After majoring in French, translating and falling into food and journalism in France, earning a Master's degree in journalism from Columbia, and reviewing food in New Orleans, Craig LaBan is the Philadelphia Inquirer's food critic. And has been for 12 years.
Have you ever worked in a restaurant?
Well, I worked in restaurants in France… as a kid as a busboy in Detroit where I grew up, and while I'm familiar (with it), I have very little experience actually working a restaurant line.
Do you think having experience is important for being a restaurant critic?
All reporters cover all kinds of people and places that are foreign to them, and that doesn’t mean they can’t do a good job in accurately describing them. Most sports writers never played NFL football or NBA basketball, and they seem to do just fine. But having as much inside knowledge as you can is always a good thing.
Speaking of reviews, when you go to a restaurant to review, what are the main criteria you consider?
I look at every restaurant as a story to tell. I hope to convey, in a review, the experience and the life of that restaurant. In terms of criticism, everything is fair game, from the food to the service to the ambiance. Principally, I am a food-focused critic. If the food’s not there, they’re not going to do well on a review. So, a lot of places that are quite modest in décor and style can do pretty well if they cook with soul and heart and good ingredients, whereas a lot of fancy places that are just going through the motions and charging a lot of money don’t do as well as they expect.
How do you choose where to review?
Well… 80 or 90% of the restaurants are new, and that’s a function of Philadelphia’s vibrant, fertile restaurant scene… they’re the ones we need to hear about, to see whether they’re worth going to or not. I do believe it’s good to mix in oldies from time to time… they give your readers sort of a benchmark for relating to others.
I’ve noticed that sometimes you’ll go back and re-review a place.
Sometimes you get the feeling that restaurants underperform, and so the last issue of the year, The Year In Bells, I take the opportunity to go back and visit restaurants that either didn’t do well or did too well. It goes both ways, I’ve promoted and demoted restaurants at the end of the year.
Some people, restaurant owners and diners alike can get pretty heated over your reviews.
The important thing that people need to understand is that these are accurate accounts of my experiences. I’m being honest about it. There’s no agenda. I don’t have personal relationships with the people I cover. Nobody gets a pass for having past successes. Nobody digs themselves a hole for bad past experiences who’s now doing something right. People are welcome to disagree, but what rubs me the wrong way is when people insinuates that “somebody paid you off,” or “you have a relationship with the owners.”
And I know you to go great lengths to remain anonymous.
You do your best. Anonymity is impossible.
How did you feel back when Philly Mag “outed you” a few years ago?
It felt sleazy and gratuitous. They didn’t need to do that. It seemed like they were dressing up a boring article about a lawsuit to get people to pick it up by putting my picture in the magazine. From an organization that has its own restaurant critic, it struck me as a little bit of cheap competition. I didn’t think it necessarily served the article.
But in terms of the actual picture, did it bother me? People have had that picture in restaurants for over a decade. We don’t work in a bubble or a vacuum... it’s not honest to your readers to say that you travel around invisibly all the time, like you’re not there, because people make it your business to know who you are.
Have you ever felt that someone realized who you are and treated you differently?
Oh, sure. And you’re so aware of it. You try to compensate for that only in focusing on things that can’t be manipulated – the food, the quality of the ingredients and the cooking. You can’t take an average restaurant and turn it into a trend-setting, fantastic place the second a critic walks in the door – it’s impossible. I eat out 300 or 500 times a year - I know these places and what they do too well or that to be a major factor.
Speaking of going out to eat so much, when you are reviewing a place, are you focusing just one that one, or juggling a few?
I’m probably working on four or five restaurants at any given time. Every review is a product of two or three visits, all sort of staggered. And I do more than just the Sunday review, smaller visits for other things as well, so you’ve got to multitask in this job, that’s for sure.
When you arrived in Philly 12 years ago, how different was our dining scene?
I sort of feel like the ingredients that we see today were here, however Starr was just getting started, Vetri hadn’t opened up his restaurant, Jose Garces was in New York somewhere… the whole BYOB thing was still in its funky, restaurant-rennaisance.
Do you see the BYOB is still going strong or waning?
