Hot 50: John Lethlean and Necia Wilden’s 2015 top restaurant picks
Prepare to be bombarded. In the next couple of weeks every media outlet in Australia, from old school (like us) to new (like some website you’ve never heard of, staffed by interns who eat around all the new restaurants for free because they can, provided they play the publicity quid pro quo game), will hit you with a list of some kind, an annual state of the nation on restaurants.
Fair enough. It’s quite good sport. The brave will attempt rankings. Everybody loves a list, and the list of course must have a top and bottom.
Me, I’m glad not to be exposed to that sort of dilemma. The entirely arbitrary decision-making behind calling a certain restaurant One and another 100, or giving one restaurant three hats and another none, is something best left to others. Best from my perspective, that is. How it serves you is less clear.
At the Oz we exercise a subtler form of arbitrary restaurant anointment. Rather than try to compare flathead and snapper, we simply say they are all fish, but some are better, and fresher, than others. We call it the Hot 50, and this marks the fifth year we’ve attempted to distil Australia’s restaurant scene with a list that reflects a cocktail of energy and excellence, innovation and professionalism.
We say — with the exception of crowning a single restaurant as Australia’s hottest — here are 50 places that deliver on innovation, style, great food, professional service (including knowledgeable wine approach) and the frisson of exploring new territory, being talked about, and attracting attention for the right reasons, not because of well-targeted spin.
As someone involved with putting Hot 50 together for The Weekend Australian Magazine (alongside my highly experienced colleague Necia Wilden), I should say a few things about our annual report, in the mag on August 22.
It’s not easy (and it’s not always the lark it may seem) We take inclusion/exclusion in this collection seriously. But we’d be lying if we said there was a science to it. I like to think of this as a handbook for visitors from another world who don’t want to waste a single meal on mediocre eating out while they’re in our country. It’s a national “where are we at”.
Restaurant reviewing is a bit like democracy — not perfect but it’s the best thing we have. You can send someone along with a checklist (soft dunny wrap, check, one point), but formulaic approaches to assessing restaurants tend to turn up places that are technically fine but emotionally void. The trouble with most of your guide books and associated awards is that, to achieve the kind of broad coverage they need, a vast and disparate army of opinion-givers is enlisted. We, on the other hand, keep it very tight. We may make mistakes. We almost certainly do. But at least it’s not because we’ve trusted the word of someone we’ve never met who gave a big score to a restaurant on the other side of the country we’ve never been to.
It’s expensive. What does it cost to exclude restaurants from our list? To visit, as a nobody, test drive, then make a decision as to whether it belongs in the same company as the other candidates? Thousands of dollars. Then more.
It’s fattening. See above.
It’s independent. It gives me no pleasure to say that traditional “masthead” media businesses, such as ours, no longer enjoy the hegemony over restaurant opinion they once did. Certainly, those in the restaurant industry seem to care little for what is published, good or bad. It’s a fact of media life. But the flip side is that there is so much cheerleading from the new media, who will tell you every bloke who ever picked up a whisk is an artist, that I truly believe the public is still well-served in this country by traditional media that puts independence — and a certain healthy scepticism, an increasingly rare trait in our celebrity-worshipping times — above all else.
It’s Hot. Next week’s list sees a lot of very new blood claim a place in the Hot 50. Some incumbents have gone through no fault of their own; we simply had to make space for newcomers. Others have slipped. It ain’t perfect. But it’s not for want of trying. We look forward to your response.
Source: The Australian, John Lethlean, 15th August 2015
Originally published as: Hot 50: John Lethlean and Necia Wilden’s 2015 top restaurant picks
