Comment Is Free

There are lots of things that contribute to making restaurant comment worthwhile (or not as the case may be). Who paid for dinner is only one of these things and - if you actually take the time to understand how most of the content you digest is produced - a pretty bloody insignificant one.

As a punter, if a restaurant suddenly turned round and stumped up for your dinner, you'd feel pretty special wouldn't you? You'd probably go round telling your mates just how bloody fantastic the place was and why they should all get down there pronto, right? Well of course you would.

I did it for my first freebie review; and that was of a formula curry house on a 1970s housing estate for goodness sake. Once I hit review number twenty, though, I was pretty nonplussed about the whole freebie thing. By review 100 I was sick of eating free stuff I didn't fancy when there was great food just up the road I could chose to pay for. The point is, free stuff eventually normalises. After a while you just don't see it as justification for special treatment because it's not special. It's normal.

But hold on, and forget about money for a minute. Surely if the restaurant knows you're coming you can expect special treatment regardless of who's paying? Your experience isn't going to reflect whatever Mr Average Restaurant Punter's experience is so why should he pay any attention to you? Quite possibly he shouldn't, but the reality depends on something far more important than a bill. Even if a restaurant knows they have someone important in, they can't retrain their chef, alter their systems, change their prices, tweak their concept or get rid of the ultra-rich backer who is making them do stupid things that no one in their right mind would see as either necessary or enjoyable aspects of dining out. The staff can treat their special reviewer guest well but money and a by-line picture don't factor in to how she spots, interprets and responds to fundamentals that staff can neither change nor hide. How does she spot, interpret and respond? This depends, not on cash, but entirely on the aim behind her review.

Those wishing to increase traffic to a blog might well have adopted the approach that being trustworthy and fair is key, but what they'll quickly have discovered is that traffic goes up based, not on accuracy, but on how many comments they manage to leave on other, more popular, blogs and whether Chris, Lizzie and Helen (or maybe Andy or Angie depending on the genre) will give them the time of day on Twitter. Photos are important too, in that people want to see some sort of mildly aspirational lifestyle before they pay you even a jot of attention. None of which helps promote a focus on accurate reviewing no matter who is picking up the tab. So why bother? And what sort of obsessive lunatic deems it morally inappropriate to simply show off an experience for a burgeoning readership to pass their own judgement on anyway? Is there some under-the-table code that, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, asserts clinical recommendation as the only valid form of restaurant publicity? Perhaps we should ask the experts.

How do professional, expense-accounted restaurant reviewers perceive their job? Do you think they see it as to objectively critique restaurants with a view to directing your eating-out-pound to those most worthy of it? Main-title newspaper critics have eaten so many hundreds of thousands of meals that they are numb to the experience and see no obligation to use their not inconsiderable influence to sing the praises of a struggling but brilliant restaurant you'll love that might otherwise close or that is stumping up for their dinner. They are going to give their views based on two things only: whether they liked the food, and whether liking the food is going to enhance their personal brand more than not liking it. A combination of writing skill, entertainment factor and credibility of viewpoint, personal brand is what keeps a critic read, what lets them sell newspapers or generate page views, what triggers the debate that keeps them at the heart of restaurant opinion, and what maintains the professional clout necessary to position them as an authority on restaurants and thus remain gainfully employed in the media. Without personal brand, reviewers don't sell papers. And without paper sales, expense accounts are pretty hard to justify.

Let's imagine for one crazy moment, though, that as a way to generate interest in their work, a restaurant pundit had actually decided to write considered, accurate reviews of excellent restaurants they had personally made the effort to discover. Even if they did this, something else would get in the way of their ability to be truly objective: knowledge.

If I have bothered to work a day or two in ten different establishments each year because I am genuinely passionate about grasping the realities behind putting food on a restaurant table for money and using that knowledge to offer others a clear idea of how their eating choices can make dining out better for everyone, does it matter if a restaurant paid for my meal? No, not even slightly. I will still understand everything that is going on and judge the operation accordingly because my knowledge and motivation demand that I do so.

If, on the other hand, I have little to no knowledge of what happens in a restaurant, where food comes from, what it should cost and what good value actually constitutes, then after paying for my dinner, I will produce personally-biased drivel that's worth nothing to anyone in terms of whether or not they should eat in the same restaurant I did. Who paid means nothing when the commentator doesn't know enough to comment in the first place. Would Tripadvisor be any less useful if its millions of contributors ate for free? No, it would still be huge crock of biased, ill-informed shit. If I understand the effect of a freebie I can largely ignore the freebie but if I'm not motivated to promote restaurants I have rightly understood to be deserving of business because they are fundamentally great places to eat and - conversely - be honest about those that aren't, it really doesn't matter whether I ignore the freebie.

So let's say I've busted my butt for ten years learning everything I can about cooking, kitchens, restaurants and media, and my burning passion is simply and only to guide diners to their eating nirvana. I may try and I may pay but unfortunately, something else gets in my way. Were my editor* of the persuasion that certain restaurants were off limits for objective, critical comment, it wouldn't bloody matter what's free or whether I like it because as a mere writer my hands would be tied. To scrape a living I would have to wrest a moderately positive picture from a meal I considered overpriced, dull or poorly cooked because if I didn't my editor would do it for me then not commission me again. Why? There are lots of reasons.

