The idea that a critic might kill a restaurant with praise, though, is one to make you sit up straight. The Observer’s Jay Rayner was three months into his job as a food critic when the power of his opinion was made clear to him. Yet, within a few weeks of him publishing an enthusiastic assessment, things at the restaurant started to fall apart. An idiosyncratic place doing its own, superlative thing. As Wells puts it, a good restaurateur knows that the best a review can do is to get customers in the door once.

Source: The Guardian November 28, 2018 12:38 UTC