Every week, Mountain Xpress navigates the sometimes-tricky waters of the local food scene. The Asheville area is home to an ever-growing number of restaurants to suit every taste—and Xpress has taken on the task of giving readers “the straight dish” about what’s out there.
As with politics or art, passions about food often run high. For restaurateurs, the meals they make are truly their bread and butter—their livelihood. For customers, those meals are important in another way: Diners spend their own hard-earned dollars for what they eat, and consequently, they care a lot about the quality of both the food and the dining experience.
With so many options, choosing when and where to eat can be a daunting task, especially when every local restaurant is prepared to make the case that they’ve got what your palate pines for.
Since its inception two years ago, Xpress’ food column has proved both popular and provocative—and occasionally controversial. Our first food writer, Mackensy Lunsford, won both darts and laurels from local foodies (and chalked up a national food-writing award) before she departed last fall to start her own restaurant.
Her replacement, Hanna Rachel Raskin, has been on the job long enough to experience the possibilities and potential pitfalls of local-restaurant reviewing. And under her initiative, Xpress has clarified its restaurant-review policies, which were crafted in consultation with the Association of Food Journalists and food critics at other members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. (For more, see below.)
Raskin wrote for the Xpress’ A&E section before becoming our food writer, a job for which she’s well-qualified. A 15-year vet of the “front of the house” in various eateries, she did her graduate work in American culinary history and has since written about food for publications including American Heritage magazine and the Journal of Popular Culture. She’s served as a culinary-tourism consultant for organizations including the Southern Foodways Alliance and the Asheville Independent Restaurant Association.
For anyone curious about how we at Xpress review local restaurants, here’s a Q&A with Raskin that serves up the details.
— The editors
Mountain Xpress: We’re here to dish about how you do your work—so why can’t we see your face?
Hanna Rachel Raskin: Partly because I desperately needed to comb my hair the day this picture was taken, but mostly because I have to retain my anonymity. That’s an ambitious goal in a town as small as Asheville, but it’s key to doing my job well. If I told restaurants I was planning to review them, I’d probably never have a bad meal—or so I like to think. But I want to have the same experience as the average diner, which pretty much means going incognito. If I suspect the staff is on to me, I make sure to mention that in the review.
MX: How do you choose the restaurants you review?
HRR: I focus somewhat on relatively new restaurants, but just opening isn’t enough to merit a review. I’m interested in restaurants with ideas, whether that means becoming the best restaurant in all of Asheville or merely the first eatery in town to make a decent kishke. I try to visit restaurants that have everybody talking (and wondering if they’re any good) and ones that might have escaped notice, but deserve to be talked about. I’m also cognizant of the range of restaurants we cover: My aim is to review restaurants representing all cuisines, price ranges and neighborhoods.
MX: What’s your mindset when you visit a restaurant you’ll be reviewing?
HRR: I sit down for every meal hoping it’s going to be the best meal I’ve ever had. I’m always ready for a chef to wow me. Of course, in cases where I’m really disappointed meals, it isn’t fun: If stomaching sub-par food wasn’t bad enough, there’s the specter of having to write something that the business owner might not like to see.
MX: So why write negative reviews at all?
HRR: There are plenty of publications that subscribe to the “If you can’t say anything nice … ” school of reviewing, but that’s never been the Xpress’ approach. Our goal is instead to run fair critiques—and informed opinions—that help readers make wise decisions about how to spend their food dollars. Heaping praise on restaurants that neglect their diners’ taste buds—and then charge them exorbitantly—doesn’t seem fair to the many local restaurants that respect their patrons’ palates and pocketbooks.
But it is fair to give restaurants a second chance to prove they belong in that latter group. That’s why, according to our restaurant-reviewing guidelines, we won’t publish a negative review until the reviewer has made at least two visits to the restaurant in question. That means that the worse the food, the quicker I’ll be rushing back, friends in tow, to sample it again.
MX: Some folks say negative reviews—no matter how many trips you make to justify them—aren’t supportive of the local-restaurant scene.
HRR: To be clear, I’m a huge fan of the local-restaurant scene. It’s more vibrant than the scene in towns twice the size of Asheville. And there’s every indication the food scene will continue to develop and diversify. But a dynamic restaurant scene doesn’t preclude criticism—it requires it. Having lively—and even sometimes contentious and opinionated—conversations about what we eat and where we eat it is essential to the growth of Asheville’s edible community. Of course, people aren’t always going to agree with my take—and the Xpress always encourages those with different views to let us know.
MX: Sometimes you don’t just write about the food. For example, you’ve been called out by some readers for writing about menus, bathroom hand-dryers and the like. Why go there?
HRR: There’s so much more to the restaurant experience than the food. Otherwise, we’d all eat take-out. To convey a restaurant’s atmosphere, I’ll often mention the size of the plates or the paintings on the walls, which sometimes reveal more about the restaurant’s intentions than the food itself. There was a near riot when I wrote about the menus at Carmel’s, but I still think those good-looking menus tell us something about the Grove Arcade restaurant: Carmel’s is obviously a place that cares about presentation.
MX: But why the hand dryers?
