What food critics in cars get wrong about restaurants

The most influential food critic on TikTok, Lee proceeds to inspect the scored snapper that he had just purchased from Cane, a popular Caribbean restaurant on H Street NE in Washington, D.C. “I’ve had whole fish before, but I’ve never had it presented like this,” Lee tells his 16.6 million followers. He then bends the fish at the tail and takes a deep bite.

“It kind of just tastes like fish,” he says. “... I’m saying it’s just fish, but I’ll eat the hell out of this snapper.” He gives it a 7.9 out of 10.

What many of Lee’s fans may not have known is that the critic didn’t just order a whole fried snapper; he ordered whole fried snapper escovitch, a Jamaican dish traditionally topped with a kaleidoscopic tangle of vinegared vegetables. When presented on the table at Cane, snapper escovitch arrives buried under veggies and greens: pickled peppers, sliced onions, a chiffonade of culantro, a scattering of scallions and a wedge of lime on the side. It’s an explosion of color. The fish is also paired with a culantro sauce, built from an herb popular throughout the Caribbean.

The sauce and garnishes were all packaged for Lee to pair with the snapper, says Jeanine Prime, the proprietor behind Cane. “Part of the dish, escovitch, is essentially having these pickles, the vinegar, offsetting the fried fish,” Prime tells me. “That’s a critical element of the dish that was missed in Keith’s review.”

But Prime understands that taking a big, meaty bite of a whole snapper is more visually striking than opening a handful of containers and assembling a composed bite in front of a dashboard camera. She understands, in other words, that those who critique food from their car seat are essentially captives to their cellphone cameras. These devices provide a narrow view of life inside a vehicle, which becomes a metaphor for the reviews themselves: They filter out the messy details and, as a result, miss the big picture. Like a whole fried snapper without its sauce and garnishes.

The genre of car-based food criticism has emerged with the rise of short-form video platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, which have democratized the food-reviewing game beyond what even early blogging software accomplished. All you need now is a vehicle, a smartphone camera, some video-editing experience and a personality that crackles on the small screen — the very small screen.

Back when legacy media controlled much of the news and opinion that reached the public, editors served as the gatekeepers. When I became managing editor of the Houston Press in the late 1990s, one of my first duties was to help hire a food critic. The résumés I combed through were occasionally masterpieces in self-promotion, transforming threadbare experience into ironclad qualifications. Some applicants believed they were qualified because they liked to eat — and had lots of experience with it.

But the internet has turned all of this on its head. The vast majority of food critics today are self-appointed. Type “food critics” into TikTok’s search bar, and your screen will be flooded with dudes — I’m not sure why most are male, but that’s a discussion for another day — sitting in their cars, espousing opinions.

Keith Lee is the brand name. But others go by TikTok handles such as lukefoods, Mr.ChimeTime, lifeofcian, waynedang, shawnfoodreviews7 and many, many others. Their reviews — whether awkward or authoritative — are strangely transfixing. You might look up from your phone and realize an hour or more has gone by.

The approaches are as different as the people. Lee has an almost Zen-like persona. Conversely, Rashad Mooreman (a.k.a. Mr.ChimeTime) is a tough, often-profane critic who loves a challenge, such as when he feasted on a whole roasted pig in his car. He also loves setting up challenges, such as a faceoff between a $60 fish sandwich and a $600 one. Luke Collins, who issues opinions under the prosaic lukefoods, exudes pure puppy dog energy, even when he’s slagging on something, such as a Popeyes chicken sandwich. His persona draws frequent comparisons to Kevin from “The Office.”

Part of the attraction is the bond implied between influencer and viewer, forged by the tight frame and the hermetically sealed environment of an automobile, one of the most personal spaces in our peripatetic lives. Virtually every critic is filmed from the waist up, with quick cuts that might zoom in on a single bite or, in the case of Lee, on a single eyeball staring back at you. The intimacy, as Pete Wells notes, can be too much.

“To me, it’s like I just want to take a step back” from the video, says Wells, the recently retired restaurant critic for the New York Times.

