I Don’t Wanna Eat at the Rationalist Restaurant

Scott Alexander, probably the world’s foremost rationalist blogger, has written a post about art. I find Alexander to be a charming, idiosyncratic writer who approaches most topics with a refreshing lack of guile. Rationalists, if you don’t know, attempt to understand the world in as cold-hearted and quantitative a way as possible. This does not make them selfish or cruel — a major rationalist project is donating money to cost-effective charities that operate in the poorest parts of the world, for instance, because that’s where the money will have the greatest impact. Rationalists talk and think a lot about AI. Occasionally rationalists miscalibrate their beliefs and form death cults, but I think rationalists would argue that they form death cults at a lower rate than non-rationalists, which is what really matters.

Anyway, Alexander is not in a death cult, and his post, “Contra Everyone on Taste,” is an honest attempt to discuss art and art criticism and try to distinguish between the content of the art (the canvas/sculpture itself) and its context (the identity of the artist, whether the work was a response to societal or artistic trends, etc.). To get into all this, he shares how he used to think that restaurant critics worked:

A critic’s assistant would deliver dishes to her house, so she wouldn’t know which restaurant it came from. Otherwise, the critic might let her preconceptions influence her judgment, and a restaurant’s reputation would become self-reinforcing. She would eat blindfolded (or be spoon-fed?) so the food’s appearance couldn’t distort her judgment either. A typical tasting would intersperse food from dozens of different restaurants, with each dish tried multiple times (obviously the critic wouldn’t know it was the same dish) to ensure that the ratings were consistent. Any critic whose ratings were unreliable — two blind tastings of the same dish were no more likely to correlate than tastings of two different dishes — would be laughed out of the business.

According to Alexander, when he realized that actual restaurant critics don’t do any of that, he was appalled — instead, critics write about “ambience” and the personal backstory of the chef. He’s since “made [his] peace with real-world restaurant criticism,” and concedes that things like ambience and the visual presentation of dishes are “part of what makes restaurants fun.” But Alexander also insists that the blind critic of his imagination could learn valuable truths that elude other food writers: “They might learn that the family restaurant down the street makes a steak that beats the $100-a-plate Michelin-starred steakhouse. Probably the average claim like this isn’t true. But probably there’s some claim like this which is true, and they could learn it. The real-world restaurant critic who writes stuff about ‘ambience’ never will.”

As someone who knows something about food writing, all of the above is very silly. For starters, you can’t isolate how food tastes from the atmosphere of a restaurant or how it appears on the plate — factors like a diner’s mood or plating can affect how things taste. Removing a dish from the restaurant setting irrevocably changes it; Alexander’s ideal critic would penalize restaurants that spend any effort on their dining rooms or service. And that’s not even factoring in how food quality might drop as it is ferried from the hypothetical restaurant to the imagined rationalist critic. A wood-fired pizza, for instance, should be eaten as soon as it comes out of the oven — by the time it gets to our noble blindfolded critic, it will be lukewarm and soggy1.

Secondly, restaurant critics are writing about restaurants, which is not quite the same thing as food. This is a distinction that a lot of people either don’t understand or don’t care about, and the idea that restaurants are nothing more than food production facilities goes far beyond Alexander’s blog. These days your first exposure to a buzzy restaurant will probably be photos of its food on social media, and “trying out” that buzzy restaurant may consist of tapping buttons on DoorDash. Delivery has taken over to the point where 75 percent of restaurant orders are to-go, according to one recent report. Many people who love eating restaurant food rarely visit the actual restaurants they order from. Like so many of our other relationships, this experience is now mediated through apps. If restaurant food means a burrito dropped on your doorstep like an abandoned baby in a bassinet, it doesn’t matter to you whether the restaurant it comes from is a moodily lit mezcaleria or a window inside a ghost kitchen complex.

Tellingly, the most popular restaurant critic in the country is probably Keith Lee, who has 17 million TikTok followers. A positive review from him can be a huge windfall for a restaurant, a.k.a. the “Keith Lee effect.” He eats almost exclusively in his car, which is supposedly a way for him to dine anonymously (a family member or other helper generally picks up the food and brings it to him). But this also means that all the ambience and presentation stuff gets left by the wayside — he’s probably the closest thing to Alexander’s imaginary reviewer that exists in the real world, judging places solely on their food and in the process sometimes highlighting some lesser-known restaurants2.

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There are a lot of arguments about which restaurants are the “best.” Less discussed is why restaurants exist at all. If I’m thinking rationalist-ly about food, learning how to cook is obviously a better way to eat well than ordering an endless procession of burrito taxis; if you are a reasonably skilled home cook working with high-quality ingredients, you can prepare dishes just as good as what you’d get at most restaurants, and for a lot less money. You go out to eat, ideally, not because the food will be mind-blowingly good, but because going out to eat is fun. It’s fun to see people and be seen, it’s fun to dress up for special occasions, it’s fun to give yourself a break. Maybe you have some transcendent dining experience, but probably you don’t. But you should feel comfortable and taken care of. That feeling has something to do with the food, but it also has something to do with the physical space of the restaurant, and the way the staff interacts with you, and the volume of the music, and the lighting, even the way the menu is printed. Successful restaurants care about all this stuff. If you hang around people in the industry, they’ll often end up talking about hospitality as a kind of all-encompassing, all-important philosophy, because guests are responding to a lot more than simply what’s on the plate.

If this sounds a bit pretentious or silly, that may be because the notion of a restaurant being an experience has been eroded in our collective imagination. The concept of a “neighborhood restaurant,” where you would drop in to eat one or two nights a week and know the staff by name, seems quaint. Prices have risen to the point that regularly eating out is a luxury; to keep labor costs contained some restaurants have swapped out human cashiers for kiosks and have patrons order from QR codes stuck to the tables. “Going out” seems less special and yet more expensive than ever, and if you’re going to spend a good portion of the meal looking at your phone, does it really matter where you are?

It would be ridiculous to suggest that restaurants (or cafes or bars) are art. But they have something in common with art in that there’s a part of the experience they create that is ineffable, something you can’t get delivered. When you see a work of art that speaks to you, can you define what it says, or even what the you it is speaking to consists of? Similarly, if a particular dive bar or coffee shop is a special place to you, can you define why?

It’s a critic’s task to pin down those ethereal ideas, to put into words why a piece of art is meaningful, why a restaurant transcends the mundane. This job is impossible, and usually critics fail — is it any wonder why they are so despised? Quantitatively-minded thinkers like Alexander (and a big portion of the public) want critics to be able to provide ratings and logically defend them, but they can’t. Human experience can probably largely be reduced to numbers, but there’s a fraction of it that defies rationality, those moments when a line of poetry or a taste of ice cream or a sound you can’t quite make out transforms you, and you can’t even describe the transformation, you just know that you were one thing and then in the span of a slivered moment you became another thing altogether, and maybe after that you came back to being yourself, whatever that means, and you spend the next however long wondering, How can I possibly explain this to anyone else? If you have this sort of experience while eating dumplings, what rating do you give the dumplings? I’d probably say about an 8.7.

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