Oh, absolutely still going. I think it has come into different phases – a lot of the people who started it off have grown out of it or moved onto other things. It’s still a vibrant expression of the neighborhood restaurant and a great entry point for young chefs, and I think there are some that are doing it at a really high level. It’s maybe not the thing that everybodys doing anymore, but every emerging neighborhood needs its BYO and its part of the reason that the landscape has been such a productive restaurant machine. They’re easy and inexpensive to open, so if you think about all those things, it has totally shaped us. When I came here, the city was still caught up in the starch, white linens of fine dining. Restaurant Row has almost entirely collapsed since then.
Do you think we need more fine dining spots?
I think there’s a place for it. I would be really sad if they totally drifted away, but I also think that everything is a natural progression. I think it’s a good thing that we’re finding casual ways to eat great food and have good dining experiences on an everyday basis rather than just as special occasions, but I do think there’s a place where the most talented among the chefs can take a moment to really focus on doing something as special as they possibly can, and create something that is inventive and rare, and I think people will go for that. It may not come in the same package as Le Bec Fin with its crystal and silver bells and tuxedos and all of that, but you want there to always be a place for the most ambitious people who are cooking for almost arts sake, to see what new boundaries they can discover.
Are any places popping into your mind, that aren’t quite like the fine dining we once knew, but are still fine dining in another form?
To be honest, I think Vetri is kind of an example of that, but a natural one. He’s cooking at the highest level, with all measures of fine dining experience, but there’s a casualness to it. You can see people wearing jeans, but of course they’ll all be paying $150 at the end of the night. But I’m waiting for Jose Garces to take a stab at something like that. He’s bringing some of the best food to these restaurants like Amada and Tinto where you’re getting exquisite cooking, complicated, cutting-edge food, but there’s still this sort of bustling, casual, sometimes uncomfortable aspect to the restaurant that wouldn’t have been the setting for that kind of food, you know, 10 years ago.
What do you mean by uncomfortable?
Just the incredible noise. And in the case of Tinto when I first reviewed it, which I think is his best food, you’re sitting on a tall stool, jammed next to somebody else… it was a little uncomfortable, physically. And I’m not saying it has to be the Four Seasons where there’s a sort of hushed tone, but there’s a happy medium in there somewhere, and someone’s going to land it.
Have you noticed a general trend in the noise volume of restaurants?
It’s always going up, and when I first started, we thought people would try to get their decibels down. And sounds in restaurants is a natural function of hard surfaces, and soundproofing is expensive.
Do you think the loud noise may be somewhat due with the greater number of young people dining?
Either way, I think it’s a great thing; it’s fantastic. People are more interested in food now than ever, and you’re finding great food in all kinds of venues where you didn’t before… bars with the gastropub movement, now pizzerias, saloons for burgers, cafes… I think it’s fantastic. But you don’t want pure culinary ambition to be completely drowned out by the need to keep things casual all the time.
The big names we’ve mentioned – Starr, Garces, Vetri, Stern – how important are they to Philly’s restaurant scene?
Well they’ve been huge – enormous. The trio of Starr, Garces and Vetri have brought a high level of professionalism to the scene. They’re the culinary training grounds for so many of the next generations’s chefs. Starr less so in terms of pure culinary experience, but a ton of people have came out of Starr’s organization. But if you look at the people who are running some of the best restaurants around town, a lot of them have been produced by Garces and Vetri. So we’re lucky to have those big names.
Can you imagine what it would be like without them?
(laughs) No. I think we’re a big enough city and someone would have stepped in to do that… it’s hard to imagine what it would have been like, but people in Philadelphia love great food, and we’re fortunate to have such talented people doing it.
Do you feel that you’ve played a part in the development of the scene here?
No… I mean, I let people know what’s going on, and hopefully set a certain standard for people reading my column as to what to expect, but I don’t teach people how to cook or run a restaurant through my column. I’m a reporter, I’m an observer, and I hope that I keep people connected with what’s going on. And I hope I give people good advice on where not to go. For the most part, though, we’re providing information on what the restaurants are producing.
Philly has come so far in it’s food scene… do you think we’ll ever be a New York or San Francisco or New Orleans?
