Food writing, and even restaurant reviews, didn’t begin in the 1970s. A century earlier, Marcus Clarke was writing a series of columns for The Herald titled “Something to Eat”, and ‘the Vagabond’, aka journalist J.S. James, was describing the offerings of Melbourne’s sixpenny restaurants.  Fast forward to the 1950s,  when restaurateur and entertainer Geoff Brooke authored a column in The Argus which, under the heading of “Your Night Out“, suggested options for dining around town, followed by a show. However, his “reviews” were limited to naming the key personnel, the prices, the type of music, and the specialty dish. (At Gini’s Restaurant in Toorak, the house special was American-style chicken for 10 shillings and sixpence.)

Australia’s first restaurant guide appeared in 1968, authored by the television chef Graham Kerr.  Graham Kerr’s Guide to Good Eating in Sydney, was followed, later the same year, by Graham Kerr’s Guide to Good Eating in Melbourne. Again, descriptions were brief and there was no rating system, with readers left to assume that mere inclusion in the guide guaranteed a standard of food that was, at least, acceptable.

The in-depth restaurant reviews we now expect from newspapers and magazines had their beginnings in the USA in the 1950s, with Craig Claiborne, the food critic of the New York Times. Claiborne developed an ethical framework for professional reviewers. His precepts included that the reviewer should be anonymous, the publication should pay for the meals, and the restaurant should be allowed a grace period after opening before it was reviewed.

In Australia, the 1970s saw the emergence of the restaurant review as a regular feature of newspapers’ lifestyle sections. Sydney advertising man, Leo Schofield’s first review appeared in The Sunday Australian in 1971. It was of Melbourne’s Cafe Florentino, praising the ox tongue Madeira, the vitello saute con spinachi and the “nubile camembert ripe for rape” (terminology he would be unlikely to use today).

Schofield continued to write for The Australian and The Telegraph for six years and, during the 1970s, produced four editions of the food guide Eating Out in Sydney. He went on to write restaurant reviews for The Sydney Morning Herald, the Bulletin, Mode, and Gourmet magazines and, in 1984, was the inaugural editor of The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide.

In 2007, reflecting on the early days of his food writing career, Schofield wrote:

Back then, chefs were anonymous toilers in airless kitchens. In 1974, when I compiled the first-ever serious guide to dining in this city (it later morphed into The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide), many of the restaurants included began with Le, La or L’. French Provincial was the go. The only lettuce one encountered in a salad was the iceberg and the pomme de terre du jour was the Idaho potato, a specimen the size of a rugby ball, peeled, wrapped in aluminium foil, baked then ceremoniously opened at your table, split and dolloped with industrial quantities of sour cream and chives.

There were bumps in the road. A scathing 1984 review of the Sydney seafood restaurant, Blue Angel, landed Schofield and The Sydney Morning Herald in court. The restaurant was awarded $100,000 in damages.

Schofield was not the only influential food critic to emerge in the 1970s. Beginning in 1972, Richard Beckett, writing as the satirical character Sam Orr, began penning restaurant reviews for the feisty left-wing newspaper Nation Review. His reviews were irreverent and aimed to subvert the pomposity of more elitist food writers. One of his articles examined places that “would kill a brown dog”. Beckett also produced a guide: Sydney Restaurant Guide, published by Angus and Robertson in 1977.

Melbourne, too, had its notable food critics. Restaurant reviews by Eric Page began appearing in The Herald in 1971, under the moniker of “Hortense”. Page reportedly won his position as the paper’s food writer by consuming the most pies in the company’s free staff cafeteria. His book, Where to Eat in Melbourne, was published in 1979 and featured a star rating system, awarding just one restaurant, Fanny’s, five stars. Over at The Age, Peter Smark took time out from his distinguished journalistic career to write restaurant reviews, culminating in yet another guide: Eating Out in Melbourne, published in 1977.

Over the following decades, these pioneers were followed by many, many more, but you could argue that the role of professional food critics has, to some degree, been usurped. Today, we largely get our restaurant reviews online. Even the longstanding Good Food Guide is now an app, not a book. While we still see reviews from the professionals, under a wide range of banners including newspapers, magazines and websites like Broadsheet, the process has been democratised. Anyone can write a review, either on their own blog or on one of the many review sites such as Tripadvisor, OpenTable and Yelp.

So can you trust the amateur reviews? Maybe. Most sites try to block astroturfing (writing a favourable review of your own establishment), but it all comes down to personal opinion. There will be haters. There will be fans. Maybe it’s safer to rely on the professionals, after all.