You have to have two qualities. You have to know how to write well. [...] You have to know food. It’s very hard to do those two things. –Mimi Sheraton
“Review Review” introduction
This is the first in a series in which I consider the state of contemporary restaurant criticism. My aim as “food-critic critic”: To evaluate a half-dozen or so reviews and, at the end of the series, provide a summary analysis. As in my recent piece on Pete Wells, each “Review Review” will also assign a rating based on five stars.
The subject of today’s study is Pizza Baby Flops in Attempt at NY-Style Pizza in Charlotte, from Queen City Nerve in Charlotte, North Carolina. The opening sentence strikes the A-note to which the rest of the review is tuned, i.e. solipsistic, unnecessary, condescending: “For most of Dry January 2024, I kept my mouth shut”.
The critic then devotes five (!) paragraphs to the month-long sobriety trend, admonishing its adherents as “temporary teetotalers” in a campaign of “online whining”.
A painful start, but it gets worse: Making clear that he takes no pleasure in bringing “shade”, the critic writes the following, quoted in full: “Does the oncologist take pleasure in telling a patient that they’re terminal? Does the officer on duty enjoy knocking on a door with news of a terrible crash? Does the food critic [...] relish in finding just the right turn of phrase to explain why a certain food is just no good?”
Whew, talk about three sentences that are three sentences too long. Of course, the critic might mean them ironically – but the effect feels facetious, not funny.
Paragraphs pass, with more digression, almost dissociative in character. One moment, our critic speaks from the confessional; the next, the chaise lounge. (“Had Justice Samuel Alito tried the pizza at Pizza Baby [...] then he may have steered the court to rule differently”). This information, he tells us, though “painful,” is “all the more important for [us] to hear” – proving that he’d make an awful oncologist, as he’s misdiagnosed both the source and the scale of our suffering.
Lines later, including the particularly painful “twee tapas” (ouch), the review proper finally begins, at word – count ‘em – four-hundred and eighty five. Here, the critic lays out his initial issue with the Pizza Baby pizza, namely its status as a New York slice. The problem, he argues: too “floppy”.
The critic then lays out his pizza expertise – he’s been to New York City, you see. In fact, he dined at Stretch Pizza, “legendary American chef Wylie Dufresne’s” restaurant (apropos: a one-star rating from the Times ). Apparently, the critic asked “the staff” there how they felt about describing a New York pizza as “floppy”; their response, he states, proved unfit to print and he barely “made it out of there alive”. Cool story, bro.
An analgesic tangent
Let’s take a respite and turn to the restaurant in question. On Google, Pizza Baby has a rating of four-and-a-half out of five stars, based on 136 reviews. The bad ones number 13 (nearly half of which are complaints about the service or business hours). The restaurant’s page on OpenTable reveals the same rating, with 90 comments. Yelp – yep, same, 53 reviews.
Charlotte-based food blogger PapiEats posted his Pizza Baby take on YouTube, noting that the pizza is “delicious, the dough is extraordinary” and “high-quality”. Adam Eatz NC, in his video review, starts with a heartfelt “I’m kind of a pizza connoisseur, I’ve worked really hard at that” (me too, bro, respect) and concludes that the pizza tastes “really good” and ranks among “the better pizzas in Charlotte”.
A post on the city’s subreddit, “Who has the best pizza?”, lists 176 comments; four note Pizza Baby as a favorite (although one reply does describe the crust as “soggy”).
It seems, then, that Charlotte has a respectable pizza scene – indeed, Sam Hart, chef, restaurateur and James Beard finalist, wrote about his pizza quest for the Charlotte Observer (24 pizzas, 24 days). His takeaway: “Charlotte is a Grade-A pizza town”.
My point: Diners in Charlotte may actually have credible pizza expertise of their own, which means their online commentary does hold some weight. In light of this, while our critic may not like the pizza, the idea that it is absolutely terrible – in his words, an “affront to common sense” – sounds sus to me.
Break time over
We now return to the review, where the critic continues his (rather dull) ax-grinding, lamenting how social media has ruined restaurants, adding: “At around the same time, I think, that the reel took the place of everything real”. This is an attempt at a “right turn of phrase,” I suppose, but it lands with a sentimental thud.
When the critic turns back to the food, his commentary is acerbic. “[It] was a pizza poised for pizzaz” – more shitty alliteration – “had it not been so woefully under seasoned”. Or, in another vapid exaggeration: “Only at Pizza Baby have I found it impossible to tell the difference between mortadella and a mushroom”. Really?
The rest of the review reads more or less the same, a bramble of mean-spirited commentary (“[day]-old chewing gum has more complexity”; “the acidity works like an industrial solvent”). It closes with a final blow: “Then again, bathwater might be exactly what the dough at Pizza Baby really needs” – a statement that, apart from its pettiness, makes zero sense?
Final rating
In my view, in order to justify their position and power, a food critic must be at least as good at their craft (i.e. writing) as the restaurant is at preparing and serving food. If the quality of the food at Pizza Baby is as poor as the caliber of this writing, then our critic might be right – it is indeed an “affront”.
But I doubt that. Moreover, any of the legitimate ideas in this review get lost in its mediocre composition and callousness. For my part, I consider good criticism an act of generosity – not just to the public, but to the subject at hand and the people behind it. In that sense, the critic has missed the mark.
One star, out of five.