What Reviewing Restaurants Taught Me About Cooking

Most of us learn to cook by first watching other people do it. Perhaps you’re a son whose mom made blue-ribbon pies, or a daughter with a father who always cooked Saturday morning breakfast. Or anyone, anywhere, who once asked someone in their kitchen, “So, how much salt did you just add?”

I learned much about cooking from my parents, especially my mother, and from cooking with friends. But I also learned from watching the cooking—to be more precise, the finished results of the cooking—of hundreds of restaurant chefs.

I reviewed restaurants hereabouts for 17 years, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, a bit into the aughts, after eating and assaying thousands of restaurant meals.

Here’s (some of) what I learned about cooking, lessons I’ve taken to hearth when cooking, not only for myself, but also and very importantly when cooking for others, especially guests in my home.

I remember writing recurrent criticisms in my reviews, about how the butter on the table tasted “of the refrigerator” or how mealy or stale the bread was. These are little things (that, like little things, add up) that a good cook should monitor. For example, in the frig, keep the butter in its own shed, away from the foods from which it can pick up odors and off flavors. (This caveat applies to many foods that might absorb the malodorous: a slab of polenta set to cool, for example, or certainly many a baked good.)

From all these years reviewing restaurants, I learned many a solid cooking technique, for example, how hand-patted burger meat way outshines, especially texturally, pre-formed pucks. How mushrooms are sponges, really, and so to mind my hand when adding moisture—stock, juice, wine—when cooking or serving them.

I learned not to soak chopped nuts in a salad dressing for more than a few minutes lest they lose their crunch. Or to beware how easily it is to eradicate the crisp I’d achieved on roasted vegetables or the edge of a steak or the bottom of a risotto cake by either letting it steam if somehow contained or by dousing it with an embarrassment of sauce(s).

Some things really annoyed me, mostly dishonesties, it turns out. I used to rank or grade a restaurant on the correspondence between what it said it was and what it delivered on the plate. A really fine pho joint got the same sorts of positives as a posh fine dining establishment if both were honest in their own ways.

One thing totally bugged me: canned corned beef, which to my mind looks and smells just like anything wet for the pooch from Purina. (It may taste like it too, but I cannot and will not go there.) So, whenever I asked a server if the restaurant made “its own corned beef hash” and they said it did, but it did not, I got peeved. Cooking from a can is re-cooking someone else’s cooking. Don’t do it; cook it yourself.

I suppose what I learned most about cooking from all that restaurant reviewing is also another form of honesty, that is, to buy the best quality ingredients that you can afford, prepare them simply or straightforwardly, with fine focus, all the while keeping the plate balanced (among textures, tastes, savors, aromas, indeed all the senses).

That sounds like a lot, and actually it is, which means that it also allows for play, as well as pretention, its downfall. Dining out—and, similarly, entertaining at table—is beset by the urge to splurge, to impress or wow.

It’s important to check that, just like we used to with our coat or jacket at the door.

Here’s a recipe for homemade corned beef hash.