402: San Francisco's New Restaurant Critic with MacKenzie Chung Fegan

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I also feel like that is not in service of, like, equity. If, like, some restaurants have access to a photo of you because they've hired an expensive PR firm, but maybe, like, a mom-and-pop business does not have access to a photo of you, if some restaurants can know what I look like, then I think all restaurants should be able to know what I look like. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel. Mackenzie Chung-Fagan is the new restaurant critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. She's a former Bon Appetit editor who returned to her hometown paper to shape the food coverage in the Bay Area.

1:09And it's so fun to have her on the show to go deep on her first few months on the job, the state of modern restaurant criticism, when restaurants actually close, and more.

1:27Mackenzie Chung Fagan, this is Taste. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Great to chat with you. I know. It's so fun to get to catch up because we we work together at Bon Appetit and used to get to see each other in New York. And now you are a West Coaster again. Yeah, I feel like this is just us scheduling a phone call to catch up. And also, you know, like a thousand of our friends are listening in. A thousand? I don't know how big your audience is. Millions. Millions of friends are listening in. And also my mom, who's going to hear that, that you returned to the West Coast after being in New York for a while and get ideas for myself, probably.

2:01Eliza's mom, let me tell you, it gets better than that. I currently live downstairs from my mom. So with a baby, with a baby. That's right. Multi-generational household. Well, you know, my mom is from the Bay Area. So the fact that you're in the Bay Area also is awesome for everybody. Oh, where's she from? She grew up in like San Jose area and lived in San Francisco for a while before coming down to LA, which as a Northern California person, she was reluctant to do. But now I'm an Angeleno at heart. So that's what happens. I'm interested in your take on this because the NorCal-SoCal quote unquote rivalry is fully one sided.

2:38Like I talk to people from LA and they're like, why do Northern Californians have beef? And Northern Californians are of course like, oh, yeah, like we're so much better than LA. Like L.A. culturally is like so different from San Francisco. Yeah, it is all one sided. My dad is from L.A. but went to school in Berkeley and has a story that he went to a party and someone was like, oh, you're from L.A. You're stealing all our water. So I don't know if that's part of it or if it's just like L.A. and Hollywood take up a lot of conversation space in the California conversation. But I agree that I do think it's pretty one sided and I have like only love for the Bay Area.

3:15Yeah, I think it's always sad when there's a one-sided rivalry because it says a lot, right? Like if you find out that somebody thinks that you're their nemesis and you're like, oh, that's cute. You know, it's like it's just not it means that it's not it's not real that like somebody has a chip on their shoulder. Yeah, we need more like two-sided rivalries, I guess. Bring it back. So I'm curious. OK, when you came back to the Bay Area, was there like a restaurant that you had to eat at first or like some kind of like the in and out experience, you know? Well, I was going to say traditionally before I moved back on the way home from the airport, you would stop at In-N-Out.

3:51I did not do that this time. And also now that I'm in this job, I really can't have kind of like regular spots. So now if I'm hungry coming from the airport, I like have to go to Brillingame or, you know, downtown San Mateo or wherever is nearby and like have a meal at a place I haven't been to before. Yeah. I'm curious as a restaurant critic, how are you sorting all of the restaurants that you're trying to go to? I would imagine that Google Maps is probably like not cutting it. I have lots of spreadsheets. And I also am going to plug this management software that I use called Nosin. I know. Yes.

4:32If you too love spreadsheets and organization, I have this exact same question because there's just like a lot to keep track of from my upcoming dines, my previous dines, who I went with, what name I made the reservation under, what time is the reservation. And I asked Soleho, my predecessor, for help. And they were like, look, everything was chaos until I started using Notion. And now I use it too. And it's great. Notion, if you're listening, Mackenzie could be your spokesperson. That's right. I could be your Geico lizard. What you said about the name that you booked it under kind of piqued my interest because it fits into the fantasy of like what a restaurant critic does.

5:14I know that you're not doing the disguises, but what steps are you taking to try to have like a quote unquote normal dining experience? Yeah. So I'm not anonymous in that my photos are out there. And I'm not pretending that they're not. And I say that because like a lot of critics who are anonymous, like their photos are also out there. But, you know, I'm just I have like social media, like you can Google me, you can see what I look like. But I am trying to maintain anonymity in another sense, I guess, which is just like I'm not booking under my own name ahead of time. I am using aliases. I am hoping to go as long as possible in a restaurant before somebody notices me.

