, we can do it, we don’t need the man, man’ and then they

19

all thought, hey maybe we can make some money out of it and they all started

taking free meals they didn’t declare and they’d take $50 for a tweet, and

that’s not very good.

With the increased blurring and overlap between professional and amateur reviews

comes the suggestion that less value is now placed on independent, professional

reviews, or as Goodsir, Neill, Williamson and Brown (2014, p. 127) put it, reviews

fuelled by journalistic integrity. Participants reported that there is greater likelihood

that these independent reviews would be indistinguishable from advertorial because

an increasing number of amateur reviews are written as a result of a hosting model,

and in some cases, with monetary compensation for positive reviews. This was

viewed by some professional critics as diminishing the credibility and authority of

their role, as described by the national restaurant critic for The Australian:

There genuinely seem to be people out there who don’t care whether the

opinions that are being expressed are as a result of an independent assessment

or as a result of some kind of quid pro quo, tit for tat you’re going to buy me

lunch and I’m going to give you a nice review. There are people who seem to

think that it just didn’t matter. It’s the Mamamia thing … they have editorial

content alongside advertorial with no clear distinction between the two. Where

once people were information gathering themselves – seeking things out

themselves, and now that’s much more dictated by PR.

Claiborne asserted that the media organisation should pay for meals, and that if a

reviewer accepted free meals it would represent a clear journalistic conflict of interest

20

(Voss & Speere, 2013). All participants in this study stated that their employer paid

for all review meals without exception. Freelance critic and former critic for The Age

Good Food Guide expresses the commonly-held view among professionals that the

PR-driven model of restaurants hosting bloggers is problematic, and has created a

landscape in which audiences are oblivious to the differences between independent

reviews and those that arise from PR campaigns:

You have to look at who is actually paying for the meal. The difference

between professionals and bloggers - bloggers rarely pay for their meals these

days. Often it’s comped by the restaurants.2 So they’re beholden to the

restaurant for their free meal, so it’s a tricky area – it tends to mean their

commentary is full of gushing praise. For professionals – it’s in their

professional interests to stand above the fray and try and be as objective as

possible and that can only be achieved by having that bill not being paid by

the restaurant – by being paid externally. The difference between reviewers

and bloggers – simply because of that psychological factor of who pays for the

meal and that’s usually something people don’t understand. The pioneering

food bloggers did it for the love of it and I see more merit … back then it was

unadulterated by the PR machine. But the whole area has been so corrupted

that there’s no way of knowing who is in the pocket of whom.

This view expressed by participants echoes previous media commentary by TimeOut

London (2009), which calls into question the integrity of amateur reviews, and

highlights the blurred boundaries between reviews predicated on journalistic integrity,

2 ‘Comping’ is short for ‘complimentary’, relating here to meals provided free of charge.

21

and those fuelled by the hosting model employed by public relations practitioners in

the hospitality industry. From an audience point of view, the danger of this is that

many people who have read ‘“average food blogger” experiences of restaurants over

the last couple of years are now in danger of being “duped”’ – in the sense that

readers will assume that bloggers visit as anonymous customers (TimeOut London,

2009).

Listicles and Clickbait

Blank (2006, 32) notes that connoisseurial reviews on Claiborne’s model were

traditionally around 500-700 words, offering a ‘warts and all’ commentary on not

only the individual restaurant, book or film, but the broader social or cultural context.

Quality prose is also considered a central attribute of the connoisseurial review.

However, there has been a shift away from the entrenched, standardised review

format in favour of content and style more in keeping with digital media, such as

‘listicles’. The term ‘listicle’ is journalistic jargon for the combination of an article

and a list. It was a term invented to describe digital content that is often criticised as

being a dumbed-down version of journalism meant purely to attract clicks and lacking

the nuance of long form journalism (Leonhardt, 2015). There was agreement among

respondents that they had all been required to write shorter, more attention-grabbing

reviews, and in some cases, media organisations had eradicated the critical element

altogether, replacing it with a recommendation-style review. One participant who

writes for a number of prominent national and NSW-based publications commented

that some media organisations still valued the critical element of a review, but others

did not:

22

I think there are decisions that certain publications have made in order to

compete … that … has necessitated a lessening of the role of criticism by the

professional critic – the degree of criticism has perhaps dissipated over time.

Some magazines I write for want reviews that are about informing people of

what’s good, and there’s never a bad, or negative word or sentence included in

any of those … and some, like Delicious, are happy for me to tell it how it is.

The following comments capture one participant’s reflections on the change to the

briefs she received from employers in recent years. In the earlier years of her career,

reviews adhered to the format established by Claiborne, and usually included a star

rating. The detailed, evaluative long-form accounts of dining experiences that media

organisations commissioned when she began writing about food some 16 years ago

were in stark contrast to reviews she is writing now, which may be as short as 140

words in length, and often take the form of listicles.

