The question burns: What are Nine Publishing’s restaurant reviews in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald trying to do? What is their purpose?

When I assessed weekly eating places for more than 30 years for the Australian Financial Review, The Sunday Age, the Herald Sun, and, yes, The Age itself, I had only one aim: to say if a restaurant was worth a diner’s money.

In the media, that’s what restaurant reviewers are supposed to do, I believe. You write for consumers, newspaper and online readers.

My main focus was on whether the ingredients and their cooking were of the highest quality. Service was important, but judging it was mostly about waiting times before and between courses and waiters’ attentiveness. Décor and ambience were idiosyncratic, so you described them but didn’t opine. (Up to the reader to do that.) Music, too, was the eating place’s choice, so for the reviewer it was sometimes only a question of whether it was too loud.

Much more important, I believed, was comfort, whether the tables were generously-sized, the seating able to support a diner for a couple of hours without unease. Most importantly, I insisted on fabric napkins when I began in the late 1980s my first continuous weekly gig at the AFR. (It lasted 11 years.) It occurred to me that I should score restaurants out of 20 points and take off two if they tabled paper serviettes.

And for French-and-Italian-leaning places and the new wave of fine Australian counterparts in the late 1970s and ’80s, bread had to tabled free; I deducted two points if it wasn’t. (The point of bread is to mop up sauces, which are the most technically difficult and revealing of kitchen compositions.)

Luckily, I felt I had the goods to determine food quality, having lived and worked in France for several years in the early 1970s and having married into a French family in the food industry that cooked Gallic classics with rigour. Australian restaurants in the late seventies simply didn’t know how to. Even the much-vaunted Stephanie’s was tabling basic French tucker, the results underwhelming.

It took the emerging “Australian” (fusion) restaurants of chefs such as Patric Juillet, Cheong Liew, Phillip Searle and Mogens Bay Esbensen (among a few others) to demonstrate culinary discipline and high originality. (A long account of the development of Australian cooking and why it happened is in my book Advanced Australian Fare [Allen & Unwin 2002].)

What are we getting from reviews nowadays? For a start, no points are deducted for lack of bread or paper napkins. Far from it!

News Corp papers no longer review restaurants regularly. It’s an expensive exercise – costs of meals, transport and reviewers’ fees. So in Melbourne and Sydney The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have it on their own. (I discount entirely bloggers’ efforts. Their motives and means are, in the main, obscure and opaque, their “reviews” mostly vacuous. Ditto, The Australian Good Food Guide.)

Posted in a separate section called goodfood, Age reviews gush. A recent one of Gambino in Glen Waverley is exemplary. The restaurant is a “huge deal” for the suburb. It has a “most glamorous rooftop”. It’s a “chic, sleek, blue-velvet cave”, reviewer Dani Valent goes on to write. Gambino appears to be on the fifth level of a building, and a rooftop is a floor up. Importantly, Valent writes that the latter has no wheelchair access.

She talks about cocktails, then writes that you may “steer” either to casual or fine dining. A whole tomato is infused with soy sauce, stuffed with cheese and served in a pool of basil oil, ready to “ooze curds when cut”. The “drama is undeniable” but the “fandangling” makes her hanker for a sun-drenched tomato. These two sentences border on criticism, but she needed to go further, in my view. Why does she prefer a fresh tomato? What was it about the cheese-stuffed one that put her off? Not a word on it.

The “theatre curtain goes up” on eye fillet topped with a “sturdy ravioli” containing “mushroom sauce”, a dish that “pays off in spectacle […]”.

She goes on to describe uncritically several other dishes. And, in around 36 wide column-centimetres, not a single Gambino dish is analysed. Sometimes her observations are detailed, but dishes’ textures and flavours and if they’re in balance remain unassessed.

Citing a single example of an Age review cannot characterise them all, of course, but one that reads any differently in style and content from Gambino’s is a rarity. The restaurant scored 14.5 out of 20. (A maximum of 10 points are given for food, five for ‘hospitality’, three for ‘setting and experience’, and two for value. Scores tend to be mainly from around 13 to 15, and I, for one, have never read a failure.)

Callan Boys, national restaurant editor at Nine Publishing, answered generously a series of questions I emailed him. As far as he can see, The Age and the SMH are the only regular restaurant reviewers in conventional media. Nine pays “within reason” the cost of review meals, reviewers’ fees, and travel costs to get a “proper overview” of a restaurant. If a negative review was on the cards then he would “expect the reviewer to visit multiple times and be accompanied”. To write his own weekly reviews, he “will usually visit at least twice”. How reviews are financed, he wrote, is “for Nine Publishing eyes only”.

To visit more than once for the sake of a “proper overview” is nonsense. A clear divergence from the classic purpose of food criticism glares. Diners-out don’t visit twice. They can’t afford to. And they won’t visit a second time if their first experience is poor.

So much of cooking of even the artiest food is a question of preparation long before service. Eating places have plenty of time to get it right. They’re not playing a recital of late Beethoven piano sonatas, attempting to hit in a couple of hours thousands of right notes at the right speed and force in front of a packed concert hall. (I’ve heard a lot of piano recitals, and almost all concert pianists never play a bum note.)

In short, the bias in Nine reviews benefits restaurants and not consumers.

There is something of a model for this type of “journalism”. Almost all the articles in travel and tourism supplements are written by “guests” of the venues and cruises and hotels and airlines that they’re writing about. Writers describe, but never criticise. If they do have a misgiving, it’s usually benign.

Travel writing is, in essence, advertising copy that supports the tourism and travel industries’ highly lucrative publicity. It’s worthless if you want a truthful idea of what to expect at a destination.

I asked Callan Boys if Nine papers had ever failed a restaurant. He linked me to a nine out of 20 that Age chief restaurant critic Besha Rodell gave in October 2023. Nine papers had certainly given full-page “negative” reviews, he wrote, although these were “largely left for restaurants with deep pockets and investors […]”. If a “small, struggling, independent restaurant” turned out to be “pretty awful […] most critics across the globe will just not write about the experience and move on”.

How helpful is that for readers?

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.