How do you nicely say to your waiter that your meal wasn’t quite what you expected-and what you expected wasn’t what you received? Or do you say anything at all? These are questions that restaurant reviewers take very seriously. Great reviewers not only care deeply about the craft of making beautiful food, they have their readers’ best interests in mind. But what happens when you’ve read a good review of a restaurant and it doesn’t meet your expectations?

This question and many others found its way into the heads of my wife and me after looking forward to a Saturday night dinner out at Copeland in the Westin Hotel in Morristown, NJ.

In prior trips we had eaten at the bar with mostly good results-it’s hard to mess up a hamburger billed as the “best in NJ,” and we were eager to try the more formal restaurant. We had no idea that the restaurant would be so inept at even the simplest task of cooking and serving dinner for two on a Saturday night, especially after the New York Times had spoken favorably about the chef.

We arrived at 7:30 for our 8:30 reservation, hoping to get an earlier seating and were told by the Maitre d’ that we could not be seated even though there seemed to be plenty of open tables. And so, we sat down at the empty bar surrounded by large screen TV’s playing sports without the sound, not the atmosphere we seek out for a romantic dinner on a Saturday night.

The dimly lit room of dark wood and deeply painted red walls, hung with pastoral scenes of house and home from an 18th century perspective, didn’t quite fit with the large screen TVs playing sports. Drinks were well made and with a careful hand; I had a Havana Mojito made with 10 Cane Rum, fresh mint and simple syrup.  My wife had a $12 glass of a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc that might have cost $6 or less at retail for a bottle.

We finally got up from our bar-stools and walked back up to the podium and asked the Maitre d’ if we could sit down.  They had forgotten us at the bar after a nearly 45-minute wait. That’s where our experience went quickly downhill.

Now seated at our table, we waited for  someone to notice us.  After about a 5 minutes, we were offered grease-stained menus, and no wine list. After another five minute wait we asked for and were given a wine by the glass list, also grease stained and smeared with food.

Eventually, after weeding  through many commercially available-mostly forgettable and overpriced bottles, I ordered a somewhat  serviceable Pouilly Fume. But, I didn’t feel like drinking much. It was getting late, and we were hungry having worked all day, skipping lunch.

We were not told about the nightly specials, although we noticed that diners at nearby tables received a recitation of an interesting selection of the chef’s creativity. We were beginning to get a complex. Why were we ignored? I was interested in what the chef might prepare, having read in the New York  Times  that he had (some) talent, garnering a Very Good rating, not an easy task to receive.  But our waiter never gave us the chance to deviate from the menu set before us.

I ordered the Sashimi of Yellow Fin Tuna w/Coconut, Kaffir Lime, Chili Oil.   The description of the dish on the menu read well enough, but what I was served was in no way matched the description. The mostly warm temperature (not a true sign of freshness) tuna was soft and mealy to the tooth and flavorless to my palate. I tasted no hint of chili oil or coconut or even Kaffir Lime Leaf, but I did detect some slivers of scallion. The foam that surrounded the minuscule pebbles of fish was reminiscent of milky-colored cucumber tinged marshmallow cream, whipped into a frenzy of fuzzy, tongue-numbing submission.

My wife ordered a simple Caesar salad, nicely plated and well cleaned of the grit that sometimes plagues Romaine washed in restaurant prep kitchen sinks , but it was overpowering with both a lemon juice and vinegar dressing. The Parma cheese “Frico” crisp on top was a clever and creative diversion, but it was soft, as if it had sat under a heat lamp for too long.

We ordered the Roasted Organic “Heritage” Chicken that was billed as a twenty-minute wait, (we waited almost 40 minutes for it to be ready) served with roasted cipollini onions, chanterelles and fava beans for $26 a portion.

I don’t mind spending $26 on a $3.50 chicken (wholesale)  if it is brightly flavored and freshly roasted to a crispy turn. In this case, however, the chicken was desiccated from being par-cooked, then held until service at just below temperature, then flashed in a hot oven, reheated to finish.  The chickens were served with vegetables that may have been originally cooked during the Nixon Administration, then reheated ‘banquet’ style on a steam-table warmed plate. The portion size was miniscule with only slivers of really small chanterelles, a couple of sorry looking pale green fava beans and finally, two overcooked to mush, cipollini onions. The sauce tasted of a type of canned stock that I was familiar with…a demi glace that comes from a jar or pouch of concentrated mix, having a flavor that is bitter and cold to the tongue, not a homemade, deeply flavored demi-glace from a restaurant that bills itself as “everything from scratch.”

