Back when newspapers and magazines were more relevant, your restaurant lived and died based on its reviews. A review in the New York Times can still make or break your restaurant, and you always want to get a good review no matter what the publication, but with message boards, blogs, email and basically the whole entire internets, reviews in mainstream publications are no longer one-way, top-down proclamations and are instead parts of a two-way conversation. Don’t worry, this isn’t some misguided attempt to criticize restaurant reviewers (I like most of the food writers I’ve met), but I thought people who read this blog might be interested in how a review winds up on their plate.

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We just got our first mainstream print review in the New Yorker’s “Tables for Two” section in the front of the magazine. My husband got written up in the New Yorker a few years ago in which they wrote, “Grady Hendrix…doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would enjoy watching a man bite through his arm while masturbating inside a burlap sack, but he is.” After having my husband called out as a demented pervert (which he is, but still…) in the New Yorker I knew the stakes were high and I prepared myself accordingly, instantly purging Dirt Candy of all burlap sacks and banning my employees from any masturbating – either inside a sack or otherwise – while on the premises.

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Reviewers will not find ANY burlap sacks at Dirt Candy.

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I knew I was getting a “Tables for Two” piece weeks ago when I noticed a customer taking notes during their meal. They ate about half the menu, then came back another night and ate everything else. If you don’t think I notice what people do during dinner, you’re wrong and it took about five seconds with Google to learn that this was Kate Julian who’d written some “Table for Two” pieces for the New Yorker. A week or so later I got a phone call from her on Sunday wanting to ask questions about the restaurant with a deadline for the following week. We chatted on the phone, then the following Saturday a nice photographer showed up, and two weeks later the piece appeared.

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I don’t want to get into an argument with a reviewer, especially in public where there are witnesses (I prefer the “ninja ambush in a dark alley” approach) but I did want to say something about our wine list. Julian writes, “The wine selections are strange…with stranger descriptions…” to which I fist pump and say: Hallelujah!!! Rachel Ponce, our sommelier/wine consultant, and myself have worked long and hard to make sure that the wine list at Dirt Candy is completely strange and it’s very thrilling to have that hard work validated in the New Yorker. Rather than present NYC with yet another line-up of the usual suspects, the same old Chardonnays, Syrahs, Pinot Grigiots and maybe a Gewurztraminer thrown in to really shake things up, we wanted to offer our customers a wine list that they couldn’t find anywhere else, full of Orzadas and Pinotages, Goldmuskatellers and Rotgipflers, Viogniers from South Africa and Greco di Tufos. What’s the point of going out if you’re just going to drink the same old thing again and again: you may as well stay home and grab something from your corner liquor store. Trust me: it’s cheaper!

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My wines are “strange?” You mean “strange like this…

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…or this?

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We also wanted to make these wines fun. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been intimidated by a multi-paged wine list with its endless columns of wineries and vintages and grape varieties marching down the page like little ants, all of it blurring into one giant, stressful, un-fun ink cloud. Some people love lists like this and for the serious, hardcore wine drinker they’re perfect, but there have been plenty of times when I’ve ultimately just picked a price I could handle, grabbed onto a varietal that I recognized and took a guess. The wine came, I drank it, it was usually lovely, but it never made an impression and I wanted to make sure that none of my customers were ever in the same boat. I wanted a wine list of stuff our customers would probably not have anywhere else, a list of wines that are unique, and a list that’s accessible and fun. And according to the New Yorker, we did it!

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But for all the fun of the “Tables for Two” piece (and it is fun, and I’m proud to have it) there is a dark side. And that side is the photographer. Being a photographer for the New Yorker is a prestigious job and it’s produced many famous photographers like Richard Avedon but not only do I not remember the name of the woman who took the photos of Dirt Candy (much to my discredit) but I can’t find her credit in the magazine anywhere, nor on the New Yorker website. And while Julian got to sit indoors and eat delicious food that was expensed back to her magazine, this poor photographer came in on a freezing cold day and stood outside for three hours. Out of all of us, she worked the hardest and then the fruits of her labor: a two inch by one inch picture in the magazine without even a credit. I actually don’t even know if people realize that it’s a photo and not a piece of artwork. So a big shout out to the unsung victim of the “Tables for Two” piece: the Unknown, Hardworking Photographer.

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I’d like to say one last thing of great importance: if the guy in the PETA hat comes into the restaurant again with his friend Elka, let me know because I’d love to buy you guys a glass of wine. After all, we’ve been immortalized in the New Yorker together: myself, PETA hat man and his friend Elka. If this was a movie trailer with a voice-over by the late, great Don LaFontaine it would begin, “In a world…where grits and hush puppies roam free…three strangers…united by fate…come together and discover that the only thing that’s more delicious than what’s on their plate…is inside their hearts.”

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Cue the flying pony and we’re outta here!

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