Let’s do something different. I usually begin my columns with a tasty dish, or with an essay on food or politics. Below that, I’ll publish a paywalled review or city guide. A little something for everyone.
But for the sake of variety, I’m going to do two columns this week! In a few days, I’ll review a new restaurant that I’m super excited about. I might talk about nachos too. But today…
Making Better Listicles With Omissions, Explanations, and Slights
The New York Times published its big pizza guide this week.
I know what you’re thinking. Another guide. Another list.
But trust me. This is a good one!
One of the forces behind the New York pizza index was Luke Fortney, my former Eater colleague! It was thrilling to watch him defy the physics of digestion as he gorged on sauced dough for months — an act of glutinous self-sacrifice that he documented on Instagram. Korsha Wilson, Nikita Richardson, and Priya Krishna also had bylines on the column.
Twenty-two venues made the cut. Some of them you’d expect, like Anthony Mangieri’s Una Pizza Napoletana, Joe & Pat’s (the vodka pie is so, so good), and L&B Spumoni Gardens. But some of the inclusions were pleasantly surprising — like Chrissy’s and the viral Ceres — because they were so new.
And more personally, I appreciated how the list revealed a few holes on my own pizza resume, like with Dani’s and Wheated.
But here’s my favorite thing: The Times explained in a separate post why Lucali, a mainstay of other pizza guides, didn’t make the cut.
This is no small matter.
I’ve only been to Lucali once, long before it became a celebrity magnet in the vein of Rao’s.
Here’s what I remember: The candle-lit Carroll Gardens ambience was very cute. The box and chain toilet was very Godfather-esque. And the pizza was…fine.
When I tried to go back — around 6 p.m. on a Saturday before the pandemic — the wait list was already filled up for the night. How does one actually get in here? The host offered a precise reply: Don’t come on a Saturday.
Lesson learned, lol.
Anyway, Lucali isn’t for me! The cash-only spot didn’t wow the Times, either. “The hassle-to-quality ratio is out of whack,” editor Nikita Richardson wrote, citing both long waits and issues with the food.
Now here’s the thing: Those aren’t the type of comments that usually accompany a high-profile restaurant guide. You don’t see the Michelin folks issuing a 532-word post when the inspectors downgrade some white truffle palace from one star to zero.
But maybe they should. I’d like to see more lists explain their omissions. Because lists and their ilk are a big, big deal. And they can have a serious impact on restaurants.
The angriest email a chef ever sent me wasn’t from something disastrous I wrote in a review. It was because of something I wrote in a list. Somehow, two small errors slipped through our fact check. And man, that guy was pissed.
I don’t blame him.
As a critic, I can devote an entire week to penning a 1,300 word restaurant review. Yet still, twice as many folks might skip the full column for a tiny blurb about the same place. All the more reason for food journalists to double down on the eating and the research, even if we’re just writing a few lines in an empanada guide.
Lists are everywhere. They continue to be massive, labor-intensive endeavors at both The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times. And during my Eater days, we’d try to put out a map every day or so. It was a lot of work.
The Infatuation is essentially a giant site of lists (even the reviews are formatted as lists), with guides that seem to match every single Google search imaginable…or un-imaginable (“Where To Eat Inside In NYC And Still Feel Like You’re In A Garden”). I’ve relied on Resy’s guides for my own research, and The World’s 50 Best organization gets so much traction with its ubiquitous lists that sometimes I know more about a bar’s numerical ranking than what they actually serve.
And then there’s the New York Times. The paper now supplements its regular restaurant reviews with a sturdy crop of national and regional guides. Do people read these posts? They sure do. The “100 Best Restaurants” was the NYT Food Section’s top story last year, beating out major reviews, news, and recipes.
What was the second most-read story?
I don’t mind these lists. For the most part.
People click the sh!t out of them (not why I became a critic, but so be it). They keep the lights on for us in the business — the journalism business. And they’re a service-y counterpoint to the longer essays and reviews that we write.
A good one tells you where you should go, or at the very least, about the places you should be familiar with. But you know that already.
What’s also fun about lists is the silly doomscrolling. The act of flicking your thumb on an iPhone screen while adrenaline courses through your veins — as you check to see if your favorite doughnut shack made the top spot. Or if it made the list at all. And if it didn’t, you get to experience a dose of pleasurable rage at how these incompetent fools could ever consider themselves professional reviewers. Until you click on another story 13 seconds later and, like a cat chasing a string, you forget about your faux anger.
As a critic, I’ll sometimes enjoy the sinister “Mr Burns” pleasure of knowing that folks will get riled up about their favorite squid spot not meriting a single mention. There is no criticism here, simply oblivion. Indeed, this is how guides often function. Neither Michelin nor The Infatuation typically announce why a tasting menu spot falls off one of their lists. It simply disappears.
That’s not my favorite approach.
As a reader, I want more insight. I want answers. I want to know why a fellow food writer doesn’t love the same Korean fried chicken (Golden HOF!!!) that I do. Or on occasion, I love an ignominious inclusion. The finest of these come in the form of a ranked list, when some clever reporter inevitably puts a crowd favorite in last place. For a master class in this sort of thing, go see New York Magazine’s (correct) argument that Billy Joel’s second-worst song is “We Didn’t Start the Fire” — that wantonly passive, everything-is-not-fine boomer screed.
This is the stock we trade in, as culture journalists. We stay in dialogue with our readers through written arguments, and when we show up on radio shows or newscasts, we respond in thoughtful sound bites, not with silence. If an implicit purpose of our lists is to make every reader declare “but what about this place that you snubbed,” then it’s worth chiming in about precisely that place.
