For 15 years as the Des Moines Register’s “Datebook Diner,” Wini Moranville’s byline ran next to a headshot of a smiley-face paper plate to protect her anonymity. With her new memoir, she’s ready to dish. Photo: Duane Tinkey
Nobody knows more about local restaurants than Wini Moranville. After decades of reviewing them for dsm, as the Des Moines Register’s “Datebook Diner,” and currently for her own Substack column, “Wini’s Food Stories,” she’s written a new memoir called “Love is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All,” published by the University of Iowa Press. She offered dsm an exclusive preview of the following chapter, before the book’s release on July 17.
When we asked Wini Moranville to share an excerpt from her new book, she chose chapter 10, “The Perils of Reviewing Restaurants in a Midsized Midwestern City,” because it answers two common questions: Did she ever get recognized when she was reviewing restaurants? And did she ever wear a disguise? “Honestly,” she said, “those are the two questions everyone wants to know.”
One of the pitfalls of being the reviewer in a midsized city is that you’re way too visible. You can’t fade into the mass of millions of people as you can in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. And if you lived in the city from grade school through high school and then from the age of 31 onward, and if you’ve freelanced for nearly every food editor in this major publishing hub, well, a lot of your readers know who you are. And if they disagree with one of your reviews, they’re going to tell you. And your husband, mother, and mother-in-law.
“You owe me a steak!” said a local food photographer after he visited a steakhouse that I had reviewed but that had fallen short on his visit.
“Your daughter-in-law is a pushover!” said a friend of my mother-in-law’s after I gave a thumbs-up review to a restaurant she likely had a bad experience with 20 years earlier.
“The cheese course at that place Wini recommended was so skimpy!” said my mother’s bridge partner at her biweekly bridge club.
I once got the stink eye when I spotted an acquaintance at a great but undiscovered Vietnamese spot. I interpreted his look to be saying, “Shut your gob about this place, will ya? Let’s keep it our little secret.”
I’d be introduced to people at parties or out and about, and when the conversation came around to my métier, I’d get cornered for long-winded, blow-by-blow accounts of how dreadful a meal was at a place I had recommended.
Or it was the opposite — a place I had given a tepid review was someone else’s favorite place. My husband, Dave, had a friend who read my review of a Vietnamese place that was fine, if nothing to drive across town for.
“Man, she was way off about that place!” he said. “It’s so authentic! When I walked through the back door, there was this faint odor of urine, and it reminded me of some of the best restaurants I dined at in Vietnam!”
How had I missed the urine-y smell — that sure mark of authenticity in a restaurant?
Of course, being known among readers means that in some cases, you’ll be known among restaurateurs, too. Once you’re known in one local restaurant, it won’t be long before you’re known in others.
After a former student of Dave’s worked at Bistro 43, I was outed there. Staff from there moved to other restaurants, where they outed me among an entirely new crew of servers, some of whom invariably moved on to other restaurants, and the network of knowing spiderwebbed out. I also suspect that some acquaintances, attempting to ingratiate themselves with chefs and restaurateurs, would out me if they happened to spot me at a restaurant they were dining at the same night I was.
Did I try to camouflage myself à la Ruth Reichl? In her memoir, “Garlic and Sapphires,” the former New York Times food critic famously wrote about the great lengths she went to disguise herself when reviewing. Readers sometimes asked me if I did the same. No, I did not. Any kind of wig or costumed getup of the sort Ruth Reichl wore would have stuck out like a sore thumb in Des Moines. The staff would’ve known something was up. Or, they would have said, “Good evening, Wini,” and I would have felt ridiculous. I also would have had to devise disguises for Dave, and I simply did not have the time or resources to do all that.
After the third year of reviewing, I knew I’d be recognized in about 25% of the restaurants I went to — mainly among the chef-driven bistros, the downtown hotspots, and the newly emerging polished-casual spots. Because there was little crossover among staff between those kinds of restaurants and the many other styles of venues I reviewed, I could generally go undetected at the other 75% of restaurants — the ethnic spots, the suburban chains, the casual pizzerias, and the burger joints, as well as eateries in the suburbs or nearby rural Iowa.
