Do they know you're coming?

When people I meet find out I write restaurant reviews, the one question I get more often than any other is, "Do they know you're coming?"

It shocks me every time. Before I was a critic, I assumed all reviews -- of restaurants, hotel rooms, vacuum cleaners, whatever -- were anonymous, unbiased accounts of the writer's experience. When I was an editorial intern at Detroit Monthly Magazine (now defunct), the restaurant critic -- who worked full-time at one of the local newspapers in town as well -- went so far as to write under a pseudonym.

Now, of course, I realize that "critics" are often paid for their "opinions," and more so these days with the rise of new technologies. People are building entire businesses around writing glowing reviews online for other companies, as well as posting positive blurbs on Twitter and Facebook.

But I assumed that the general public was savvy enough to discern, for the most part, when a publication or web site ran nothing but paid advertorials and when it was a respected, major-market newspaper or magazine that adhered to a set of ethical codes. Not so. Sadly, the lines have become blurred to the point that people assume that I call up a restaurant in advance, tell them who I am and when I'm coming in, and the restaurant gives me a free meal, which I then critique.

That's not to say I go to great lengths to mask my identity. Yes, I try to keep my picture out of the press and off the web as much as possible, and I make reservations under fake names. I do meet with chefs and attend events on occasion, but Phoenix is not that savvy of a market that all of the servers and managers know what all of the critics in town look like and anticipate their arrival. (... Or do they? If you work in a restaurant, please let me know if I'm woefully naive.)

They certainly don't know when I'm coming in, though. Shoot, sometimes I don't even know when I'm going to visit a restaurant until the last minute. And I can't imagine why anyone would value my opinion if it was underwritten by the very places I'm supposedly reviewing.