5:58And I think just like extending that length of time when you can have a kind of normal dining experience is helpful. for the, you know, it's helpful to see how everybody else is treated who isn't a professional critic. Do you have multiple phones that you're making different resi accounts for? Like I'm trying to think about if my phone number is always attached when I make the reservation name. Your phone number is always attached. And I remember like when I was in New York working at Bon Appetit, sometimes I could see at the host stand, like the POS system would pop up and my name would be flagged.

6:34Yeah. There's like a Resi note that people will attach to your names. Exactly. And my understanding is, and somebody from Resi, let me know if this is wrong, but my understanding is that can happen like among restaurant groups, but it's not like system wide, I think. I think there's different levels to it. Cause I've asked my friends that work in restaurants before and a restaurant can make their own notes on someone. So like my friend works at Claude. When I go to Claude, they know that I'm Casey's friend. And then also there would great for you. I know. Shout out to Claude. Great cake. Love your cake.

7:05It is a great cake. But also I think there can be like resi wide notes, but I don't know. I don't know who makes what necessarily. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So I do have I do have different resi accounts, different open table accounts. I make new ones when I think that I've used one name for too long. And yeah, I have, I do like burner phone numbers. I love the mystery of all of that. And I loved your newsletter talking about why you decided to not try to protect your identity. And some of it obviously is, as you mentioned, you have social media. I think you've been on the Today Show a bunch. So like your face is out there.

7:42But can you talk a little bit about kind of the experience of like why you didn't want to put up that charade in the first place? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do think that those practical points need to be considered. and they're relevant because, you know, I'm, I am a millennial. And I think that for people of my generation, your generation, we've been told that, especially if you're freelancing, that you have to build up your own personal brand, you know, social media is important, all of that. And so I think that as newspapers are hiring the next generation of critics, I think that it's unrealistic to say that your critic needs to be anonymous.

8:23Or if that is a prerequisite, it means you're going to be pretty limited in the type of person that you can consider. Or offering robust services to wipe somebody's identity off the face of the internet. Yes, right. Yes. Which sometimes I'm like, yes, I would love that. Please disappear me from the internet. So I just think that that's kind of like a reality of people want to be hiring the next generation of restaurant critics who are also contemporaries of the next generation of chefs and diners. I'll say that too. But on a more philosophical level, I just think that anonymity isn't real at a certain level of restaurant criticism for people who have been doing the job for a long time.

9:06Now, I do think like my colleague, Cesar, who is our associate restaurant critic, he's anonymous. And I think that he is actually truly anonymous. You can't really find him online and I've died with him. I don't think people like are clocking him. Um, but you know, that's also because like for the most part, when he was, um, working with Soleil, like Soleil was kind of hitting the three Michelin star spots and Cesar was exploring, you know, more in like, um, you know, the deep East Bay, you know, doing like a lot of really amazing coverage of, I would say, you know, more like pop-ups, food trucks, stuff like that.

9:42So But depending on where you're going, maybe there isn't a photo of you in the kitchen, but maybe there is. There probably is at spots that feel like they have a lot to gain or lose reputationally from a critic's visit. So I also feel like that is not in service of equity, right? If some restaurants have access to a photo of you because they've hired an expensive PR firm, or if their GM came from another well-funded restaurant, but maybe like a mom and pop business does not have access to a photo of you, I would just like prefer to do away with the pretense of anonymity altogether. If some restaurants can know what I look like, then I think all restaurants should be able to know what I look like.

10:27Yeah, I really appreciated that element of your newsletter. And just as a friend of yours also, it was so fun to just get to see you entering into that position. I guess to zoom out for a second, what drew you to wanting to take on this position of being the restaurant clinic at The Chronicle in the first place? I mean, it's a dream job. Yeah, obviously. Like, you know, when when my editor reached out and asked if I would be interested in applying, I talked to my spouse about it. We were very happy in New York. And I was like, it's a rom-com job. Nobody has this job, really. You know, it's like, it's like in a romantic comedy, people are like architects and like own like a flower shop and they're restaurant critics.

