Why I Don’t Write About Restaurants

Or at least try not to.

Whenever I read a traveler’s list of where to eat in San Juan, I think, Good for them. It’s best to write about the local food and drink scene as someone who comes and goes, not someone who stays. I know, because I used to be someone who came and went: I thrilled at eating out for a week and drinking endless cocktails a few times a year; I had internalized some absurd idea that good restaurants buying beautiful local produce and serving it in fine style could have a sort of trickle-down effect. But food is like the economy: nothing trickles down; the wealth just pools at the top.

If I had a dollar for every time a visitor came and told me, “If I were a local, I’d be eating at that place every week” about a restaurant where the average tab is at least $100, I’d have enough for one empanada and 2-for-$5 Medallas at our preferred dive. I smile and nod in reply. I let them have their tropical fantasy. After all, I have mine.

There are many excellent restaurants serving local produce that don’t fit the mold of a certain list-making type of traveler’s idea of what’s good. All of it comes down to taste (which isn’t “subjective” in any real way, but constructed by class, education, and culture) and to dominant aesthetics on social media and in magazines. If a dive or a chinchorro can look good in the right light and can provide the proper local flavor, then it works. It becomes the token affordable place on the list. Don’t forget a kiosko in Piñones, of course. 

This has all contributed to why I’ve stopped doing restaurant- and travel-oriented writing. I don’t feel like there’s a place for me to do so in an honest way, or in the right way. A city deserves critics who have deep historical and cultural context; a city deserves well-paid and thoughtful critics who can tell the truth. The work must be done for the sake of making sense of food in said city, for its people. Yet how many cities have the critics they deserve? Recommendations and lists from boosters, tourism boards, and visitors are what the local and macro economic situation has allowed in their place.

My experience is very colored by being in Old San Juan, which is where my husband grew up and works. It’s also a place I had dreamed about living while I was a visitor, admiring from the sidewalk all the high ceilings with beams and arched doorways: This beautiful setting truly adds so much joy to my life. But we don’t have a car because it would be like flushing money down a toilet (setting aside my political qualms), yet not having one determines everything we are able to do, everything we’re able to see beyond the beauty of our daily lives. When a rental is affordable on occasional weekends and we get out, it’s such a relief to escape the tourist core, to remember why I love Puerto Rico and kept returning to my grandmother’s island. This remembrance usually involves eating a heaping serving of a vianda, any vianda, en escabeche.

But staying here in San Juan, the focal point of tourism, makes the complications of daily life real, and these complications have plucked out the stars that were once shining in my eyes and obscuring my view—these economic and infrastructural issues, these appeals to tourists over locals, deeply affect the culinary scene in every way from what’s being served to the cost to the language on the menu: 95 percent of the population speaks Spanish at home, yet many menus are offered only in English.

The dominant aesthetic I’m referring to—the dominant aesthetic that determines worthiness for a tourist’s list—still has a lot to do with the idea of the Global Brooklyn, where visual signifiers and virtuous statements create a social-media-sharable space that capitalizes on seeming socially engaged while only actually being business-engaged. From the book, Global Brooklyn: 

These are coffee places with a theory of good coffee and food trucks with an ethos attempting to change the world—both writ large, as when engaging with global issues of sustainability, and writ small, as framed through notions of community or neighborhood. Such strategies are aimed at achieving success in the network economy, very often measured in relatively novel terms of social, environmental, or justice impact. However, they largely keep themselves at a distance from direct engagement in social movements, revealing a constant tension between references to grand narratives and the care reserved for small radius issues.

I’ve definitely seen more diversity of aesthetics emerge since that book was published in 2021—for one, I don’t think the “social, environmental, or justice impact” sells well anymore in most urban centers, considering a strain of regressive political nihilism I’ve noted as emergent among tastemakers (they love to smirk and sip their whole milk cortados, being so bad for consuming dairy). Yet while social media may have fragmented cool consciousness in such a way that, say, even the minimalist café can seem a bit dated—or simply like a neighborhood mainstay rather than a sought-after anomaly (there’s one in my hometown of Patchogue)—there are still markers one knows are going to sell.