PR maven Chris Diebel, who later became a restaurateur himself when he opened Bubba, once told me he had posted a photo of me above the time clocks, beverage machines, and point-of-sale terminals in all the restaurants of his clients. I recently asked him how my being recognized might have made a difference in my experience — would they have sent out a different server? A better steak? Here’s what he said:
Once you are seated, we aren’t likely going to change your server. However, we may space out that server’s next table to ensure they weren’t in the weeds while serving a food writer. We’d tell the servers in surrounding sections that they need to be extra helpful running food because their colleague has a VIP in the section. From the back-of-house perspective, the most senior person in the kitchen (exec or sous-chef) would personally oversee plating. Ideally, that’s always happening at the expo line, but leadership gets pulled in multiple directions. The front-of-house manager might step into the expo role for ten minutes while the chef focuses solely on that table.
I have no doubt that in some restaurants where I was recognized, I did get preferential treatment. What some restaurateurs didn’t know (though I’m sure Chris Diebel did) was that I could almost always tell when I was recognized. And in most cases, a restaurant might have done much better had they not recognized me. An earlier Des Moines Register food critic, Josef Mossman, said it best back in 1977:
Restaurants where I am recognized humor me by pretending they don’t recognize me, and the reactions follow three patterns: (A) They fuss over me and treat me with such lavish favoritism as to incur the rancor of other diners who know what’s going on. (B) They spill gravy on me. (C) They take an air of condescending hauteur as if to say, ‘We don’t care who you are. You can’t scare us.’
More than 25 years later, my experience was almost the same. While I rarely encountered servers who were so nervous that they spilled something on me, I did get overly obsequious treatment. I remember dining at an intimate venue that was, at the time, one of our city’s best restaurants; as I left, I bumped into an art director who had also been dining there that night. I asked her how her meal was. “The food was fine,” she said. “But your table got all the service!”
She said we had had the same waiter, who had practically ignored her party while she watched him fawn over ours. Such fussiness — and it happened often when I was recognized — brought unease to the overall experience and generally didn’t do the restaurant any favors. I could also tell I was recognized when everyone — every server in the room, every host or hostess, and any other staff member who happened to walk by the table — would stop and ask me how everything was, usually at the most inopportune times. With so many interruptions, just having a nice conversation with my tablemates became a struggle.
At the other end of the spectrum were servers who would become aloof toward our party, in that “I don’t care who you are” shift Mossman described. While I didn’t wish for special treatment by any means, the opposite case brought its own kind of dismay. One night, a server at a small bistro would not deign to bring me the glass of wine I had ordered to go with my entrée. She hadn’t forgotten; rather, she’d glance over at me from across the room while coolly taking her time doing some other task, with a look that said, Yes, yes, I know — you’ll just have to wait. Finally, she set my glass of wine next to my near-finished plate and indifferently walked away. I’d waited tables enough in my life to know when a server is in the weeds versus sticking it to you.
In the end, how much difference did it make if I was recognized? It might have moved the needle a tad — especially at the well-staffed, on-the-ball spots for whom Diebel consulted. Yet rarely would it make a substantial difference at most other venues. Untrained servers don’t suddenly become experts just because a critic shows up. Recognizing me could never make an uninspired kitchen suddenly stellar.
One night, sitting near the open kitchen at a stylish downtown venue, Dave heard the chef say to his staff, “She’s here. It’s quality time now.”
And yet, course after course proved downright dreary. That was the best they could do? I glumly thought. It was so sad, in fact, that I ended up not writing about the restaurant at all. It closed soon after.
A few nights later, I’d look forward to driving somewhere in some lesser-traveled part of town to find a place where I knew I would not be recognized, where I’d hope more than anything to find good, honest food served with genuine care by people who believed that it was always “quality time” for everyone who sat at their tables.
