Critic’s Notebook Goodbye, avatar The Morning News’ restaurant critic ditches anonymity, aiming to broaden Dallas’ dining discussion

This is me, outing myself.

I’m Leslie Brenner, and I am extremely pleased to meet you.

In the best of all possible worlds, dining incognito is the ideal way for a restaurant critic to operate — and it’s the way I was able to work for the first few years I was on the dining beat here in Dallas. But now I’m going to work in a different way, abandoning what Adam Platt, New York magazine’s restaurant critic, referred to as the “dated charade” of anonymity when he unmasked himself ten months ago.

Even before the Internet, it was nearly impossible for a prominent restaurant critic in any city to stay invisible very long. OK, so you make reservations using aliases and pay with credit cards issued in phony names, but then things play out like this: You publish a review of a small restaurant, and the chef or owner pieces together who you were from the dishes you discussed, or from a service anecdote. Next time you show up, they know you. The servers memorize your face. One moves to a different restaurant, and when you show up to review it — completely incognito, or so you think — he points you out to all the other servers.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook? Forget it. Someone snaps an iPhone photo and it goes viral before you can say “I’ll have the duck.”

And in the age of Twitter and Facebook? Forget it. Someone snaps an iPhone photo and it goes viral before you can say “I’ll have the duck.”

Our readers benefited from an excellent incognito run when I began, thanks to the fact that I had painstakingly scrubbed cyberspace of my image before arriving here, and I knew not a soul. For more than four years, a Google image search of my name brought up lots of faces, but none of them were mine.

But I had also published a number of books, and restaurateurs began to catch on that they could buy a copy of one of my old titles for 47 cents on eBay and they’d have a photo to tape up in the kitchen. Sure it was tiny, and it depicted a much younger, thinner me. But it was a photo.

After several years of engaging with increasing frequency in the ridiculous ritual of pretending not to be recognized by chefs and restaurateurs who are pretending not to recognize me, I’m dropping the ritual. It’s dated. And it’s a distraction.