Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Hey Adam, I thought you'd be interested (and maybe others too) in this article on our local food critic here in Toronto...his publisher thought it'd be a gas to dress up his food critic and take him back to all the restaurants he's reviewed in the past... http://www.torontolife.com/features/guess-whos-coming-dinner/

Enjoy - Nicola

If you are reviewing a restaurant I don't really think it right to take a free meal. In any other profession that would get you fired. Did you know that you were called a “a world-class mooch" by and article in the NY Mag?

Both your experiences just go to show what can be so frustrating for diners--those who are deemed "special" i.e. food bloggers, with their increasing power over the life and death of a restaurant, get special treatment. It doesn't matter that everyone in that restaurant is paying an exorbitant amount for their dinner, only those who are of interest are treated well. It just reinforces to me how much I want to avoid restaurants like that.

You raise a good point, csl. There are governance and transparency issues that need to be thought out carefully. For our site (http://nycnosh.com), we try to remain as anonymous as possible and to keep the photography quick and done in a way that disturbs nobody. That said, we've been asked a few times about who we were and whether or not we plan to write about the food we're eating, and of course the only ethical answer is 'yes.' So we try to return to a restaurant without the camera to determine if we can spot a difference in service or food. We'll also chat with people sitting near us sometimes, just for a bit of reference, and on the rare occasions when a chef has sent us something unusual just to impress us, it becomes apparent pretty quickly.

a couple of months ago when i dined at eleven madison park (the new chef is one of my faves), my dining companion tongue-in-cheekly blurted out "she's a food critic" to our waiter. even though i quickly said "no i'm not !" , and i had no camera and took no notes, halfway through our meal the chef daniel humm came out to our table to say hello.
3 months prior to that, when i dined there with another companion who had called ahead to pre-arrange a 13 course tasting menu to go with some special wines he had brought, the chef did not come out to say hello to us even though this was a much more expensive meal.
chefs and restauranteurs are aware of the power of public opinion to impact the success or failure of their restaurant, whether from a paid writer or an unpaid blogger, it's part marketing, self preservation and common sense. let's face it, most people with jobs treat their bosses who sign their paychecks with more respect than their co-workers , so the concept of "VIP's" exist everywhere in life, not just in a pricy restaurant.
go bloggers !!

But is this a good thing? You left Le Cirque this time with a better impression of the restaurant and the Maccioni family because they treated you like a celebrity, but they only did that because you embarassed them the first time and because they now know that people read your blog. If they really cared about anonymous customers, you would have been treated well to begin with.

The free meal demonstrates the power of blogging, but it doesn't get the Le Cirque staff off the hook for being jerks. I doubt they treated every customer so well that night, and someone will always have to take the loser table. We can either support these places or not. If I get an invitation to a free meal in response to a bad review, I just ignore it. Let the restaurant prove itself to new customers.