I sure hope we’re destined to be just Philly. People always want to say, “we’re just as good as such-and-such,” but you can’t compete with New York and it’s size and its place as an international center. There’s no point in even trying to compete in that way, although there are things we do better than them because we’re Philly; we’re smaller, more personal, more accessible. And we benefit from being so close to those centers because we’re a great destination for sophisticated talent that want the breathing room and affordability to start their own thing. I’ve always thought of Philadelphia as one of the best small restaurant cities in the country because you can afford to do that here.
Everything revolves around food and wine in California, and we can’t compete with that just in terms of the mindset of people. New Orleans, which I know very well, has this strong, indigenous cuisine and tradition that they draw on constantly with an amazing creativity and energy, and I think that Philadelphia is finding that. That was always one of the things I hoped for early on, that people would connect more to what our regional traditions are, and kind of update those things. And we see a few gestures in that direction, but there’s a lot of room to explore, which is exciting.
Do you think we could ever break away from this cheesesteak/pretzel symbol?
We’ll never get away from that. I swear, everytime some tv crew or radio station or website calls me because they’re visiting Philadelphia, its always about cheesesteaks, or canolis, or pretzels.
So we wouldn’t ever want to?
It’s part of who we are and there’s no way around it. They’re genuine, they’re part of us, and it’s not something to be ashamed of. But there’s so much more to us, and it’s hard for people from afar to identify with anything else. But we’re lucky to have those things, trust me.
Aside from Philly, what is your favorite food city in the world.
Well, I love San Francisco, I do. I think there’s a high quotient of good food per capita out there. New York is obviously a food paradise, but there’s more bad food per capita, percentage-wise than any other city, too. And I’ve lived in Paris too… Paris is pretty awesome.
In Philadelphia, is there a trend right now that you can’t stand?
I like the things that are going on in Philadelphia. I love the casual things that are happening. The thing I can’t stand is to watch us sort of give up on the old-school places that were once the measures of greatness. And that’s just time changing.
What kind of place are you referring to?
This isn’t to start rumors, but every few months I’ll hear “the Four Seasons is going to close its restaurant,” or “Le Bec Fin is on its last legs,” and they have to struggle to remain relevant in this world. I just wish that we could find a way to evolve them naturally, and keep them here.
And I also wish we had a better wine culture in this city, but that’s just part of the LCB’s situation we’re settled with. But the things that are going on in the city - the beer and gastropub movement – those are just so exciting, and I think our wine culture is very much stifled by the state store system, and that has a lot of room for improvement.
Ok. Food writing is highly specialized – you’re even teaching an online course on it here at Drexel – what advice would you give an aspiring food writer?
Well, what I tell them is that they need to get out there and write. There’s no replacement for writing. Reading about food, watching food online or on TV is one thing, but actually getting out and trying to write about food as a good journalist would – meaning you have your facts right, you do your reporting and put energy into the writing – and you get it published. There’s no replacement for being published. And starting a blog is a good way to get started, but there’s no replacement for being paid for an article, and it forces you to apply standards to what you’re doing. It’s more than the 2 a.m. bleary-eyed post in your pajamas. It’s not the same thing.
When you’re not dining out, do you cook at home?
I cook as much as possible at home, I love to cook. I had a little training when I was younger, and I’ve spent the last 15 years talking to chefs everyday and writing about food, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount as a journalist.
Would you say, then, that you’re the chef of the house?
Yeah. My wife cooks too, but I enjoy cooking more than she does. It’s relaxing for me, I really enjoy it.
Last question. You know so much about what it takes to make a restaurant last and succeed, would you ever consider opening one yourself?
Absolutely not. It’s a whole different skill set from what I’ve learned in my career. I’ve learned to be a newspaper reporter and writer, and I think I know what I like, but running a restaurant takes skills that I haven’t worked on in my life.
And can you imagine the reviews?
Emily Callaghan is managing editor of Table Matters and a graduate of Drexel University. Her work has appeared in Philadelpia Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer and TheSmartSet.com.
Article photo from philly.com, Eat Drink Philly" photograph from suvodeb, via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Philly" photograph from camardella, via Flickr (Creative Commons).