The brief is not to give a warts and all assessment – it’s more about summing

up the essence of a restaurant and why somebody would want to go there.

Shorter articles or listicles means reviewers now have less opportunity to

provide readers with any contexualisation for the dining experience:

In a 150-word story you have no warm-up space. No chance to clear your

throat, you’ve just got to start singing. And with a 500-word review you have

some time there to really chew on the cud a little bit, get some reference in

there … and you can include things like history and interesting reference

points.

23

According to numerous participants, a significant portion of review content produced

mimicked the format of OCRs, and as a result left little space for the kind of nuance

longer-form pieces allow for:

[Sites like Yelp and Zomato] … got ahead of the game. All these sites now, if

I type in a restaurant, Yelp’s probably going to come up first – or another one

of those kinds of sites. A Zomato review describes just one experience without

going into the cultural or social realm.

Interviewees also bemoaned the prevalence of clickbait. There was the suggestion by

interviewees that there was now much less emphasis on integrity in favour of

entertaining, titillating content, with one participant likening negative reviews to

‘blood sport’. This was at odds with Claiborne’s expounded views on how reviewers

should go about their job and can be seen as undermining the connoisseurial

reviewer’s professionalism. This was a point not lost on participants:

Half the game these days is trying to be the most attention-grabbing. The way

we share knowledge is so different now. I think the thing with (OCRs) is

…it’s entertaining to point and heckle. Which is some of what food media is

becoming. It’s up to us to be entertaining and thought-provoking. People like a

bad review and they like blood sports – that’s not what I set out to do ever.

Conclusion

24

This article has demonstrated that the proliferation of amateur restaurant reviews on

blogs and OCR sites has fundamentally altered the practices and role of the

professional food critic – including changes to the process of carrying out reviews, the

ethical framework guiding this, and the format of reviews. These changes, in turn,

have affected the role of professional restaurant reviewers as cultural intermediaries in

the gastronomic field in several ways. They must visit and review restaurants as soon

as they open, often based only on one visit. They feel loss of anonymity detracts from

their ability to represent the experience of the average diner. They also report

experiencing increased pressure to emphasise the positive attributes of the dining

experience over criticism in their reviews, and the prevalence shorter articles, or

listicles, was seen as only providing limited space for nuance and contextualisation.

Changes to the practices and role of the professional critic uncovered by this

research can be seen as contravening several of the ethical tenets Claiborne

established. This includes the push for immediacy of reviews. Whereas critics would

previously allow new restaurants to find their feet before writing reviews, and often

make several visits, this has largely been abandoned due to the perceived need to keep

up with the real-time nature of digital and social media. Critics are now also

increasingly required by their employers to build public profiles, rather than being

allowed to maintain anonymity. Respondents believe that the abandonment of

anonymity and prevalence of the hosting model has diminished the integrity and

credibility of reviews. The final theme emerging from the evidence is the

abandonment of a standardised critical review format. The critical element of reviews

had been eroded, and in some cases eradicated. Long-form reviews have in many

cases been replaced by listicles and attention-grabbing headlines that are common

features of digital media. When considered together, these findings demonstrate that

25

the influence of digital reviewing practices, has, in the view of mainstream media

food critics, undermined the credibility and professionalism of their work, because the

reviews they produce no longer adhere to established professional, ethical and literary

standards. Fundamental elements of this framework have been undermined, and in

some cases completely abolished in response to changes wrought by amateur

participation in the gastronomic field.

That all professional reviewers saw these changes as profoundly negative

reflects their position as existing cultural intermediaries in a gastronomic field under

siege by new participants. Well socialised actors will instinctively defend their culture

and its habitus, which is deeply internalised and reproduced over time through

institutionalised practice. The changes that are evidenced above in the traditional

reviewing practices and output of professional critics mark the discursive terrain of a

struggle between them and their new competitors as agents and cultural intermediaries

in the gastronomic field.

The theoretical implication of this is that some amateur contributors now

challenge the position of professional critics as cultural intermediaries in the

gastronomic field. These changes indicate a transformed cultural field – one which is

larger and more contested, with diffuse boundaries, rather than being the domain of a

small number of elite, professional reviewers. The proliferation of digital technologies

has allowed widespread entry of amateurs into arts and cultural discourses. Evidence

from the gastronomic field of culture suggests this has been a democratising force,

dissolving longstanding status hierarchies. A range of cultural intermediaries with

differing levels of status and influence are now producing a more varied culinary

discourse across a wider range of writing genres and publishing platforms.

26

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participants at Food Politics: from the Margins to the

Mainstream conference in Hobart on 30 June – 1 July 2016. I am also grateful to the

two editors of this special issue for their invaluable guidance and suggestions, as well

31

as the two peer reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions. Any errors

remain the responsibility of the author.

Author information

Morag Kobez is a PhD Candidate in the Queensland University of Technology School

of Communications. She is also a freelance food and travel journalist.