HRR: My goal is not just to tell readers about a particular restaurant, which they may never have the chance to visit, but to explore more general issues related to local dining. Restaurants have lately been pouring huge amounts of money into bathroom design; those monster hand-dryers gave me the opportunity to address the trend.
MX: How do you decide what to order for a review?
HRR: I wish I could sample the entire menu, but it’s not logistically possible—there’s no quicker away to arouse a server’s suspicions than by ordering multiple entrees in a single sitting. Instead, I try to maximize my orders by bouncing around the menu. I always have at least one appetizer, salad, soup, entree and dessert, and usually many more. The rules for my reviewing companions are strict: If one person is ordering grilled mahi mahi, nobody’s having the grilled salmon, because I want to sample as many different ingredients and cooking techniques as the kitchen has to offer.
MX: Do you order alcohol on review visits?
HRR: Almost always. Good chefs intend for their food to be enjoyed with a drink, and most restaurant owners think long and hard about their beer and wine lists. Having a drink is one element of fully experiencing a restaurant.
MX: What’s your favorite food?
HRR: I’ve been told I eat like a 65-year old man (which I am not). My comfort meal is a Caesar salad with extra anchovies, a porterhouse steak, cooked rare, with a side of crumbled blue cheese and salty steak fries doused with vinegar. But I eat all kinds of food with almost equal vigor: I still get nostalgic about a warm brown-rice salad with tahini dressing I concocted while working at a vegetarian restaurant.
MX: Do you eat everything?
HRR: There’s plenty of plate-shuffling on a review visit. I taste everything I mention in a review. Fortunately, I don’t have any food hang-ups, other than a pesky allergy to eggplant.
MX: So what if eggplant parmigiana is the house specialty?
HRR: I’d assign that review to someone else. There are times when it’s not appropriate for me to review a restaurant: I might know someone who works there, or have a prior relationship with the owner. Or it might have something to do with eggplant.
Xpress food writer Hanna Rachel Raskin can be contacted at food@mountainx.com
Wow. I can not believe that you actually had your own paper interview you in order to rebut all of the criticism thrown your way. Too bad the restaurants you give an unfair shake don’t get the same luxury.
It was a sad week that we had to endure your ersatz validation instead of another menu layout and commode review of J.T. McDrinkey’s.
Her shadow is thinner than I expected.
Edtomfish: Actually, they do get to rebut. It’s called “writing a letter,” and there’s a whole section of the paper for it. You have read the Xpress, haven’t you?
I think it was a good idea to run the interview this week. I don’t really recall reading much in the way of an introduction to Hanna Rachel Raskin when the restaurant column changed reviewers. There might have been one that I simply missed; regardless, it never hurts to get an inside look at how a review is being produced and at who is doing the reviewing.
For instance, I did not necessarily assume that either the current or former restaurant critic had anything more in the way of credentials than an ability to write, a willingness to take on that particular “beat,” and a personal appreciation of food and the dining experience. Plenty of sections at plenty of papers are staffed that way.
Anyone, in my opinion, who has done their graduate work in American culinary history is likely not just some random yokel stumbling around in the dark regarding the reviewing of a restaurant.
I don’t recall having to read letters written by people associated with restaurants that received positive reviews raising hell with the way she does her job. But for too long now, I have to read something from every cousin and boyfriend of whatever restaurant owner/mgr. who just got a poor review.
That is why I take issue with “edtomfish’s” above comment “Too bad the restaurants you give an unfair shake don’t get the same luxury.” Really? Then why do I have to read all about it half a dozen times in the letter section after a negative review comes out?
Getting five or six people to write a letter on your behalf makes it look like an avalanche of criticism. I don’t know Raskin and I’m not involved with restaurants, and I feel that the vast majority of readers have no problem with her reviews.
A lot of the complaints try to take issue with her mentioning the menus, or bathrooms, or whatever, but it is only as if to say, “Why do you give so much attention to the accoutrement when you could have focused more on your sub-par dining experience at my restaurant?”
It seems like once the first letter complaining about her reviewing style got printed, there was a piling-on, all with the same complaints (the menu review, etc.). Since that has all blown over, I haven’t seen anyone with a fresh complaint about her reviewing style, just rehashing of the same observations regarding one or two columns, now in the distant past. I guess when someone more astute than “edtomfish” or “antipasta” makes a fresh observation about her writing, they too will suddenly have the same observation to make. “Antipasta” — “Her shadow is thinner than expected” ? Wow, deep, dude. You really take the reviewing of local restaurants quite seriously. What’s the matter — have an off-night in the back of the house when she came in to review your workplace? Someone needs to put the kitchen-monkey back in its cage.
I’m glad they ran the interview because it lays it right out regarding who she is, what she does, how she does it and why she does it the way she does. With all the howling from the haters, I would think you (Hanna-haters) would appreciate this sort of thing. In fact, you seemed to be demanding some sort of accounting for these outrages. To continue sniping like little babies about her says much more about these particular people than it does of her.
Or you’d rather the paper what — keep sacking people until the paper finds someone who doesn’t think your uncle’s restaurant sucks?
The interview was necessary, and appreciated by this reader, so that we don’t have to keep reading the same letter over and over from what is statistically an extremely tiny group of people among the readers — pissed-off owners/mgrs. of restaurants who just got a poor review (and also their brothers-in-law).