Soleil Ho has been the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic since 2019. She had a hard act to follow in replacing her predecessor, Michael Bauer. I give her credit for doing a good job. She liberally expanded the traditional beat of a restaurant critic to include pop-ups, food trucks and little mom-and-pop ethnic eateries. But something she wrote yesterday bothers me.
Soleil is clearly a person of progressive bent. Her column over the weekend—originally published last December—was a plaintive musing on whether she, as a restaurant critic, is “fueling gentrification in the Bay Area” by doing her job. She cites San Francisco’s Mission District as an example. Long a sprawling neighborhood of Latinos, since the early 2000s The Mission been changing. Hot new brewpubs and chic bars came in, along with trendy restaurants. Yuppies began buying up the run-down old Victorians and sprucing them up to become multimillion dollar homes. Classy (and expensive) new gyms and hipster coffee shops replaced taquerias to cater to the lifestyle preferences of more affluent new residents. While it’s true that the Mission is still overwhelmingly Latino, there’s no question that it’s a neighborhood in transition. And Soleil worries that she’s part of the problem.
She admits to reviewing many of the new restaurants in the Mission, but she asks, “[H]ave I been actively complicit in normalizing its gentrification?” This causes her to get into a long reflection on gentrification, its causes and history, its connection with urban development, the role food plays in rising rents and displacement of poorer people, and her own role in all this. It’s clear that Soleil feels guilt. “The actors in the machine, including myself,” she concludes, “could do more to acknowledge our roles in this process [of gentrification]”, although she never spells out what that “more” might be. I mean, it’s not as if Soleil is going to quit the San Francisco Chronicle because she’s wracked with guilt.
I have some sympathy with Soleil, and to some degree, she’s right. But I question her allowing her personal thoughts and feelings to invade her column. The fact is, people don’t care what Soleil Ho thinks about gentrification, any more than we’d care what a sportswriter thinks. People read Soleil Ho to find out about restaurants, to hear about the food, the chefs, to discover interesting new places to dine. When I was a wine critic, I avoided topics that were political; not only would my boss have objected, but so would my readers.
But the San Francisco Chronicle has changed direction drastically over the last three years, ever since a management team that is frankly progressive was hired by the Hearst Corporation to replace the former team. With that change came the newspaper’s startling wokeness, which ranges from anti-police content in news articles to letting Cat Brooks have a column to—well, Soleil Ho. In many respects, we’ve been watching the Chronicle—once a great newspaper—die a slow death.
I don’t mean to dismiss Soleil’s concerns. But, really, her column just isn’t the place to air them. It’s self-indulgent, and a disservice to her readers—especially since she has no solutions to offer.
Steve Heimoff