11:12But nobody really has this job. And the fact that it also is in San Francisco, you know, it's my hometown paper. I'll shout out to the San Jose Mercury News as well. You know, I think everything sort of like the confluence of all of these things made me feel like I have to apply. Yeah, I love the category of rom-com job because that's exactly true. And I think on the subway Uptown today, I just saw an article that was like a 20 years of 13 going on 30, like talking about everyone that wanted to be a magazine editor because of that movie, which is so funny. You have a favorite rom-com job? I mean, journalist that makes$3 a word, I think is my dream rom-com job.

11:51You're exactly right. Yes. Okay. And I feel like also you have a really personal connection to like what restaurant criticism can do for a restaurant, like specifically in the Bay Area with your family's Chinese restaurant. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes. My grandparents founded a restaurant called the Hunan Restaurant. There are still Hunan restaurants around. They're now called Henry's Hunan because Henry was my grandfather, the founder. And they were immigrants to this country and not trained chefs, but a very typical immigrant story where they tried all sorts of failed small businesses until they alit on opening a Chinese restaurant that served the cuisine from the region that they were from, Hunan.

12:31And at the time, Chinese food in San Francisco and in America in general was mostly Cantonese inspired and very kind of Americanized. So, you know, a lot of like fried rice, that type of thing, which was not reflective of the food from our province and the food that my grandparents grew up eating. So they just decided to cook the food that they ate at home, that their grandparents made for them. And it was very rustic and fiery, sort of the Kachina Povera of China. You might think of it as like a lot of chili peppers, a lot of garlic, black beans, fermented black beans. And it took off. And part of the reason it took off was that Tony Hess, a writer for The New Yorker, happened to be passing through Chinatown on Thanksgiving and stumbled into my grandparents' restaurant or somebody took him and he wrote a talk of the town piece about it.

13:28And then Gourmet Magazine wrote about it. And all of a sudden there are these national articles about how my grandparents' restaurant is the best Chinese restaurant in the world, is what they said in the New Yorker. And it really exploded the business, they were able to move into a bigger space. We were able to bring over relatives from China who opened their own branches of the restaurant because we needed people to come and work. And it just is one of those examples of of getting lucky of a critic being in the right place at the right time, deciding it was a good story and changing the pathway of a family's fortunes.

14:12Yeah, it's such a great story. And it also makes me think about the way that media can kind of like take something and run with it, that you had, you know, one piece of recognition, your family had one piece of recognition, and then all these other national publications saw that story, wanted to do their own version of that story. And it kind of snowballed from there. And it makes me think about this like interesting tension in between wanting to, you know, like give recognition and like share a story more broadly. and also be the person that's trying to like break new ground and elevate another restaurant.

14:42Because and I mean this with the most possible respect to your family, like maybe it was the best Chinese restaurant in the world or maybe it was the Chinese restaurant that was really great that like the world or like the world of media was talking about in that moment. Totally. Eliza, it was not the best Chinese restaurant in the world. OK, you can say that, but I can't. Like from a purely statistical point of view, the best Chinese restaurant in the world is in China. Yeah. you're exactly right you know like um again my colleague caesar he's he's from la he wrote for la taco came up to the bay area and was like all right like i'm gonna go hard on the bay area taco scene and was like uncovering all these amazing taco trucks or like home restaurants you know which are literally out of somebody's home and you need to know a person you need to be able to like find them on Instagram if they have social media.

15:33And, you know, he did all of this legwork. He was able to write about some of them in the Chronicle. And the next thing you know, like one of them is on the New York Times is like 25 best restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area list. Like, obviously, he is doing that surfacing, you know, people who are in local news are kind of like owning that beat, finding the local person and somebody, you know, who's like based in New New York, as we were at Bon Appetit, we are reading those news sources. So you're exactly right that media can have this snowball effect. Yeah. And I love talking about Caesars' work with LA Taco because that is my favorite hometown publication being from LA myself.