Another reason these videos resonate is the very thing that drives chefs and restaurateurs crazy: the unapologetic amateur status of the critics. The reviewers approach their meals blind, with seemingly little preparation on the restaurant. They are Every Diners, stand-ins for those folks who don’t consider themselves foodies, Elite Yelpers or the kind of know-it-alls many of us hate dining with.

Wells compares this new wave of critics to the punk movement of the 1970s, when the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash and many others rebelled against bloated arena rock, with its seven-minute guitar solos, sometimes executed with a violin bow in hand. Punk’s aesthetic was its amateurism, and its fans related to its unvarnished, sometimes brutal truth. Same with food critics in cars.

“The everyman critic is more trusted than somebody who knows what they’re talking about,” Wells says.

I was a critic for 13 years at The Washington Post before I backed away from the Casual Dining column in January. And when the coronavirus pandemic entered our lives more than four years ago, many of my reviews were based on meals consumed in the driver’s seat of my vehicle. I even bought a tray I could attach to the steering wheel. (Some of the car critics have one, too.) I eventually started to treat the car like a mobile toaster, clearing out the crumbs under the seat every few months.

But there’s a distinction between a critic who dines in the car and someone who reviews from the car. The latter is spontaneous and unfiltered, composed of knee-jerk reactions to how a dish hits the palate.

My reviews were anything but spontaneous. They were plodding affairs in which I was always pushing up against deadline, asking for extra time to polish a paragraph (or five) or to ask more questions of a chef or maybe even to make one more visit. They were based on research, experience and interviews. They were bloated arena rock.

By and large, the restaurants I reviewed didn’t demand in-person visits. They were often carryouts, counter-service operations, food trucks, food-court shops, pop-ups, ghost kitchens, pizzerias and other places where what was boxed up for takeout varied little, if at all, from what was served inside.

And I followed some unofficial car-dining rules: I would not eat a cuisine designed for communal tables, such as Ethiopian, in which much of the pleasure is derived from decompressing with friends over an injera platter dotted with stews, tibs and salads. I would not dine in the car if the meal would be diminished without its plating, its service and its ambiance. Truong Tien, with a focus on Hue royal cooking, was such a place.

Some experiences are just not meant for the car or carryout, which would seem self-obvious. But you’ll find four-wheeled connoisseurs digging into tomahawk steaks, Maryland blue crabs, a Cajun seafood platter, a Philippine lechon tray for two and other dishes that seem like children lost when consumed in a car. Without a heavy carving board and a steak knife, without the brown paper rolled out on a picnic table and a bucket of cold ones within reach, without the fiddle-and-accordion music waltzing in the background, without loved ones around to share with, these meals are compromised experiences.

Then again, I may just be showing my age. When talking to Craig Laban, restaurant critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he mentions that his two 20-something children are not attracted to dining rooms like those from previous generations are. “They’re like the Grubhub generation,” he says. “They would rather eat takeout at home than go out to a place, like eight out of 10 times if you give them a choice.”

What fuels our need to nest at home? Lingering covid fears? Inflation? A desire to shelter in place amid the existential crises we face outside our front doors? Technology has not expanded our horizons — and our desire to interact with life — but narrowed them. Food critics in cars are just another manifestation of tech-driven isolation.

The truth is, dining out is a social experience, with a set of rules. When you decide to dine out, you are bound by the social conventions of the restaurant, the culture that influenced it and polite society in general.

Dining in cars, by contrast, is a stateless nation, beholden to nothing except the values and accumulated wisdom of those folded up inside the vehicle. If you want to devour an Ethiopian vegetarian platter, all by yourself, with an old plastic spoon found in the glove compartment, no one is going to side-eye you. No one, in fact, will be anywhere near you to provide the kind of social cues that lets newcomers know they’ve crossed a line into gaucherie.

It’s been rare in my TikTok viewings, but I love when a critic, overmatched by a dish in the driver’s seat, will make a confession to the camera. Case in point: In July, Collins dumped a seafood boil into an aluminum tray and proceeded to pick through the shellfish in his car. The absurdity of the task was not lost on him, as Collins kept trying to pull meat from a snow crab leg while balancing the giant tray on his lap. He maintained a sense of humor throughout the ordeal, right up to his final admission:

“No matter how fun this may look, it’s not, okay?” Collins said. “Do not do this in your car. This is literally pain.”