We skipped dessert. We had arrived around 7:30 and didn’t leave until long after 10.  Having cooked in hotel kitchens for some of my restaurant cooking career, I am well aware that hotels have a marvelous way of taking excellent ingredients and destroying them, focusing on food cost over-runs than the TASTE of the food on the customer’s plate.

It is often too much about the bottom line and the conveyor belt style of feeding, one that I learned about plating luncheons out in Arizona at the Scottsdale Princess Hotel in 1992.

The New York Times has a restaurant review that dates from 1859 which may well be the first foodie writing:

http://kottke.org/07/09/first-ny-times-restaurant-review-circa-1859 .

It would be many more years before food writers, critics and journalists would hold the power to build reverence with the public regarding a fantastic meal, or humiliate and destroy a restaurant over a series of poor, inedible ones. Reviewers, in order to stay balanced and unbiased in their reviews, would don elaborate disguises in order to eat like everyone else-hopefully without special treatments or discovery.

A reviewer has the responsibility to describe the restaurant experience from the coat check person to the waiter who folds your napkin when you stand up. Each person who works in a restaurant is worthy of mention and should be as important a character as the head chef and the Maitre d’. They all play a part in this specific kind of theatre. It’s show time and I want to read the reviews. I want to be driven to dine at that restaurant, or steer well clear!

In this case of Copeland, I should have dug, “a bit deeper.” to find why this restaurant was mostly empty on a Saturday night.

Food writing and more serious food journalism exemplifies the reasoning that someone is interested in letting their readers know that there is a restaurant worthy of their visit, or a simply a mention for their shared imagination. Prior to 1859, no one had done this in the New York Times. Reflecting on the retirement of Frank Bruni as the Times’s restaurant critic, I wonder what our fascination is with the meals people are eating? Do we really care if the food is good or not? Some obviously do, otherwise we would have never had a man like Frank Bruni filling our stomachs and minds with his well chosen and satisfyingly delicious words describing the great, the good and not so good, restaurants in New York City.

I found with Copeland at the Westin Hotel that one reviewer’s (in this case not Frank Bruni’s) “Very Good” is another reviewer’s “needs much more work.” As a food journalist, I find myself influenced by the writing in New York Magazine’s Grub Street as much as I am with our local (to our town) foodie blogs in the New Jersey  Star Ledger restaurant review forum on NJ-Online. The local cognoscenti oozed over Copeland and their talented young chef. I wanted to ooze over him as well.

Although I enjoyed, over my past four or five visits, the “best burger in NJ” (a maybe on that one) at the bar, that wasn’t why I wanted to dine there. The reason was pretty clear at that time. I wanted to be influenced by a chef with a clear vision and purpose in his kitchen. I wanted to learn something from this “Very Good” review and be moved into that seemingly otherworldly place that restaurants like Nicholas in Middletown, NJ and Serenade in Chatham, NJ, hold in my stomach.

The immediacy and  power of the Internet as witnessed by Gary Vaynerchuk with his critically acclaimed success of the Wine Library and its golden egg, the eCommerce operations, exemplifies the explosion of eCommerce as a new sales medium, a new language if you will. Blogs from traditional and therefore serious media sources such as the Times,contain many valuable lessons for the restaurateur, if they would only take the time to read them and hopefully act upon this information.

The restaurant owner must re-train his mind to scope out this new channel of communication…To pay attention to the power of the media…To read what the media has to say- to guide the restaurant’s success or failure..As Marshall McLuhan says, the Media is the Message.

To grow the a business or fail takes careful attention on both accords. In order to succeed, every meal in a restaurant that calls itself “Very Good” must reflect the love, the passion and that specific sense of attention that the restaurateur took on when they opened the doors. Any less is unacceptable and only perpetuates the myth that good reviews make the restaurant and assure its success. Success is earned by careful consistency, rather than what was perceived as being assured because of a framed review placed conspicuously on a wall in the foyer.

It’s just not happening at Copeland  right now. That’s too bad. It’s a nice room even with the sports on the television monitors.

My take away here is: Cook well, serve good bread and teach your staff to smile. Success will follow.