Let's start with a basic premise. A restaurant review is supposed to be an evaluation - an honest, informed, and appropriately critical look at the good and bad elements of the dining experiences at a specific venue, hopefully contrasted with similar places for the reader's benefit. This needs to be established up front because The Buffalo News hasn't published actual restaurant reviews for decades. In their place, longtime "News Restaurant Reviewer" Janice Okun has typically offered column after column of filler - the equivalent of all the junk and preservatives that shouldn't be in your food - mixed with only the tiniest shavings of meaty opinion. Rather than focusing on behind-the-scenes, personal details such as Okun's relationship with Buffalo News senior management, or the reasons why she hasn't actually retired, we're going to look mostly at her words. What follows is a long overdue discussion of the seven sins committed in her Dining Out column, and why they should not be allowed to continue - or be repeated by her eventual successors.

1. Okun's Columns Barely Qualify As "Reviews." This seems too basic to even mention, but merely filling a 650-word space by regurgitating the menu and discussing the venue does not constitute a proper review. Yet that's what Okun has done from week to week. She rarely renders meaningful opinions on the flavors or quality of the items ordered,¹ and often appears to be basing reviews upon only a single visit by two or three people, leaning heavily on text descriptions from the menu as column filler. Most of the items discussed seem to be ones that she hasn't actually tried, and relatively few words in many reviews actually discuss what the food tastes like. See Chipotle (the top dish is corn salsa, a condiment) and the straight-out wacky article on Dug's Dive for particularly pronounced examples.

The Solution: The News is a major newspaper with a multi-million dollar budget - not a blog or a modestly funded web site - and it leans heavily on local businesses for advertising revenue. (It even visits restaurants it has reviewed, before and after the review is published, asking for money in the form of advertisements.) It should, following the recommendations and ethical guidelines of the Association of Food Journalists, require and pay for two or more visits to a given restaurant. Ideally, four or six insightful people should visit each time to properly sample the menu, comment on the service, and issue meaningful opinions on the food quality. If the paper doesn't have enough space for the full proper review, it could easily publish an extended version of the printed article online.

2. Okun's Reviews Effectively Call Almost Everything Good Or Great. Okun uses a "four star" rating system in which virtually everything receives 3, 3.5, or 4 stars. By her own explanation, this means that almost everything covered is somewhere between "good" and "extraordinary." Lower ratings are exceedingly rare - a 2.5-star rating is infrequent, and a 1-star rating is seemingly impossible. Just as with its other execrable column, Cheap Eats, the scale is broken, and provides almost no differentiation between venues. Is the Indian restaurant Tandoori's better or worse than Taste of India given how The News rated them? That's impossible to say. One received four pennies, the other three stars. What does that actually mean?

The Solution: The News needs to throw away all of its prior ratings, which were issued under transparently broken systems, and start fresh. It has muddled its ratings with changes to the number of stars, and even issued a seemingly impossible rating (see the 4.5-star review of SeaBar, notably pulled from the News's web site). A new, consistent, and universally applied rating system should really be put in place.

3. Okun Reviews And Issues High Ratings To Places Where She Knows The Owners. Take the review of O'Connell's American Bistro, which she interrupts to mention that she talked with the chef mid-meal, or her review of Kuni's, where she noted her meal was custom-tailored to her tastes by the chef, "who knows us as semi-wusses." Both places received four stars. And perhaps because she's "definitely known to the management," other details (see comments) about O'Connell's that might have been important to some customers were left out.

The Solution: The News should not employ reviewers who have ties to local restaurants, and should probably have more than one reviewer covering high-end restaurants so that (the perception of) impropriety can be avoided.

4. Okun's Reviews Are Littered With Errors. Factual errors compete with formatting, grammatical, and typographical errors for the savvy reader's attention.² Here's just one particularly confusing example: "You’ll note the interesting twists applied to some of the classic favorites on the menu" at Blue Buffalo, she claims before sprouting off some street knowledge. "The Muffuletta ($8), that historic New Orleans Italian sandwich, sprouts the salami, ham, mortadella, mozzarella and provolone that you would expect, but it also sprouts olive salad." What's the twist - two odd uses of the word "sprouts" in a sentence? No, the twist is apparently supposed to be the olive salad. Olive salad is a key ingredient in the original recipe. Apparently neither she nor her editors knew that. Even if you haven't visited New Orleans' Central Grocery, which invented the sandwich (and has the recipe hanging at the counter as shown in our photo above), you can look the ingredients up on the Internet. It's free.

The Solution: The News should hire or assign a new fact checker, copy editor, and web developer for this section of the paper. Also, new food reviewers.

5. Her Poor Food Choices Are Obvious To Savvy Diners. This one could go on for a half-dozen paragraphs - we have tons of examples - but it needed to be kept short and sweet. Reviewing one of the area's only semi-authentic Chinese restaurants, Gin Gin, she orders as if she's at a food court or buffet line, and waxes on about the delicious packaged fortune cookies. Visiting the Brazilian steak house Brasa - a rare example of an increasingly popular national trend appearing locally - she says that she "overindulged at the salad buffet before the meat appeared," the sort of mistake someone familiar with all-you-can-eat Brazilian steak would never have made. At the sushi restaurant Kuni's, she offers only one word of opinion on a single piece of sushi - cooked eel - before rendering a four-star verdict. And desserts? At the steakhouse Russell's, she "chose a Lemon Tart and a Giant Cookie," neither of which she describes except to complain that they were topped with fake whipped cream. Similarly, at Dick & Jenny's, she picked a Fudge Brownie. Verdict: "pretty good, but, let’s face it, fudge brownies are always pretty good." So why order it? And who in their right mind would select a cookie at a steakhouse?

