Two Cheers for Anonymity

Red Medicine panicked in outing Times' Virbila, but did no lasting harm

Comments (0) By Jonathan Gold Thursday, Dec 30 2010

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But a good critic never allows himself or herself to become accustomed to this treatment, and even the least of us notices when an amuse-bouche multiplies in size, when we are served three langoustines instead of two, or when the sauce on our plate is prepared à la minute instead of ladled from a bowl.

Our secret, if we have one, is that we tend to err on the side of kindness — we are looking for things to praise, not things to mock.

PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN

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Red Medicine

8400 Wilshire Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Category: Restaurant > Vietnamese

Region: Beverly Hills

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But even in Los Angeles, which for decades has been one of the most creative restaurant cities in the world, there are at most a dozen, a dozen and a half noteworthy mainstream restaurants that open each year, restaurants that push the dialogue forward. (When I was the critic for monthlies like California and Los Angeles here and Gourmet in New York, I still found it difficult to find 12 restaurants interesting enough to contemplate at length — although, I admit, some chefs whose food I thought too boring to review have earned international reputations for their dull cuisine.)

Is there a place for negative reviews? Sure. But at the Weekly, I am lucky enough to write for editors who agree that a great bowl of dan dan mian is as culturally important as the 43rd wild-mushroom flatbread or the 19th-best spaghetti putanesca in town.

A restaurant critic does spend a lot of his or her time in restaurants that are some combination of incompetent and dull, and as anybody who's ever spent time grading papers can tell you, there is nothing more aggravating than splitting the difference between an A- and a B+.

I have no beef with Red Medicine. I liked the meals that the staff prepared in the first weeks at Test Kitchen, and I'll probably enjoy what they do in their own space. I can even understand, almost, why they felt obligated to do what they did: They had kept Virbila waiting, they were slammed, she had been pretty brutal to chef Jordan Kahn's desserts when he was the pastry chef at Michael Mina's XIV, and they sensed disaster. It was a panicked move, and I suspect they knew it was dumb even as they were doing it. They did no real harm to Virbila — if anything, they lent her pluckiness — but they made themselves look second-rate.