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I clicked through and read the article and the perspective therein was so foreign I feel like I'm being trolled. I don't even know where to begin.
Yes restaurant critics review the entire experience of going to a restaurant. They do not obsessively focus on establishing which one has the better tasting food. Am I the crazy one? Is the taste of the food the only thing normal people care about at a restaurant? I am pretty confident people who are into, like, fine dining care a lot about atmosphere and presentation and ambiance and so on. Going to a restaurant can be an Experience!
The analogy with taking medicine feels so insane. The vast majority of people taking medicine are not doing so for pleasure, they are doing so for purely functional reasons. That is not, to my mind, how people engage with entertainment or art. People can be, and often are, induced into engaging in pleasurable activities by a good story about a thing or a sense of novelty. I cannot tell you how many books I've been induced to read because they had a cool design on the cover rather than by my expectation they would be good (often wrong!)
And, like, the context outside an artistic work can obviously inform one's enjoyment of that work. Has Scott really never had the experience of enjoying something more due to knowledge not contained in the work itself? Has he ever had an in-joke?
It's just about all I care about, assuming the low bars of "won't get food poisoning" and "don't have to wait 2 hours for a meal" are cleared. When reading Yelp or Google reviews for restaurants I find it incredibly frustrating to wade through paragraphs of descriptions of the service, atmosphere, or other things I couldn't give less of a shit about, and prefer those written by Asian immigrants, who typically get right to the point and focus exclusively on the quality of the food. Of course, I'm far from normal, and the fact that I have this problem is evidence that your typical restaurant-goer does in fact care more about ambiance than me.
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Thing is, the pleasure someone gets from a dining experience is also a functional reason, one that could theoretically be isolated and measured, like the effectiveness of medicine. The problem with something like the atmosphere or vibe of a restaurant is that you really can't double or even single blind yourself against that, much like how a movie critic can't watch a film without knowing what it is. So, like film reviews, we'd have to just kinda accept the critic's word for the quality of the atmosphere of the restaurant being reflective of the actual quality, rather than the biases of the critic that could have been shaped by the restaurant bootstrapping its reputation via good marketing or whatnot.
But a restaurant critic certainly could do a double blinded taste test to judge how good the food is, and include it as a component of his review. Which would actually provide meaningful information to a reader who might not share that critic's biases than the critic's report about the taste based on his experience of eating at the restaurant.
Could they though? I am imagining a blindfolded critic being spooned with two mouthfuls, not knowing what they are going to be. With classic dishes I suppose it might work. They could say 'This tastes like lasagna. I preferred forkful A over forkful B as it tasted cheesier'. With unique dishes I don't even know what the test is supposed to look like as there will not be an obvious control dish to serve alongside it.
It certainly would be a fun scientific project to come up with ways to do this in a way that allows us to draw actually meaningful conclusions! With unique dishes, the control could just be some dish put together by an amateur based on the same ingredients (or at least the inferred ingredients). Or perhaps an amateur putting together a dish with the goal of making it taste and feel similarly to the actual dish. We'd have to actually run a study on the studies, running these studies multiple times in multiple ways, to determine which control is actually more effective as a control for the purposes of judging the unique dish.
I would consider watching an episode or two of a Youtube of this, or Hell's Kitchen tier reality show. But ultimately it would come across as trashy, and get stale fast. I would never use it to actually choose a restaurant to eat at.
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That part is describing his young self's thoughts and a naive somewhat autistic nerd would indeed find that a much more understandable and good world, where things worked that way. A human has certain sense inputs, like vision, which is like pixels in some arrangement, and hearing, and taste, and these combine in the brain and they give pleasure or sometimes pain if it's like a sharp object poking at your skin. You want the inputs that create the pleasure type of sensation, and the goal of humanity is to bring about such sensations. So we have to experimentally ascertain which kinds of inputs give which kinds of sensations and then do more of the good type. For this, we have to isolate the effect of the thing itself, so we don't have noise from other aspects, so we can purely classify and score each individual type of input and then we know what is good and what is bad. It's an impulse to catalog things, like understanding all the herbs and mushrooms and fruits of the forest to know which one is good and which ones is bad. Experiences and tastes and visual qualities are similarly somehow out there, for us to pluck and test, and to use to bring about more pleasure.
If your brain doesn't tick this way, this may sound totally alien, but the more extreme thing-oriented engineer type nerd would find this more comfortable and clean for answering the question "what do people want? what makes them tick?", than the mess that humanity actually works like, the mess and mystery and contradictions that are appreciated and enjoyed by people-oriented people. But obviously the above is exaggerated for effect, I'm not saying that such people are incapable of understanding social realities, and indeed Scott also has grown out that view. Grappling with these things has brought about the concept of "type 2 fun" in this community, but it's still grappling with these ideas of "do you truly like X, or do you just pretend for status reasons", when these are much more inseparably blended in the socially attuned, normal person's mind. Because the type of "input" that humans really crave is the one that validates their status/identity/value within the community/society, a combination of being liked/loved/respected/feared or even just stably attached to such people.
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Not the only thing. But it is 90% of what people care about.
People are willing (though less willing than they used to be) to pay a premium for mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a full-service setting compared to mediocre chain-restaurant food served in a fast-casual setting. At the high end there are a number of elite power-dining restaurants where the food, while good, is not worth the money and the name on the door is a status symbol. I think this is inconsistent with taste being as much as 90% of what normal people care about.
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I suspect you're 90% wrong. If it were this taste-centered, you'd see all the tables at fancy restaurants filled with people on their own and you'd see very fast service geared to deliver as many delicious tastes as quickly as possible (i.e. you'd get McDonald's). The vast majority of people going to a good restaurant go for a social experience shared with the people at their table, the others in their restaurant, the city they're in, the culinary tradition they're participating in etc. The taste is really important but you can't even decompose it as an individual factor as delicious food in a shitty, antisocial environment doesn't bring that much pleasure, and shitty food in a beautiful environment ruins everything.
If I were a prisoner in solitary confinement and you served me a Michelin star meal, I think I'd disagree.
This is true and probably could make a successful novelty restaurant concept as well. Context really is all.
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I think the rise of takeout and online orders from regular restaurants via Wolt and Foodora indicates that many people are fine with just the food part. As people are getting increasingly atomized, at least the food part stays constant and you don't have to sit together with a bunch of people who happened not to cancel last minute this time, but are staring at their phones anyway. Instead, you can eat the food at home and not pretend, and watch something more engaging than the boring stories your acquaintances would relay.
Of course this is exaggerated, but I think the reason that many see the food as the main thing of a restaurant visit is related to the erosion of communities. And for sure, for many people it's really just about practicality. American dining is anyway about rushing the customer out the door once the food is off the plate. So it's not hard to see that they would understand the purpose being the food.
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