We’ve updated the search tool at Fined Dining through December 2007. Now you can see which Florida restaurants were fined from 2005 through 2007, how much they were fined and when. :
You can find details here. And you can judge for yourself, which is the real point of this post so please read on.
If your wondering about the maps, we’ll have them up soon one way or another. We’re holding off for the moment because we think the imminent change we promised a month ago might actually be really, truly imminent. If not, the maps will be up in the usual place in a few days.
Meantime, at the risk of beating a dead post, we want to revisit last week’s exchange with Laura Reiley, the St. Pete Times’ food critic, just to make one last point that we regard as central to the whole exchange.
If you forgot or missed it, we criticized Reiley for recommending an eatery, which had been temporarily closed and fined by the state just a few months earlier, and for failing to (know or) mention this down side to readers, or even mention where they might learn more on their own.
Then we decided to tweak Reiley by posting this at her blog. Annoyed by our impudence, apparently, she responded the next day with a post in which she rationalizes unsanitary kitchen conditions, suggests that her 16 years of reviewing restaurants have taught her how to spot a real health hazard and that state inspectors can’t necessarily be relied upon for accuracy.
She capped it all with this comment, which we’ve excerpted below.
“…my problem with reporting the pertinent facts is that sometimes they aren’t valuable … The last thing I want to do is create fear among the dining public about restaurants that are doing a good job … Penalizing a restaurant for a whole year for an off day is rough stuff.”
Thank you, Mrs. Pulitzer.
What we have here is failure to get over yourself. Reiley, apparently, sincerely believes that she is the ultimate judge of all things restauranty, that we’re too thick or childlike to discern valuable information for ourselves and that we need an adult to interpret the big, complicated food world.
Is it any wonder that traditional media is held in such contempt by so many people who flock to untraditional sources of information?
Omniscient media is a transparent canard peddled by a few lingering, arrogant media hacks. As hard as it may be for Reiley to accept, the lecture is over. We’re moving outside to the commons for a conversation and we’re all better off for it, including those restaurants of which she is so fiercely protective.
Doug Bebell, the owner and chef of Mystic Fish wrote to us asking what we hope to accomplish by calling attention to unflattering public records. Until we said so, it hadn’t occurred to him that GoToTell is at his disposal 24/7/365 to comment, explain, document and even crack back at us. He and you are always welcome to document, comment, rebut, question, criticize and draw your own conclusions. And that’s why this kind of forum has the potential to provide more pertinent and valuable information than Reiley ever would or could from her singular, albeit well-informed perch of the printed word.
As we explained to Bebell, we know that many people are actually intelligent enough to realize that good businesses make mistakes, just as good people make them sometimes. And a lot of regular folks are surprisingly adept at discerning authentic remorse from duplicitous denial. People are generous with second chances when they see them as warranted. All they need is enough information by which they can feel confident to decide. Lectures beg questions. Dialogue provides answers. Just ask a journalist.
Bebell is a chef and an entrepreneur. We understand why he didn’t get it right away but we’re gratified that he does now and that he took advantage of our forum to say his peace. As for Reiley, that’s just one woman’s opinion.