What’s Missing From Reno’s Food Scene

Don't eat at home, eat out. 

What is that flavor? Is that lemon verbena?

The dish was lush, silky — if silk were conjured from chocolate, sugar and cream. It tastes so fresh, it’s like sipping rain.

 Do you see where we’re going with this?

 Everyone has opinions on everything. But food and drink rank among those subjects that tend to elicit strong opinions — which opinions people feel are inherently valid and worthy of wide release.

 We don’t make the same assumption of expertise about, say, auto repair or raising koi or the stock market, so why do so many people feel they’re experts on food and drink? And why do they feel (strongly) they should share those opinions in writing? (Yelp famously exploits this sense of entitlement as its business model.)

 The fact is, while many people want to write about food — from bloviating on Yelp to being legitimately published  — food writing follows the 10,000 hours rule. Which is to say, it takes a minimum of 10,000 working hours to become truly proficient in a professional endeavor.

 Where have all the words gone?

 Let’s bring this trundling tea trolley to the point. In Reno, for many years, we enjoyed local food writing that had achieved (if that’s the word) those 10,000 hours and then some. Indeed, the quality of this food writing was such that it would have been at home in a national publication.

 But this food writing went away, and now we’re left in Reno with a hodgepodge of food writing (let’s call it that), from whatever source, that delves into chicken wings or uses the word delicious too many times in one article or becomes delirious over the debut of another Chick-fil-A.

 Reno’s food and drink scene has improved significantly in the last 20 years. The local people who open restaurants and bars and food trucks and bakeries and breweries and distilleries and, you know, that home cookie hustle  — the people who invest their life savings in a really tough business — deserve good food writing that covers them.

 And then there’s the local politics of food. Just thinking, we are now a decade into Midtown food and drink culture. The mayor and certain Reno officials hyped Midtown like Thomas Keller himself was about to touch down. How did that hype work out? How many food and drink businesses have come and gone in Midtown? Is it a good place today to pursue that food and drink dream?

 Picon hopes for the return of good food writing in Reno. In the meantime, we’ll console ourselves with this punch. You know the one.