1. Saying Restaurant Gordon Ramsay represents a fundamentally overpriced experience for the majority, or that the Fat Duck - like McDonalds - is more of a factory-cum-theatre than a restaurant, is not going help an editor's publication appeal to a majority audience. Regardless of the "truth", these sort of left-field opinions make credibility easily assailable, going, as they do, against the majority of job-scared, tow-the-line pundits. Tasked with generating a decent readership, this is something most editors are less keen on that the proven one-two, punter-bagging punch of a fluffy viewpoint alongside stunning photos.

2. Most providers of restaurant content exist because of: hobbyism, sponsorship or advertising. If an editor pisses off the advertisers or sponsors that keep her website, book, magazine or whatever funded, she has suddenly regressed to having a hobby rather than a job. So editors must ensure pieces that concern advertisers or the interests of advertisers are nice to advertisers regardless of what their writer thinks or who is funding them.

3. Editors aren't bloody stupid. They know that punters want entertainment. They know that if their weekend review were a series of humourless factoids recorded by an unswayable multi-millionaire, their readership would slowly bugger off. Hence, they edit, and their writers better bloody well learn to minimise how much editing they have to do by not writing anything they'd need to edit no matter how accurate it might be.

4. A huge percentage of restaurant and food content relies on the cooperation of PR agencies. If a restaurant appoints a PR, that firm becomes the writer's gateway to interviews, exclusives and pre-written content. Without the cooperation and continued trust of PRs, it can be somewhat challenging to discover and secure the volume of editorial opportunities needed to survive on a skeleton staff propped up by handy - but fundamentally biased - press releases. Where do you think restaurant news comes from? Do you think it's all gathered independently via meticulous research or, if taken from a press release, re-written by some all-knowing restaurant genius who researches it back into reality? No, it's processed from press releases with minor changes by underpaid sub-editors who, yesterday, were cut and pasting some gibberish about cleaning products and are generally dealing with so much volume across so many different subjects as to be utterly desensitised to the quality or accuracy of content. Anyway, the point is that if editors let knowledgeable, ethically-minded writers roast restaurants represented by certain PRs, those PRs would withdraw their support and those editors would have to hire more writers or researchers they couldn't afford and their bosses would fire them.

Now, speaking of PRs, here's a poser for you: it's wrong for a blogger or journalist to approach a restaurant and offer them publicity based on a meal that will not be charged for, but it's not at all wrong for the same restaurant to pay a PR agency £25k annually to pimp freebies out to exactly the same bloggers and journalists. In actuality, those writers who make contact independently are saving restaurants a huge amount of money: if everyone did it, restaurants would have far more money to sink into our dining experience. Follow the logic here: if you think instances of "blaggergate" have nothing to do with PR agencies who are experts at getting information into the media and at the same time need to protect their businesses from an ever more open and broad market for restaurant promotion you are, frankly, naive.

Many PRs were once journalists. Why? Because there are less jobs around for journalists, and those that do exist no longer pay very well. This low pay, however, is offset considerably by press trips and previews: opportunities for journalists to try out things they will write about. A hotel, a bicycle, a phone, an album, a film, a car, a wine or even - *shock* - a restaurant. Journalism is built on these little tasters and, strangely, no one questions a music reviewer's opinion of an album he didn't pay for. Whereas a journalist eating for free can only be a total crook.

Just as a freebie distances one from the majority who pay for dinner, though, so does having a disposable income high enough to eat wherever you want whenever you want. Would I trust the views of someone who spends their money on food at an almost shockingly profligate rate yet hasn't bothered to develop any sort of ability to truly understand the sourcing, preparation and production of what they eat? No, I wouldn't. They have no concept whatsoever of value because while they may settle the bill personally, their ability to pay it without a blink means they cannot judge it for those unable to do the same. Their opinion is based, not on value or fact, but on a very narrow range of highly personal criteria shaped by an experience of dining out that could hardly be further removed from that of others. They judge a £100 meal on the same basis as a £400 meal. They judge a turbot based on a thousand other turbot. Punters don't. Oh and, by the way, that's the same punters who don't get freebies.

So who can we trust to judge restaurants? Chefs, surely, have more subject-matter knowledge than anyone else and must be routinely employed to tell us where to eat. Please. God. No. While they may grasp how most of what they eat is cooked and be able to roughly judge ingredient quality, working fourteen-hour days five days a week with the other two reserved for managing their "life" and catching up on sleep, a chef's basis for comparison outside their own restaurant is almost shockingly low and vastly skewed by such huge professional investment in their own cooking. If a pundit manages five weekly meals out to a chef's one, who has the best point of comparison for what should happen in a dining room and be on a plate for punters to want to come back? Chefs don't feel right critiquing their peers, they don't feel confident about doing something that isn't their job and - in most cases - they're not the best writers. Just like most writers aren't the best cooks.

The point is, all this should demonstrate that you simply can't generalise. Just because some blogger takes a freebie and you, as a punter, would be biased if you got one, doesn't mean they will be. It doesn't mean they're ripping anyone off, either. If they are, then the entire process of getting a restaurant into the press a fundamental rip off, which it can't be because, via PR agencies and entertainment for journalists, restaurants continue to pay to be in the press. And if they didn't pay to be in the press, we'd all have far, far less restaurant writing to consume and we'd all moan. So please, stop complaining about freebies - they're an institutionalised aspect of long-established, mutually profitable relationships between restaurants, PRs and content providers, they have been around far, far longer than bloggers and blaggers, and they are doing you absolutely no more harm than the rest of our entirely imperfect food media is.

*of course I'd love an editor, but as well as spelling, tone and grammar they'd also correct my opinions which would be really boring.