16:11And I think it kind of fits into the style of restaurant criticism that I really fell in love with growing up with Jonathan Gold and kind of going out and eating at these strip mall, immigrant-run smaller restaurants and kind of celebrating that food. I'm curious what you think about the role of restaurant criticism being in this moment in time when obviously there are so many people leaving reviews on social media and on TikTok and there are all these publications that are trying to kind of find their footing amidst that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I guess that I am very appreciative that restaurant criticism has been democratized.

16:50You know, I think that the days when there was one critic at a newspaper and they were going to review all of the Michelin star restaurants or all of the openings that had PR. Like that's, that's boring to me. I think that's not how I eat. I do go to some of those places where I would go as a civilian, but you know, on a day-to-day basis, that's not how I eat. And I don't think that's how a lot of people eat. So I think it's great that there are sites like LA taco that are covering, as you said, you know, mom and pop, often immigrant-owned small businesses. And I think that there's room for that in major newspapers and for the lead critics at major newspapers to take on those type of restaurants as well.

17:33Social media has just totally changed the game as well. I know that Gen Z, Eliza, tell me if I'm right. Gen Z gets their restaurant information from TikTok. And, you know, that's cool. But also, I think that we have to be clear eyed about what what restaurant criticism on TikTok is. The things that are going to rack up the views have to have some sort of like active visual appeal. Right. So like a cheese pull or a table side Caesar salad preparation. It has to be visually sumptuous in order for the algorithm to hit. So somebody could be cooking really delicious food that's just like kind of regular, regular food and maybe isn't colorful.

18:18It's just, you know, on a plate. And maybe that is not going to catch the eye of TikTok critics because they know that it's not going to hit in the same way. Also, they're getting paid. Also, people on social media who are reviewing restaurants are getting paid. Their meals are getting comped. So while I do think like I'm always interested to see where people are eating and it's helpful to surface some of these undiscovered spots, I don't generally trust what social media critics are saying about how good a spot can be. I don't know. What's your what's your take on that? Like, what do you think about TikTok and Instagram criticism?

18:56I mean, so full transparency, I don't have TikTok because I can't have self-restraint with it. So I had to just like delete it off my phone. But obviously, Instagram reels. I mean, it was like desperation. That was the only option. But I did stick to it, which is cool. I like finding out about new things via social media. I think that like video is a really good format for seeing things that look delicious as you're talking about. And I do think there are people that do good work with that. There's this guy like Righteous Eats that I follow here in New York who goes to a lot of these kind of like outer borough immigrant run restaurants and places.

19:32And I think that like he has good taste and it's a cool way to find out about things. But I think like the benefit of long foreign criticism, I mean, like how many times are you going to a restaurant before you review it? Three. Three times. Yeah. In some cases, two. It's like super expensive, but three at a minimum. Yeah. And you have so much experience and knowledge that you're kind of connecting things through and you're going deeper in a way that you just can't in a video format. So I think like there is a place for all of those things. I'm curious, like, how do you feel or how do you try to balance like going to the legendary Bay Area spots like Zuni and Chez Panisse and like checking in on them and also talking about like newer places and kind of all of the different ways that people can eat in the Bay Area in this moment?

20:16I think at this point, I mean, I just started the job in January and my first review dropped in March. So I'm brand smaking new. And I do think at this point, the balance is heavier on the side of getting up to speed. So I am visiting more established spots, more places that feel like they have shaped the course of the Bay Area dining scene. of course I'm visiting new spots as well but you know nobody wants to hear from a critic who doesn't know what she's talking about so I'm really appreciative first of all that the Chronicle gave me you know about like six weeks just to eat around before I had to start producing anything because I think you know I wouldn't have any credibility if I was like yeah this new spot is super good it's the best restaurant in the Bay Area oh also I haven't been anywhere yeah I mean And we were talking about your ties to the Bay, but you did live in New York for, what, 20 years?

21:1120 years. I think about that a lot as someone who, you know, it's been over a decade since I lived in L.A. And I go back and visit, but I feel like my intel is kind of not quite what it used to be. Did you find yourself having to balance, like, your memories or conceptions of what the Bay Area is from the last time you're there and kind of reshift them now that you're back living there full time and doing all of this eating? Yeah. By the way, I also already feel out of touch with the New York dining scene. And, you know, I've only been gone for like four or five months. And that feels terrifying to me where I'm like, what's this new place that everybody's eating at?

