Where is the line?

Reading the Sunday Taste section of todays Sunday Tasmanian, under the column entitled "The latest", my attention was drawn to the final item concerning a not-so-good review of the new restaurant, The Lower House, which the Merc published a few weeks ago.

Todays blurb advised us that one of the owners of the restaurant had been in touch with the Merc and that they were making all the appropriate amendments and adjustments to their establishment in order to presumably address all the inconsistencies as pointed out by the Merc in their review.

That got me to thinking about restaurant reviews overall, and the implications thereof. It's a pretty dicey job to do really, when you think about it. Where do you draw the line? What cost friendship, and the bias that possibly automatically follows, especially in a town as small as Hobart? Do you tell the REAL truth about the extremely mediocre meal you just paid a reasonably large sum of hard-earned money for, and were really pissed off and offended about having to eat?

You also need to remember that your printed opinion does carry a fair amount of weight, with many people of the belief that if you read about something in the newspaper, then it automatically must be gospel truth. So, the power of knowing you can make or break a small business is a responsibility in itself.

So there you have a tug-of-war about the honesty of your opinion of your experience versus these other issues/responsibilities.

I honestly don't think I could front up to that. It's great when all of us can blog away happily here online, expressing our opinions willy nilly, and honestly, about anything we want to - under our chosen anonymity. It's an open playing field here, with the right of reply equally open to the business owner should he/she choose to respond.

If I thought for one moment that by saying what I honestly thought about any particular restaurant would cause serious damage or harm, I would cease blogging immediately.

I read Graham Phillips reviews weekly. I don't know who is in his circle of friends, but there seems to me to be a reasonably consistent pattern of restaurants and caterers who are in the "good team", and the rest take pot luck with Grahams reviews. The old faves like Stuart Prosser, Waji, Paul Foreman etc usually get great press. I suppose if you're new to Hobart, that's handy, so you know who are currently regarded as great places to eat here, but for those of us who've been reading Grahams reviews since he started doing them, it's all very "ho hum" now.

I mentioned in a comment on (lately lamented) GG's blog a while back about the power of the previous Merc food critic, Dave Macquarie. Restaurant owners and staff really did quiver in their shoes when he turned up to eat at a restaurant. He was way more ferocious than GP. He let it rip with his opinion! At the time I thought it despicable, but now in hindsight, I have to begrudgingly admire his honesty. How else can we raise the standard of food and food service here?

GG wrote a few weeks ago about a letter of complaint he had received at his restaurant, after which general discussion followed about how we, the consumer, should express our opinions about a restaurant.

I don't know that any particular conclusion was reached but realistically, usually, any complaint doesn't go any further than the person who received that complaint. If you're lucky, it may be conveyed to the owner of the establishment, who might genuinely care, and do something about it. If that didn't work, and you felt quite strongly about it, the only other option is public airing of your grievance, ie writing to GP or the Letters to the Editor in the Merc. Or blogging!

Anyway, I'd like to see the Merc be slightly more adventurous with their Wed hospitality section. It's currently boring as, and has been operating in the same format for way too long with those paid advertorial restaurant stories about the Hong Kong Restaurant, the Castle restaurant (or whatever name it's going under today - don't bother remembering it, cos a new person will take over tomorrow & change the name again anyway in their own "unique" attempt to make a go of it) and Cooleys. I don't know anyone who's been to the Castle in any of its guises, so the advertorials can't be making too much impact.