Quote Originally Posted by swingline View Post
But there’s no evidence of this.

Look at it this way. Let’s say you’re a Vietnamese immigrant living in the Madison Heights/Troy Vietnamese community and you follow your life’s ambition to open a Vietnamese restaurant in your community. You lease some space on John R, invest a hard earned $200k to completely redo the space and open your restaurant. Your restaurant offers nothing original that can’t be found in a half dozen other places within a couple miles or so. Your kitchen is spotty but not awful. Some dishes ok, others not as good as the nearby places. Bottom line: you have a bright, clean new place that serves its customers commonplace, ok food. Do you deserve to have the most visible restaurant reviewer that writes for the largest newspaper in Michigan write a review of your place that savages you and essentially threatens your livelihood all because of the transgression of a lack of originality? How is this example any different than the Empire Kitchen review? Responsible restaurant criticism doesn’t mean that a critic has to become a shill, but it should mean that highly negative reviews are limited to the truly bad places where the food and service indicate that the owners really don’t care about their customers.
The evidence is the restaurant itself.

It seems like there would be a difference between a humble immigrant trying to make it, and a corporate/fast food backer who pours in money expecting they can do what a half dozen other restaurants do in a 1 mile radius and think it's something great and get away with it. That's hubris and I think that's what the article was about.