In San Juan, the tourist desires of Global Brooklyn are mapped onto the tropical colonial: There’s still an aspiration for one’s consumption, when here, to make one seem conscientious, self-aware. Because Puerto Rico is Puerto Rico—a colony of the United States—there is always a tenor of do-gooderism to travel content about the archipelago. Like if you travel and eat in the right way, you’ll be washing your hands of the messiness. This is why I will read on these lists about restaurants that are in neighborhoods where ritzy development, AirBnBs, and “aesthetic” eateries are displacing working-class residents as though they’re saving the whole population through serving rich people a nice fish. I don’t think the travelers are doing this on purpose; it’s just something I can’t overlook.

The other things I can’t overlook: It’s effectively impossible to do anything here without a car. There is incredible vulnerability to natural disasters owing to climate change. There’s a shortage of doctors. The infrastructural issues around electricity and water, tiny number of libraries, and lack of comprehensive public transportation can make quality of life low. AirBnBs have absolutely decimated the long-term rental market, changing the entire cultural tenor of neighborhoods and perhaps the archipelago as a whole.

Yet the culinary scene here in the metro area has been repeatedly lauded in the press in the same exact way, over and over, for years; the common refrain has been that farm-to-table restaurants are potentially broadly transformative for the agricultural system. I’ve done it myself; I want to scream at myself. It’s as though saying some sort of culinary revolution is right around the corner will make it real, when all it does is wash away these realities of inaccessibility and unaffordability. This is what lifestyle journalism does: It makes everything seem a-ok because it looks good on glossy paper. (There’s also an assumption of a certain lifestyle being always already accessible to the people creating the lifestyle journalism, despite how little money writers and editors are actually paid.)

Anyway, these issues put restaurants very low on the list of concerns for a writer; food access, grocery acquisition, and agricultural resilience are at the top. I have made a very conscious decision now to eat like, I might jokingly say, a civilian: Someone for whom going to the “hot new restaurant” is meaningless. I want consistency, more than anything, when I choose to go out to eat, and it’s quite rare. We go to the same three restaurants, over and over.

I’m very aware, too, of the way I do my own version of this type of list-making when I travel. I’m more likely to be adventurous in a city I don’t regularly inhabit, where no one knows who I am, and that’s also why I don’t blame the travelers for their hopeful, utopian lists. I’m also hopeful and utopian when I’m somewhere that is offering me only pleasure and escape. I no longer make a fantasy out of the idea of living in every new city I visit, though. I know they’ll all come with their own problems, and I’m old enough to prefer the devil I know. And if it’s somewhere I will return to again and again, I do start to take an interest in the local affairs so that I might have a better sense of the dynamics.

Being a vegetarian, too, already nudges me away from a lot of establishments that might offer more old-school local flair and toward the “Global Brooklyn” in many places. It’s why I offer people maps of recommendations gleaned from locals (and I’m lucky enough to be in contact with “food people” pretty much anywhere I’d travel) as a resource, but can’t suggest I have some definitive guide or understanding. I’ll tell you about my life; I can’t tell you how to live. 

When travelers come and then leave to write their lists, I really mean it when I think, Good for them. I’d just rather be able to say, Good for Puerto Rico.

There are five Mondays in April, which ruins my editorial calendar, but I’ll be here next week with something brief and conversational. On the 22nd, the next Desk Dispatch will come out.

Paid Subscriber Notes

This Friday, The Monthly Menu chronicles what I’ve been cooking, where I’ve been eating (yes, this is where I will talk about restaurants!), and will include a lot of my husband cooking from The Vegan Chinese Kitchen, as well as what has helped us get better at making pizza in the Ooni.

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If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.

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The Desk Book Club is currently reading Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal by Hanna Garth. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!

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News

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Consider it a nice lightweight beach read!

Reading

I spent last week sort of giving my brain a breather because I went really hard January through March on work. I’ve been focusing on Food in Cuba for book club notes, though.