For the first time in 14 years, I ate a meal in a restaurant this past weekend where I didn’t feel compelled to wonder out loud whether the chef realized his overly ambitious menu was clouding his real talent for combining bold flavors.
In fact, I didn’t even think it.
Why? Because as of this column, I’m not the restaurant critic for The Denver Post anymore.
I know, I know, poor me. Because being a restaurant critic is a dream job, isn’t it? Eating out on the company dime night after night, going to fancy restaurants all the time, having all of this power to make or break eateries with the mere flick of the send button on my computer.
Except, of course, those who are closest to me know it has never been that at all.
The secret life of the restaurant critic is that you’re always fat. You’re always sitting around for hours getting bad service, and the mediocre meals outnumber the truly stunning ones about 9 to 1.
Every week you have to come up with some new way of saying “delicious” without using one of the 22 preferred options in the thesaurus (trust me, that’s how many there are, although I never was able to pull off “saporous” with style).
And when you don’t like a restaurant that others do, people hate you, with a capital H. “Queen of Mean,” that’s what Dining Out magazine’s headline said when I moved over from Westword to The Post in 2002.
“That’s when you know you’re doing your job,” my wise new editor, Ed Smith, said. “If they like you, you’re not telling the truth.”
On the other hand, being a restaurant critic is indeed the best job in the world. As William Grimes, former critic for The New York Times, once pointed out in an interview (and I’m paraphrasing here), the great thing about eating for a living is that even when you get sick of it, the next day you’re hungry again.
But now it’s time for me to move on, and I’ll try to fill the high heels of recently retired travel editor Mim Swartz.
Maybe now I’ll finally lose some weight.
But there are many things I’ll miss about food writing, which I started in a health column and then as a restaurant critic under the pseudonym “Jacques Gourmand” in Naples, Fla., for the Naples Daily News in 1991.
It became especially rewarding in Denver, though. When I started at Westword in 1993, the dining scene was sputtering along, and people were actually looking forward to one day getting a Cheesecake Factory.
Now we have a kaleidoscope variety of top-caliber, locally owned restaurants. We’re competing with the big boys nationally on the most serious level ever, and one of the greatest joys has been watching the reactions of other journalists change over the years at national conferences.
It went from, “Oh, how awful, you write about food in Denver,” to “Wow, Denver’s really hot now, isn’t it?”
There have been a few hilarious moments over the years. The funniest was the time I watched a server rest one of those jumbo trays with six plates of food right on top of my date’s head.
The server had been stopped by a diner with a question at the next table, and while he answered, his arms got tired. My date said, “Is there a tray on my head?” and between laughing so hard tears rolled down my face, I replied, “Whatever you do, don’t move.”
Another was the time a fellow restaurant critic and I went to lunch together (yeah, we’re supposed to hate each other, but it doesn’t always work out that way) and we managed to preserve our anonymity throughout – although we wondered if we really had when the server brought dessert, a giant wedge of white cake that was covered with rings of green mold. An assassination attempt, perhaps?
Being anonymous is a crucial part of the job, and while I did get caught here and there, for the most part there are a going to some surprised people in a few weeks when they see my photo as a columnist in the Travel section (particularly for the restaurateurs who over the phone kept insisting I was the tall, leggy brunette who had just eaten at their restaurant).
But the best example of a restaurateur pretending to know me was the time I reviewed a well-known Italian place and then ate there the night after it was printed, a rare case because usually I had to move on to the next review.
Some relatives were in town, though, and were dying to try it. We were enjoying our meal when the owner stopped by a table of six next to us who asked him about the review.
“Oh, yes, we knew when Kyle Wagner was here,” the owner said. “She’s a good friend of mine, comes in all the time.”
It was hard to keep from spitting my lasagne across the room, but I kept my cool and called him the next day to ask about it. “You have to play the game, Ms. Wagner,” he explained. “I was just playing the game. Did you have a good meal?”
The toughest thing about not being a restaurant critic anymore, aside from the obvious loss of free meals, will be losing the rapport with thousands of readers who over more than a decade talked me into trying amazing hole-in-the-wall eateries I never would have found otherwise, who shared their best-kept secrets, who called or wrote to say that they’d had the best meals of their lives in restaurants I recommended, or that they appreciated something I wrote. Thank you.
And thank you, also, to the folks who took me to task for using the wrong verb, the wrong ingredient, the wrong address. I am a better writer for it.
If I could ask for a legacy as restaurant critic, it would be that I have persuaded everyone to support the locals as much as possible, to tip big when service is good and complain to management when it isn’t, and to demand good food. Life’s too short for anything else.
And I hope that those of you who have been eating with me over all these years will now come travel with me too.
Travel editor Kyle Wagner can be reached at 303-820-1599 or travel@denverpost.com.
