It's certainly not a scandal by any stretch in 2025 terms, but the Chronicle is going public with a reader letter and its restaurant critic is trying to quash criticism that she perhaps wasn't objective in a recent review.

A Chronicle reader apparently witnessed restaurant critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan getting hugs from the owners and other special treatment on a recent visit to hot new Potrero/Mission restaurant Side A. Chung Fegan is looking to get ahead of any potential criticism after that reader wrote in, trying to explain in her Bite Curious newsletter that the situation was not as it seeemed.

Chung Fegan, who reviewed Side A for the paper last month and raved about one of their menu items as "one of the best dishes I’ve eaten all year," was reportedly spotted on her third visit to the restaurant, being fairly chummy with the owners, husband and wife Parker and Caroline Brown.

The reader, named Kevin, noted that Chung Fegan was greeted "like family" when she came in, and received "anything but typical" service "with frequent check-ins from servers and the Browns themselves."

Kevin added, "Having seen up close what her chummy relationship can be like with her subject. I will have to wonder how objective she can really be going forward."

Chung Fegan defends the situation thusly: She is not, in fact, close friends with the Browns, but she was not anonymous in her visits — as she rarely is anywhere — and they do "have friends in common." She adds that the Browns are unusually friendly with a lot of guests, and they are very Midwestern "huggers," as it were.

Further, she says, she has been greeted with equal warmth and familiarity at restaurants where she was not clocked as a critic, merely as a repeat guest and potential new regular, like La Traviata in the Mission, a 50-year-old family-run spot that she reviewed last fall.

She says, being a non-anonymous critic, when she's interacting with sommeliers, servers, and other staff at a restaurant, "oftentimes all of them know who I am."

She says she remains a "professional" friendliness in all these situation, but she adds, "That doesn’t mean that I’m going to become buddy-buddy with chefs and restaurateurs, but San Francisco is a small town, and no doubt I will continue to intersect with people I cover."

This raises an interesting dilemma for Chung Fegan, who one presumes could have a long tenure at the Chronicle and wield the kind of influence that Michael Bauer once did. Bauer claimed anonymity throughout his tenure at the paper, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to keep photos of himself off the internet. It was an open secret in the restaurant world that any publicist worth their salt had not only photos of him to share but the aliases on his corporate credit cards, and the aliases he frequently used to book reservations — a person can only remember so many lies, there must be some repeats.

It was therefore a given, especially in the last decade or so of Bauer's long tenure, that he was rarely ever actually dining anonymously, and restaurants had to do a little a dance to play along with the anonymity game — or, the many owners and chefs he'd known for years just dropped the charade altogether and came to say hello.

Since the dawn of the internet, the notion of the anonymous critic has been all but forgotten — though, she says, her colleague, Associate Critic Cesar Hernandez, has managed to keep all but perfect anonymity in his restaurant visits.

And, with this comes the question of whether a contemporary critic can ever hope to get a fully objective, unbiased perspective on a restaurant, when they're likely to be recognized, the dishes sent to their table are likely to be treated with extra-special care — for very obvious business reasons! — and they are likely receive "anything but typical" service, while an average diner might be left feeling ignored in the same situation.

It's certainly clear when Chung Fegan was sent this godawful looking steak a couple months back at Park Tavern, someone besides the kitchen had seriously dropped the ball.

Photo by Etienne Boulanger