21:45I feel like I get to, you know, there's a lot. Great. I guess going through some of these many spreadsheets, my editor will ask me, oh, have you eaten there? Have you eaten there? And the answer to a lot of them has been yes in 2014 or in some cases like in 2007. So I think it is helpful having some sort of personal relationship with restaurants that have been around for a long time and being able to pull from some of those memories that like, yeah, in 2012, I remember thinking it was really good. Um, but of course that is not, that is not enough for me to, uh, speak to a restaurant having, you know, eaten there a decade ago.

22:30Um, but I think we're generally balancing expectations about the city. You know, like I grew up in the South Bay. I was in the suburbs. I never lived in San Francisco, although, you know, my grandparents were here. My aunts and uncles were here. My mom would work at the family restaurant on the weekend. So we were up like pretty much every weekend, every other weekend. but I never lived in San Francisco and I didn't go to school in San Francisco. And growing up, I just wanted to live in the city so badly. I wanted to be rescued from suburbia. And, you know, at the time when I was in high school, San Francisco still felt very kind of counter-cultural.

23:07There was amazing art happening and, you know, activists and artists could afford to live in the city. I would drive up in high school and like go to shows in the city. And And then over the course of, I guess, the next decade or so, when I'd start to come back, things just got a little bit more homogenous. And tech money really started taking over the city in a different way. And I moved back to the city for like nine months around 2015. And I didn't recognize it at all. And I feel like that was kind of at the height of mission gentrification. gentrification. We're busing people from the mission down to the peninsula.

23:48And it felt super alienating to me and that none of my friends could afford to live in San Francisco. So I did have a little bit of trepidation about moving back and would I find community? Would I find people? Would the city just feel like a playground for the rich? And then also, of course, everything that you're hearing about how San Francisco has fallen off a cliff and is caught in this doom spiral. So I didn't know what to expect, but I'll say without minimizing the very real suffering of people who are unhoused or who are battling addiction, because obviously that is real, that is a problem in San Francisco, but it is not, the scope of the problem is just not what you see reported by mainstream media.

24:39Moving back has felt incredible to me. The city feels great. The city feels like, I don't know, I feel very optimistic about it. And of course, it has problems. Everybody is aware of those problems. But I am so happy to be here. And I think that there's a bright future ahead. I think the city is going to come back. Yeah. And you're raising your own family there. So it makes sense that you would feel that way. I also grew up loving going to San Francisco, thinking that it was going to be where I would move to as a young adult after living in L.A. And then the tech influence and New York calling to me, whatever, all of these things happen.

25:19But I do love every time I come back to San Francisco, I think that the food really is some of the best food in the entire country, partially because the produce is so amazing and because there are so many amazing communities that have their own foodways. and also just like, I don't know, the bread of it all. There are so many fun things. The bread of it all, yes. The bread of it all, yeah. It's so real. What are some of your favorite meals or experiences that you've had since coming back to the city? Yeah. I mean, like in New York, pop-up culture is going strong. And I don't get to eat as many pop-ups as I would like to because I have a finite number of meals and restaurants.

26:00I will cover pop-ups but you know I've been sort of skewed towards restaurants at this point but I did go to a really great pop-up um run by Bolita they're uh Bolita Masa um the chef Emmanuel Gavron is is you know doing his own like nixtamalization and he's just doing incredible stuff with Masa and there was this like there's this red Masa cornbread that he served with um whipped lard and charred blue corn tortilla butter. Whoa. And it was so good. I got a second slice to take to go to have for breakfast next morning. I love that. And you also posted, I think, a gochujang sourdough recently, right?

26:44Yes. I mean, as long as we are talking about the bread of it all, it's just, it's ridiculous. I have a farmer's market very near me and you can get like top tier quality bread from three to four stalls that are all right next to each other. And this one, the gochujang sourdough is from Rise Up Bakery. They're a black owned bakery that supply a lot of great restaurants in the Bay Area. And at farmer's markets, you can get their freaky sourdough. They've got a bright purple one that's ube sourdough. They have like a, like a roasted garlic one. They've got gochujang. They're just really experimenting with some incredible flavors.