Smashed #38: Have food critics lost their way?

Or should chef Ben Shewry just shut the f**k up?

Chef Ben Shewry (Tourism Victoria from Australia, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

If anyone has benefitted from food media's attention in all its forms, it’s Australian chef Ben Shewry. As the owner of Attica, a restaurant that specialises in obscure indigenous Australian ingredients and that’s located in a small Melbourne suburb, Shewry has surely needed all the help he can get to fill his tables. For nearly two decades, food writers (and filmmakers) have obliged him big time. Newspapers, magazines and restaurant guides have heaped plaudits on both the place and the man.

In 2008, Attica was the Australian Good Food Guide’s restaurant of the year and Shewry was named best new talent by Gourmet Traveller magazine. The restaurant was first listed in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2010 and, in 2015, he was one of the chefs profiled in the first series of the Netflix food show Chef’s Table.

But now, in an extract from his new memoir Uses for Obsession* published in The Australian (subscription required), Shewry has lashed out at food writers of all stripes worldwide, claiming that, ‘The global restaurant industry has spent too long in the thrall of food media’, that only the late Los Angeles-based critic Jonathan Gold has ever done the job properly and everyone else is incompetent. The stance is of course great publicity for his book, but there are factors that significantly undermine Shewry’s newly discovered outspokenness.

Firstly, all that press attention that Shewry now views as deeply flawed and suspect helped put him in the enviable position of being able to charge AU$385 (about £200) for his menu, a situation he has apparently been more than happy with up until now. Secondly, his dislike of food writers has only emerged since Attica lost a ‘hat’ in its rating in the Australian Good Food Guide in 2022, being demoted from the highest rating of three down to two, the closest equivalent down under to losing a Michelin star (the guide is not yet published in Australia). He’s also only managed to find his voice after Attica dropped out of the World’s 50 Best list, having made its last appearance to date in the long list of 2021 at number 97. Now food writers appear to have little use for Shewry, Shewry has suddenly decided he has no use for them. But is it just sour grapes or does he have a point?

Shewry’s main issue seems to be that food writers aren’t chefs and therefore don’t have the knowledge and palate to be in a position to accurately appraise what chefs do. Given that Shewry has ‘hats, stars, and best-of lists’ in his sights, there are several issues with that position.

I will leave ‘hats’ aside as I am not an expert on Australian food media and I don’t know the credentials of those employed to inspect and review restaurants. However, Shewry claims that the editor of a leading restaurant guide, previously employed as ‘a direct-to-camera journalist for a television news station’ had told him, ‘You don’t need a background in food writing to review and write about restaurants’. A reliable source has claimed that Shewry misquoted the editor in his piece; what they actually said to him was ‘food writers don’t have to be chefs’ which is an altogether different statement.

But when it comes to stars, at least of the Michelin variety, it’s more than possible that the guide inspector who dishes them out will be a former chef. As Michelin points out on its website, ‘Our inspectors are experts in food, dining and hotel sectors with many years of experience working in the hospitality industry’. And as far as the World’s 50 Best list goes, that is also decided partly by Shewry’s chef peers with each of the 27 jurys around the world made up of ‘a balanced selection of chefs, restaurateurs, food/restaurant journalists and well-travelled gourmets’.

Shewry talks of ‘an oppressive review system’ run by ‘huge businesses….that want to sell more newspapers, magazines, or tyres’ (God forbid a business wanting to sell more of its product, like, say, a restaurant trying to encourage more bookings). But how is it an oppressive system when the majority of restaurants reviewed by a newspaper or magazine will have actively courted the coverage via a PR? And how are guides oppressive when no restaurant can be forced to be included? As I understand it, a listing will only be published after the guide has contacted the restaurant to confirm current contact details, opening hours, menu options, prices and the name of the head chef, among other things. If the restaurant doesn’t wish to be listed it can make that clear when it’s contacted, or simply not provide the requested details.  

Shewry goes on to make the ludicrous claim that ‘Hospitality is the only industry I can think of where businesses get reviewed by major publications several times annually, year on year, for eternity.’ Has he ever read a theatre, cinema, TV or book review? He also complains that, during Covid the guides ‘did nothing’ and their silence was ‘deafening’, and then in the next breath admits that, ‘Without restaurants functioning as restaurants, they had nothing to do’. In reality, Michelin came under fire in 2020 for continuing to award and remove stars while the pandemic raged. Shewry fails to give his opinion on that point.

Shewry claims that ‘the industry has begun to turn’. His evidence is a ‘Football-fan-level rowdy’ crowd at a restaurant awards night. I have helped run a restaurant awards night in Brighton for the past nine years and every single event has been absolute fucking carnage. The hospitality industry likes to let its hair down. A horde of coke and booze-fuelled motor mouth chefs on a rare night out taking little notice of what’s happening on stage is really not the sign of an industry turning its back on the food media that helps keep it afloat.

Shewry admits that he’s benefitted from ‘the system’ and that he didn’t speak up earlier about his concerns because it ‘existed well before I entered the industry, and initially I did not completely understand it. I thought it was all-powerful, and I did not have the same courage of my convictions that I have now’.

So what exactly are those convictions? Shewry says it’s time for the hospitality industry ‘to step up and take control, to stop pandering to a system that no longer works, that was never truly independent, never properly informed, and never quite offered the expertise it claimed to’.

How exactly does he plan ‘to take control’? Will he eject any reviewers or inspectors he recognises from his restaurant? Will he actively seek to be delisted from guide books and best-of lists? Will he refuse to be featured in those newspapers and magazines (run by ‘huge businesses’ remember and not a nice little business like Attica) that are ‘constantly coming up with new ways to sell to you, and to use us’? Beyond pontificating about it all in the print media he professes to despise, will he actively encourage and organise for his peers to do the same?

Does he have any suggestions for how the improvements he’d like to see - more knowledgeable food writers with chef-like palates for example - could be implemented? He doesn’t say, either in the extract or in the interview he gave to the Guardian last week (so that answers at least one of the above questions). All he offers is this closing thought, ‘I’m asking: who will hold the critics to account if judgments made about us are ill-informed or unjustified? It’s about questioning who holds the authority: the guides who think they uphold the standards, or restaurants themselves?’.

Shewry’s end goal in speaking out isn’t clear. No doubt he feels better getting it all off his chest, but it’s a half-formed thought. Shewry feels there’s a problem with how newspapers, magazines, lists and guides appraise the restaurant industry but he doesn’t offer any solutions for how the system could be improved or suggest any mechanisms by which the industry could hold critics to account. Shewry has a platform for his grievances because he’s been given it by the organisations he’s apparently now opposed to. Are they likely to offer the same platform to every chef and restaurateur with an axe to grind? It hardly seems likely.

As a food writer of two decades standing who has been a critic, guide inspector, restaurant awards and restaurant festival organiser, I could take Shewry’s outpourings personally. However, in the Guardian interview, he acknowledges that he ‘knows food reviewers who are genuine and who care’. Shewry doesn’t know me from Adam but I’m going to include myself in the ‘genuine and who care’ category of food reviewers. There are perhaps many more of us that Shewry realises.