Everyone's a critic
John Grossmann reports.
| More Front Burner in this issue |
| Stop and smell your dinner |
| Where old meets new |
| Let's do le lunch |
| Gourmet to grow |
| More is more |
| How does your garden grow? |
| Women who wear toques |
New York City—Last fall, even as Thalia and Stephen Loffredo, owners of the newly opened Jovia on Manhattan's Upper East Side, anxiously awaited review visits from influential restaurant critics, they already had dozens of reviews to parse for nods of approval or red flags pointing to fine-tuning adjustments. Thanks to a novel reward program cooked up by Thalia, every lunch guest through most of November was a potential critic.
On each rectangular bread plate, midday patrons discovered a two-sided "Everyone's a Critic!" form, soliciting their name, street and e-mail addresses, and personal rankings ("1: not to my liking" to "5: love it") and specific comments on all aspects of their Jovia dining experience. The thank you: a $20 gift certificate toward another lunch at Jovia. With dinner reservations initially strong, it made sense to use the offer to help jumpstart the always-dicier lunch trade. Primarily, though, the Loffredos sought to check the heartbeat of their uptown newborn. Though veteran restaurateurs (Zoë, their downtown "teenager," turns 14 this year), the couple designed the critic-for-a-day program to smooth their entrée into the tony 10021 zip code, a very different neighborhood from Zoë's SoHo digs.
"I look at this as a mini Zagat guide of real people's opinions. But instead of once a year, we got feedback instantly in the course of a month," says Thalia, who estimates about 30 to 40 percent of her lunch guests took up a pen and let loose with their opinions.
Some criticism, says Thalia, triggered immediate changes. Negative comments about the music prompted a switch from a hipper downtown vibe to lighter, jazzier piped-in tunes. Several Park and Madison Avenue customers took Jovia to task for plating the daily "simply grilled fish" entrée too simply. It now arrives with a daily market vegetable. One guest questioned why the table setting included a butter knife—when servers brought only olive oil and no butter for the bread. "Good point," realized Thalia, who passed along the word: 86 the unnecessary utensil at lunch (butter is served at dinner).
Understandably, her favorite comment came from a man listing a Dallas address: "Looking forward to returning, with or without the $20 gift certificate."
