On reviews

Customer reviews are a funny thing. I’m thinking in particular of theater and restaurant reviews. They appear to reflect less on the show or restaurant than on the reviewer and his or her biases. With theater, that goes for professional reviewers as well—they’ll asses a show based on what they think it should be—what it would have been had they written it—rather than on its own merits.

Theater reviews yield a lot of false positives, even among professional reviewers. I’ve never seen a phenomenal play get a bad review, but I’ve seen many bad or mediocre plays get great reviews. Then again, the universe of phenomenal play is a small one; I see very few. Many plays are good, some are mediocre, and a handful are inexcusably bad. So, phenomenal plays generally get rave reviews, but so do plays that I find merely good or mediocre. I still don’t understand why Peter Marks and Hilton Als so emphatically sent me to see “Oklahoma!” It was good enough, but hardly outstanding. I’m more careful in my reviews; I don’t want that kind of blood on my hands. If I’m going to send my friends out to see a show at an expense and opportunity cost, it better be worth every minute and every penny. When I review a play, I have one standard for “phenomenal”: I don’t have to think about whether I liked it or not. It’s not a choice; it’s a no-brainer. Recall my review of “Venus in Fur.” If I have to think about whether a play is good, it usually comes down to “good, but.” But what can bring a play down from “phenomenal” to “very good” is when it drags. It’s still excellent; there’s just too much of it. Enough to make me wonder whether I’d rather be elsewhere, even for those extra 10-20 minutes. See “Little Murders.”

I saw a quite awful production last weekend that’s gotten great—and interesting—reviews. It’s the specifics that fascinate me—people wrote that they loved the story even if they didn’t care for the acting. A friend of mine echoed this perspective—she agreed that the main character was egregiously miscast, but felt that the story was strong enough to carry the play. To me, the poor production betrayed the story. I wanted the actors to help me interpret the reality of the play, but they didn’t give me enough to work with. I could only shrug.

I’ve only recently taken to reading restaurant reviews. Left to my own advices, I eat at home, but as a business traveler or a date, I find myself in restaurants more and more, so I’ve been turning to Yelp more and more. Yelp reviews as a body are sociologically interesting—there’s so much variation among reviewers of the same place, largely because most of them don’t take context into account. They’ll slam a hole-in-the-wall for being a hole-in-the-wall. They’ll slam an Indian place because they don’t like Indian food, or because it’s not what they were in the mood for that day. When I review restaurants, I take my biases into consideration (I don’t have a problem with holes-in-the-wall, so context isn’t really an issue). I love to give restaurants credit for having a meaningful vegetarian/vegan selection, and especially for clearly marking vegan dishes, but I know that kind of thing is less important to omnivores (particularly those without food allergies). Moreover, I love it when waitstaff have answers when you ask what’s in the food, and f*ing hate it when they cop an attitude instead, but I also factor in the environment: I didn’t mind when, in a very authentic Mexican place in rural Arizona, where I was on business, the restaurant staff had to ask a series of people and eventually duck into the kitchen to let us know which item on the menu contained neither meat nor lard. They were very nice about it, too. Now, I would expect staff at a restaurant—especially a nice restaurant—in DC to answer that question in fewer steps, and also to be nice about it. That’s context. Here’s more context: if I found myself at a steakhouse—and I have, mostly dining with colleagues when traveling for work—I wouldn’t criticize the place for not having extensive vegetarian or vegan options.

More about biases: Some reviewers of a café that we’ll be checking out on Saturday love that the café is in an underserved neighborhood; others see it as an incursion, as a symbol of gentrification.

What do you think? Have reviews helped you, confounded you?