In the age before everyone could make their opinions on restaurants widely known, newspaper critics wielded enormous power over restaurant owners — or so the owners thought.

"They can make you or break you, yet you seldom get to meet them," said the CBC's Naomi Loeb, introducing a profile on restaurant critics for an investigative CBC news program in 1980. "But just what is it that they're after?"

Joanne Kates, a reviewer for the Globe and Mail, said she was alert to "canned and frozen food."

She also looked for a comfortable environment and attentive service.

"I'll look for a maître d' who will look as if he or she is happy that you're there, and give you the best table that is available."

Restaurants that served food on fire were apparently common enough that Kates was wary of them.

"I look for an absence of flambé tables. If they're flaming everything in the restaurant, then I think they'd do better to apply to the Toronto fire department."

She was wearing a floppy hat and a large pair of dark sunglasses to obscure her identity on TV. But not all critics took the same approach.

Jim White of the Toronto Star said he made his mission clear to restaurateurs, but not until after finishing his meal.

"After I've paid my bill ... I'll introduce myself, and I'll start asking questions about what I've just eaten," he said.

But Kates stayed mum on her reason for eating at a restaurant, because she didn't want to know the owner's situation in a way that might change the review she wrote.

"If you're a restaurateur, and you and I are sitting at a restaurant table ... I'm going to know all these human details about you, I'm going to feel sympathy for you," she explained. "And that sympathy is going to make it hard for me to be as brutally honest as I really need to be."

The Old Pickle Barrel in north Toronto was on the wrong end of one such "brutally honest" review.

"The lobster could have born in 1950, it was so tough," Kates wrote. "To say that the cauliflower is well-cooked is like saying that the pope is Catholic or fish swim."

Owner Jerry Weisbatt said the review initially made him angry.

"I spoke to a lawyer. He told me, 'By the time you get into court, Jerry ... it'll be so far down the line you'll have forgotten about it."

Talking to Kates again, Loeb told her that Weisblatt said his business had dropped by 20 per cent. But Kates was unapologetic.

"Did you ask him what his profit margin is?" she asked. "He's got a clientele in his community who are going to say, 'Oh that Joanne Kates, she's got a mouth full of sawdust ... I like the Old Pickle Barrel.'

"I think he's going to be OK."

She was right: as of 2021, the Pickle Barrel has 13 locations in southern Ontario.