The New York Times is often pretty good at chiming in.
When the NYT film critics put together their best movies of the year, they like to sneak in a few lines at the bottom, in an “also recommended” section. Here are a few of the runners-up, courtesy of Manohla Dargis: “Challengers,” “The Brutalist,” “Anora,” “Nickel Boys.” Pretty high-profile flicks for consolation prizes, right? Indeed, that’s the point. The critic is effectively telling readers — and Academy members — that she has indeed seen the films. She likes them. But there are other films to celebrate.
Or take a look at Wirecutter, the NYT product review site that we all religiously consult before making major, life-altering decisions…like choosing an electronic toothbrush. My favorite little feature isn’t the site’s top picks or upgrade picks. It’s when you hit “control F” on an $800 air filter and you run into something like this: “Molekule: Some of the worst air purifiers we’ve ever tested.”
Outstanding.
And that’s the thing. Your list might feel complete without any explanations or hand wringing. But ultimately, someone’s going to buy that automated salad spinner with a digital timer. And a lot of folks are going to visit that crappy bottomless mimosa spot that you simply omitted from your brunch list. Or one of your buddies will take you there anyway. Probably because they read about the place on another list! Part of me hates this reality, because some restaurants are objectively bad.
But as I often say, not everyone has to like the same thing.
I loved reading Alan Richman’s 2009 paean to Lucali. And Bill Addison’s pre-pandemic take on Lucali’s cheesy calzone is a joyful piece of food writing. Indeed, both Eater and The Infatuation both have the pizzeria on their own best-of guides. Though this is key: If you explain your omission on a listicle, it implicitly puts you in conversation with the competition. Which is what you want as a critic.
Now I know what you’re going to say: Lists aren’t criticism.
But lists can be better than reviews in certain ways. They’re often collaborative affairs, which is a good thing because they give a critical voice to more folks — often people who don’t have the phrase “critic” in their job titles. And lists can act — if used smartly and in moderation — as a gateway drug into longer form restaurant reviewing. If you believe all of that, like I do, it’s nice if lists (or their companion pieces) can be a little more reflective of the criticism they often supplement — or supplant.
That brings us back to Lucali! Perhaps you’re wondering specifically why the NYT didn’t love it? Fortney, the NYT reported, showed up at 1:30 p.m. (!!!), waited a few hours to put his name down, booked a 7:30 p.m. table. And then…
Our dinner for a table of three — two pizzas, a calzone and a pasta — lasted 72 minutes. We would have lingered, but we were asked to leave with a half-finished bottle of wine. I liked, not loved, our pizzas.
That’s quite a bit of work for a pizza that’s not terribly good. But if you dig the scene there, maybe because your name is Taylor Swift, then enjoy!
None of this is to say that every restaurant list needs separate notes (or footnotes) on all the relevant omissions. Let’s be realistic. We’re not academics putting together our PhDs. We’re storytellers.
But one of the things I love about the Eater 38, a regular compendium of the city’s top restaurants, is that the editors mention what venues dropped off the list in new editions. A subtle dose of transparency. Not everything needs a full explanation.
Also: It would be mighty weird if I put out a post titled “13 Reasons why The Eastern European Bathhouse Didn’t Make My List of First Date Spots.” Why? Because some lists are more delightful than serious. There’s not a lot of science behind them. You can quantifiably judge the merits of a porterhouse steak, but the broader qualities of a romantic spot are tougher to pin down.
Though the banya is definitely not first date material!
Over at The Lo Times, I do my best to make sure my city guides — we call them Cheat Sheets — feel a little bit like expository pieces of journalism, with micro-essays and other arguments interlaced with the service journalism. I want them to be something you can read, not just skim or forward to your buds. Sometimes, a blurb isn’t enough, especially if it’s a venue that I don’t get to publish a full review on.
And sometimes, I like to end my guides with a few quick lines about what venues to avoid and why — without being mean or arbitrary. Because sometimes, folks trust your superlatives more when they know what you don’t like.
No, there’s no single rubric dictating how much we should explain what’s in (or out) of a particular restaurant list. But I do follow one overarching rule:
A good list or guide should look more like journalism, and less like content. I could write a whole separate essay about what the heck that means. But if you’re a fellow journalist or an informed reader, you probably know what that means.
Or more pertinently: The NYT pizza list is journalism. It is fact-checked. The reporters and critics did the work. They ate pizza, like, everywhere. They published that smart companion post about Lucali. And without getting scientific about it, you’ll find about as many facts as opinions in the list, so even if you disagree with some of the selections or omissions, you at least get the knowledge and context. Which is what we need more of in food media.
Would I have done this pizza list differently? Absolutely. But that’s not a slight, because arguing about pizza is a quintessential New York pastime.
It’s a good list.
Now let’s see if Luke Fortney goes ahead and does Long Island pizza ;-)
This should go without saying, but the wrong lesson from our listicle world would be to cut out reviews altogether. Or to cut back on them severely. Reviews, like lists and reports, form part of the larger constellation of food journalism. We need them all.
Nothing says the beginning of summer like an essay about food journalism, lol, right?
I’ll have a fun warm-weather review for y’all’s in a few days. I sent out my fact checks yesterday! And yes, at some point, that review will get turned into a larger list.
Gotta keep the lights on at my own little Motel 6!
A few links for you :)
See you later this week, fingers crossed!
Ryan!!!
Update: I cut out the phrase “fair enough” in the web version of this story for clarity
Great story. You made me love lists again. It's not that lists aren't criticism for me, it's that lists aren't writing! I don't find them fun or artful to write...
Excelente piece of journalism!