February 26 2003

AT OUR ANNUAL Chinese New Year's dinner, the question arose (as it seems to annually) what the point of writing about restaurants is. As this is a matter in which I might be said to have a professional stake, I offered an opinion: that the job of a restaurant writer is not to offer opinions but to describe the experience of being at a particular place at a particular time, with a particular set of expectations, past, and of course quirks – the irreducible likes and dislikes – that give human color to what otherwise would be little more than a desiccated arrangement of words.

It matters, in other words, who has experienced a restaurant and then tells others about it by writing a piece, or pieces. It matters too that readers are familiar with the writer – that they know from past readings the writer's angle of approach. So the use of "I" is not only appropriate but necessary; it brings a warmth and intimacy to the restaurant-writing exercise, and like a movie camera, it helps readers orient themselves to a scene by giving them a definite set of senses to (vicariously) perceive through. But "I" sings a siren song, too. It tempts, it begs to be used, and it is easily overused. Like a weed, it can choke whole tracts of prose, until "I" becomes the story and the story simply implodes.

My inner scorekeeper, a perverse but convenient figure, tracks "I" usage not only in my own prose but in that of other writers. It is particularly sensitive to "I" as an opener. To launch a piece about a restaurant with an "I" is to set a tone of braying self-importance that is going to be very difficult to clear away if one hopes to say anything of interest, anything even noticeable, about the restaurant ostensibly in question. The inaugural "I" is a warbling, stage-hogging Ethel Merman or Martha Ray; it is two-year-old Bart Simpson clanging pans together and chanting "Quiet! Quiet!" while his bedridden mother pleads for, yes, quiet.

The inner scorekeeper has noticed that a certain writer of local provenance cannot seem to resist the opening "I." Of this writer's nine most recent pieces, six have begun with "I," another with "I've," yet another with "Once I." In the ninth, a heroic exercise of self-restraint delayed "I" until the fifth word of the opening sentence – a bait-and-switch gambit, really, that lured at least one reader with the brief promise of a less overbearing tour guide.

Name a name? This might be the Age of Ashcroft, but some things you still have to figure out yourself.