"Trust No One" When it comes to Restaurant Reviews

If you're as finicky and fussy about food as I am, you probably don't blithely walk into just any old restaurant with your hard-earned cash and start ordering away. Restaurants are as inconsistent and unreliable as friendships — great one day, disposable the next. Anyone's who's watched an episode or two of Kitchen Nightmares has learned to be wary of the prima donnas and hysterics who run half the restaurants in this country, and the kind of ill-considered ingredients and techniques used to produce their food.

It is with such chicanery in mind that I take to the all-knowing internet before trying a new restaurant, which you think would bring a measure of considered opinion to the matter. Don't get your hopes up. Sites like Yelp.com and Chowhound may have a rare, legitimately informed opinion buried in the compost-heap of ill-written blather assembled there, but I still go by the properly-paranoid X-Files dictum: Trust no one. Why? Because nobody knows what they're really talking about. Ever. Including me!

Let me give you a personal example. My older brother, whom I love dearly, is victim of what I like to call the Identity Principle when it comes to rating the vittles at an eatery. In mathematically logical terms, the equation goes like this: I have eaten there, and thus it must be excellent. So if he recommends a restaurant, you can bet it's a place where they welcome the legendary soft touch like family, he wildly overtips, and then they give him even bigger portions of the noxious gruel the next time he comes in. "Mention you're my brother!" he says cheerily, as if I'd ever enter such a flop-joint in the first place.

The point is, if he had a modicum of taste and a proper dose of restraint when it comes to assessing the fare, I'd respect his opinion. But no, everywhere he goes is by default the "best." Now multiply the dear boy by about 1000 and you have Yelp. I just cued up their page on one of my favorite barbecue joints in LA: Doctor Hogly-Wogly's Tyler, Texas, Bar-B-Que, whose food and menu I know better than my own kids. Steve S. — no budding food writer obviously — said this: "The ribs were smoked for 6 or 8 hours I was told. I don't know about that…but they weren't your typical Outback, Chilis bar-style rib." Well, isn't it nice that Steve has such urbane frames of reference? Chili's? I wouldn't order an iced-tea in that million-outlet chain, much less a cooked animal product of any kind!

Want to try a true Tower of Culinary Babel? Surf your way over to Chowhound and listen to the would-be foodies argue amongst themselves. On a local diner, one dunderhead opines: "If you go there when drunk, the food tastes better in direct correlation with how bombed you are." After a glowing recommendation of another legendarily inauthentic taqueria, another writer shot back — "If you like 50-something lounge lizards trying to hit on people and food with no spice or flavor, it's your place to be." My verdict: I go with the lounge-lizard critic. He captured the ambience and the bad food in a single swipe. I could almost trust him.....

At the end of the day, one's taste in food is about as personal as one's taste in art or film. I don't know about you, but I rarely trust any one critic in particular, though I must endorse Manohla Dargis of the New York Times as a pretty reliable touchstone when it comes to movies. As for believing your Uncle Morty when he extols the mushroom barley soup at Jerry's, well, buyer beware. And when you go to Yelp or Chowhound or TripAdvisor or the like, remember that it's a hundred such armchair experts bickering over stuff they know little to nothing about, period! But this is the Age of the Internet, where not only does everyone have an opinion, they share it. That to me is scarier than a Wes Craven film festival….