San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
For this critic, this is goodbye
A reflection on three decades of restaurant reviews
Michael Mina is an appropriate review to cap my 32-year career writing about food at The Chronicle.
One of my early major restaurant reviews was the opening of Aqua in 1991, when George Morrone was chef and Michael Mina was chef de cuisine. The restaurant earned four stars, one of my first such ratings.
Mina eventually went on to open his own place in the St. Francis Hotel, launching his nationwide empire of 44 restaurants and counting. He found his style and grew into the culinary leader he is today. In 2010, he moved his eponymous restaurant to the former Aqua space. Now at his re-envisioned restaurant, he is building a new, unique style. It represents the type of drive, passion and rejuvenation that defines the Bay Area food scene.
Revisiting the restaurant feels like I’ve come full circle.
Aqua was the harbinger of the visualization of high-end restaurants. No other four-star restaurant at that time had as many seats, or such a prominent bar that was part of the restaurant and a lively, if excessive, buzz.
By today’s standards the restaurant feels formal, but when compared to the competition of the day, places like Ernie’s and Fleur de Lys, it was the equivalent of exchanging a tuxedo for a sports coat and no tie.
What really crystallized the importance of the Bay Area’s role in nurturing talent is that even given his great success, Mina is taking a chance and doing what other great chefs have done to embrace their heritage. With the Middle Eastern focus, the current restaurant feels very personal.
He’s joining a trend that is revolutionizing the fine dining scene with the likes of Corey Lee concentrating on Asian fare at Benu and Mourad Lahlou celebrating his Moroccan heritage at Mourad.
I remember talking to chefs after 9/11 to gauge the impact of the attack on local restaurants. Because of the mood at the time Mina didn’t want me to mention he was Egyptian.
He had a clear reason, and at the time many talented chefs sublimated their personalities to concentrate on the much safer French, Italian and California cuisines.
In the 1980s and 1990s, high-end restaurants set dining trends, but that’s changed. Just as grunge infiltrated fashion in the 1990s, the smaller neighborhood restaurants that have no ambition of being a fine dining destination have influenced the top end. This allows chefs to take classic simple dishes and give them a sophisticated turn as Mina is doing.
The Bay Area has fostered this type of creativity, and has offered a condu-
cive environment for women chefs and restaurateurs, including Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Joyce Goldstein of the now-closed Square One, Nancy Oakes of Boulevard and Prospect, and Suzette Gresham of Acquerello.
Since it was announced in July that I was leaving The Chronicle, many people have contacted me (thank you for all the kind words). Some asked me to reflect on how the dining scene has evolved in 30 years.
The biggest changes have been caused by factors native to the Bay Area, specifically the internet. That relates to the world today with reader review sites such as Yelp and carshare services including Uber and Lyft.
Readers don’t have to rely on people like me for basic restaurant details, although I think as the relentless flood of information assaults us, there’s a rising need for trusted gatekeepers.
As for Uber, it has definitely helped the restaurant’s bottom line. Instead of having to have a designated driver, everyone can take an Uber or Lyft and drink as much as they want. That’s been particularly important to cities like Los Angeles.
Back in the late 1980s, everyone was talking about Los Angeles, and it felt as if San Francisco was brushed off as a has-been. In the intervening years the love of Los Angeles dining waned, and San Francisco waxed. So it seems like another full-circle moment to read the accounts in the past few months about how the excitement has now, again, moved south.
In reality the two shouldn’t be placed in competition; the scenes are different, yet compatible.
I could write a book on the massive changes I’ve seen, many of which I covered on my 30th anniversary. Like the economy there’s been a series of peaks and valleys, as growth never seems to move in a steady line.
San Francisco continues to be a culinary beacon and an epicenter of food trends. Whether it’s open kitchens, communal tables, small plates, the blending of bars and restaurants, organic sourcing, shorter menus and living wages, the city has continued to set the agenda.
The questions of where we’ve been always leads to the follow-up question: Where we are heading?
We are at a critical juncture as rents continue to escalate, and food and labor costs continue to rise, making it much harder to open a restaurant. If I had to guess, I’d say that we’re in for an adjustment in the next year or so. However, even in the most dramatic downturns of the late 1990s and the 2000s, restaurants continued to thrive.
Still, despite the massive changes in our culture, people still love to dine out, and now more than ever restaurants are gathering places that help to bind us together.
No matter what goes down, I have great confidence in the talent in the Bay Area.
I’m grateful and proud of the small part I may have played in pushing the dining scene forward. It’s been a privilege and a responsibility I’ve never taken for granted.
Early on it became apparent that being a critic is a no-win situation and that if I did the job honestly, I wasn’t going to win popularity contests. Yet my overriding goal was to be fair.
I’m searching for something profound to say. After three decades, we’ve grown to know each other pretty well. I’m happy to be moving on, but I’m sad I won’t be at the newspaper to chronicle the dining scene.
It’s a job I never got tired of. Despite dining out every night for more than 30 years, I still love it. So I’d rather just shut up and go out to dinner.