The Solution: The News should hire restaurant reviewers who are familiar with contemporary dining - high-end and low-end alike - and capable of making useful menu choices, researching the options beforehand and knowing the difference between great, good, okay, and bad versions of dishes. Reviewing the fortune cookies at a Chinese restaurant is a cheap, useless exercise, even worse than doing the same thing at an Italian place. But Okun does, that, too. (See, e.g., La Dolce Vita: "Homemade cakes, cannoli, gelato -- all are fine, but you probably should follow our example and go for the homemade cookies.")

6. The Photographs Are Almost Uniformly Useless. Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words - except The Buffalo News. The single photo that accompanies one of Okun's reviews will almost invariably be one of the same two images, every week: a wide shot of people sitting at a table, or of a restaurant staffer holding a dish. Sometimes, The News squeezes both concepts into the same photo. Is there a bonus for that?

The Solution: Take a minimum of three photographs: one of the menu, one of the venue, and one of several dishes on a table. The menu image could appear online, eliminating Okun's need to fill the "review" with a recitation of its contents and ingredients. Ideally, there would be more pictures of the food. No one, except possibly the people in the picture, cares about seeing patrons sitting at a table.

7. The Paper Has Mysterious Problems With Timeliness. When we visited Russell's soon after it opened in March 2009, we expected that The News would similarly review it in a flash. It's run by one of the area's most visible restauranteurs, so it's noteworthy, and moreover, we just happened to be there on a night when Janice Okun was apparently there with a group of people. We overheard a member of the group talking openly about whether Janice would be reviewing that night - she wasn't. And she didn't. For whatever reason, nearly two long years passed before she got around to covering Russell's, giving a nearly perfect rating to what we've repeatedly found to be an only passable place. Was she waiting for it to work out the kinks? Or something else? One can only guess how long she planned to wait after her essay on Chipotle's menu to review Lloyd, Buffalo's first food truck, which launched last year.

The Solution: Important new restaurants - arguably even unimportant ones - should be initially reviewed no sooner than one month after opening, and no longer than three months. A preview can come earlier and a follow-up can come later, but the community shouldn't have to wait two years for a major, expensive restaurant to be reviewed for the first time. Growing pains are a natural part of any new business, but a restaurant should really have its act together after the first month or so.

There's a lot more that could be said about restaurant reviews in The Buffalo News, but we're going to leave it there for the time being. Over the years, readers have complained to us about Okun's inane writing, her apparent chumminess with some of her subjects, and a major disconnect between her reviews and the reality of dining at the restaurants. These problems are as recent as last week's review of Tantalus, and go as far back as decades in our memories. It is astonishing and frankly shameful that a major newspaper could publish such poor restaurant reviews for so long. One of our readers yesterday attributed this to Buffalo's supposed "love of the mediocre." We disagree. Buffalo is filled with utterly decent people who have suffered for years with too little actual insight and poor guidance from their local paper. They have learned to live with mediocrity, but in their hearts, they would be overjoyed to have more and better options. This is our chance to make that happen, starting in a small but meaningful way.

Sign our petition to replace the restaurant staff of The Buffalo News. Janice Okun and the paper's other "food critics" have had years to lead the way towards a better understanding of the world around us, but have barely been able to see the light when it's shining in their faces. They have drooled over restaurants that would be written off as forgettable or awful in larger cities, and shrugged off or ignored places that have attempted to bring high-quality foods to Western New York from outside the area. It is a sad statement that the News may make more visits to a restaurant to chase its advertising dollars than to sample the menu. The problems are like crabgrass - an infestation that won't go away unless the entire lawn is replaced. It's time to say enough's enough, clean up the yard, and start anew.

We truly appreciate your support for Buffalo Chow. It was created because of our passion for great food and restaurants, not as filler to sell advertisements. Help us, and our community, by signing the petition to fix The Buffalo News. With your assistance, we can make Western New York a smarter and more diverse place to dine out.

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¹ Instead of commenting on quality, she tends to focus on quantity - portions are commonly described as big, large, or huge. "They weren’t kidding when they called the other part of the menu 'Large Plates,' " she said about Hutch's. "The companion’s Bistro Steak is a 9-ounce filet atop a grilled Portobello with Maytag blue cheese and a wine sauce — there were garlic mashed potatoes on that plate, too." Wow. How could one person eat a 9-ounce steak?

² There have been too many technical problems with Okun's reviews to do this particular "sin" justice above. Many reviews published on the site include "&# 9733;&# 9733;&# 9733;" or &# 9733;&# 9733;& #189;" marks in place of ratings; the title of the Nektar review comes up as "Nektar: Chic surroundings,< br/ >imaginative dishes are so sweet," and reviews such as Schimschack's are complete layout messes. Dining Out also falls prey to common tricks of the trade, such as citing the value of Wine Spectator awards, which have famously even been issued to a fake restaurant. A long-standing restaurant reviewer should know better than this.