Sauce on the Side by Michael Birchenall
June 2008 vol 7 #6
The Orange Juice Is Concentrate
My column takes a turn this month … right into the path of Tom Sietsema’s recent Washington Post review of Alto Plaza in Centreville, Va. The Post restaurant critic/reporter gave the place his lowest “rating”, which translates to zero stars and brackets with the word “poor” inside.
To fully understand what I am going to comment on you must go to our Web site at www.foodservicemonthly.com and click on ”Sauce On the Side” in the right hand column. Here you can access links to the Sietsema review and Alto Plaza’s Web site: www.altoplaza.net.
I don’t know the owners of Alto Plaza, nor have I been there. Sietsema’s statement that the place cost $16 million to build is mind staggering.
For the benefit of comprehending my perspective, I come from a hotel food and beverage operations past and I have been the recipient of lackluster reviews as well as good ones. I took the reviews personally. My reviewer from the Akron Beacon Journal was Jane Snow who has won two James Beard writing awards. In one review I will always remember, she stated that the orange juice served for our Sunday brunch was made from frozen concentrate. I was outraged. I knew that it was fresh-squeezed and I demanded a retraction – a correction. I told her the “facts” and expected her to tell me when she would be writing the new truth. She didn’t hesitate to tell me that it may have been fresh, but by the time it got to her it tasted like a concentrate. How had we mishandled it?
Indeed we had a process in place that left the fresh juice out in the hot kitchen too long and the taste suffered. We took a good fresh product and abused it. I dropped my demand and worked harder on making sure a fresh juice stayed fresh.
When I moved here 15 years ago, one of my first writing jobs was writing reviews for the Times Community Newspapers in Northern Virginia. I thought I brought credibility to the effort. I offered the perspective of knowing what it took to get food to the table.
Back to Alto Plaza. Tom Sietsema hated it – and he spent the review telling us why. What bothers me is that Mr. Sietsema relies on sniping and non-food/restaurant references to get us through the deadly review. It starts in the lead when he says it “looks like a budget motel on growth hormones.” OK, fine … some poetic license is allowed (just look at my writing) but then he follows that with it “looks like one of Saddam Hussein’s gaudy palaces.” Two cheap shots with one evil Saddam Hussein reference. Wow! If Mr. Sietsema, were a political or public figure (a la Sharon Stone) he would be issuing apologies and spin.
In the bad review especially, there is great temptation to let clever references get in the way of solid criticism. That gives us the ceviche “could double as varnish remover” and the “honey dressing that could use a restraining order.” In the case of a server who is overly concerned about his table, he interjects, “Down girl, down!”
Course after course is a disaster on multiple visits – to the point that it defies belief. Can any place be this bad? When I was doing reviews, I would get calls all the time from restaurants wanting to be reviewed. Honestly for many of them, “No, you really don’t.” Not every establishment is up to such an in depth critique.
Mr. Sietsema confirms that in the last graf when he states, “If Alto Plaza were a mom and pop operation, you’d never read about it here.” He justifies publishing the review with, “But this restaurant is a million-dollar mess, in desperate need of a deep cleaning.” Why ridicule the “million-dollar mess?” Why couldn’t he call them and say they were scheduled for a review and were seriously not prepared for scrutiny? Or the weekly Sietsema online chat could do for a negative comment of unreviewability … even his weekly mini reviews in the Wednesday Food Section would have been better use of time and space for panning Alto Plaza.
While Mr. Sietsema acts as if he has to protect the public from places like Alto Plaza, I only want to go there even more, and I plan to go soon.
I don’t know the owners, the chef or the staff, but they have to be feeling pretty low. Being the butt of a Washington Post joke is no fun – especially when it’s your livelihood.
What do you think? Let me know at michael@foodservicemonthly.com
