Justyna Adamczyk created the Polish version of the cult Gault et Millau guide, which is a paragon of reliable, factual culinary criticism. She herself is a mine of knowledge in many fields: ranging from creating luxury experiences, through business strategy, to horse riding. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to ask her about the ins and outs of food reviewing processes, the characteristics of the ideal food critic, trends that are gaining importance and many, many more.

Tomasz: Is food reviewing currently on the verge of extinction? Is it being replaced by anonymous rankings on social media?

Justyna: Platforms for anonymous reviews, such as Trip Advisor, will probably always exist. Social media and the internet in general have greatly accelerated their development. You could make an analogy with football: when the championship starts, suddenly we have 38 million coaches in the country who know exactly what strategy to adopt, who should play  in the game. It is the same as  in culinary. Whether one goes to a restaurant once a year to celebrate a child's Holy Communion or a neighbour's wedding, or goes out every night of the week but only to chain places, everyone feels like a food critic. And that’s great, because I see no reason why they should feel otherwise.

Professional food reviewing, on the other hand, will become an increasingly elitist profession. Such people, who are able to talk knowledgeably about what the new trend is what to pay attention to, which is the outstanding and masterful thing, will always be useful.

An interesting counter-proposal, not necessarily competition, for professional food reviewing will be artificial intelligence. It will check, by means of algorithms tracking likes, where people who we recognise as culinary experts go. In this way, the AI will be able to suggest, I suppose accurately, the next places you can visit.

Tomasz: What then characterises a good food critic?

Justyna: The first and foremost quality that should characterise someone who evaluates food and someone's cooking style is honesty. The critic should not have any interest in telling someone a nice thing or promoting them, let alone criticising them.

Secondly, it's good to have a factual understanding of food. You should know a lot about the products, the techniques, the correctness of their use. You should visit hundreds, or even thousands of restaurants, preferably on a very different level, from street food to fine dining and eat at many chefs, ideally all over the world, to know where trends come from: who the authors are and who just copies them.

And finally, maybe I should have started with this: you have to have an aptitude for tasting  food. I have been asked many times about this famous sensitivity of the palate. It is exactly the same as with any other aptitude, whether for sport or for playing an instrument. There is a lot to learn, but it is necessary to have a gift from heaven that makes you good at it. Personally, I have no aptitude for music, and no matter how long I studied, I would never create a work that could be called real music, despite the fact that I would probably play the notes correctly. It is the same with tasting food. As with any gift, it has to be carefully nurtured to be useful. Even if someone was born as Usain Bolt, if he doesn't train for several hours a day but just lazily drags himself off the sofa in the afternoon, he will still get out of breath before he runs 20 metres. It's the same with tasting: if you have a knack for it, and it's easy to check it with the right tests, you have to practise it.

Tomasz: Is the ability to cook useful for a food critic?

Justyna: Yes, however, I know many food critics who are completely unable to cook. The main reason is that they simply don't have time to do it because of permanent travels. I love cooking and sometimes it works really well. But there was a time  when I spent at least 200 nights in hotels and ate in at least 300 restaurants a year. If you think about those numbers, you don't really have the time or the reason to cook.

Tomasz: How should the process of assessing a dish proceed?

Justyna: This is quite a broad issue, as there are many subjective aspects of assessing food. However, when we take responsibility for preparing a guide with rankings, it would be appropriate to build criteria. In the case of Gault et Millau, these criteria are very developed and we worked on them for a long time, updating and adapting them to different markets.

First of all, when we evaluate restaurant food, we do not evaluate only what is on the plate. The whole culinary experience counts: it would be difficult to be tempted, even in theory, to take a dish out of the context in which it appears.

Once we have worked through  the context of the place , we can proceed to the food itself. The role of ingredients is worth emphasizing; their quality, origin, seasonality, and the sense of selection in the context of the style of a given restaurant and chef. What function do they play in this complex and coherent entirety? Let me add that coherence is one of my beloved words, both in business and in culinary. Why are these five or seven ingredients brought together on a plate? Sometimes chefs, which is highly appreciated by the audience, talk about the idea behind this and not another combination of ingredients: some plant grew in the forest next to another one, ripening at the same time, so it is natural to put them together. If it's a game season, the obvious accompaniment will be forest herbs and mushrooms, and to freshen things up, cranberries, for example.

Another thing is the techniques and their selection for the dish. Some time ago there was a great fashion for the sous-vide method, i.e. cooking products enclosed in bags in a water bath at a specific temperature. Some people went crazy and tried to prepare steaks this way. It is up to us, on the basis of the knowledge we have, to assess whether the technique was properly chosen for the product and the idea. You can do very strange things with different products, but will you maximise their potential?

Let us go further. Let us imagine that we have an excellent product, perfectly technically prepared in an optimally equipped kitchen and beautifully served. None of this matters if the dish is drenched in a curry-style sauce made of twenty spices, and all you can smell is a gigantic amount of chilli? At times like this, I'd love to rebuke the chef and ask him how he could waste such a great product, such a coherent idea. Therefore, the next thing to be evaluated is the seasoning, the extraction of flavours: levels of salt, other spices, and the accuracy and purposefulness of this seasoning.

The criteria described above are based on an intellectual level of evaluation which, in turn, is based on competence. We can scale the scores and express them in percentages. But the most important thing is still the tasting. Does it all just taste good together? This is the most subjective part, where we can discuss how objective the evaluator is.

Tomasz: And how to judge dishes that are so innovative that they do not fit into the traditional categories  and generally accepted canons?

Justyna: It takes hundreds of visits to restaurants. Eating at the restaurants run by the greatest chefs:  Rene Redzepi's, Massimo Bottura's, Mauro Colagrec's, the Roca brothers', Alberto Adria's, we build a comparative platform, points of reference. Each of them has a completely different style, but each is a maximalist in his genius and the coherence of what he does.

Then there is the product knowledge. When we train Gault et Millau inspectors, for example, we go to an abbatoir  where we practice meat cutting. We identify all the cuts ourselves and even taste the individual raw cuts of meat. We listen to the professionals, who tell us which cuts are most frequently swapped and how to spot fraud. It is the same with cheeses. If we are to speak about them, we must not only taste many types, but also have the knowledge of the basics of their production technology. When we train ourselves to taste vegetables, we compare the industrial, widely available ones with those which are the best, from selected suppliers. We check the differences in taste, aroma, texture, to know where the ideal is

Tomasz: Can Poles  talk about food?

Justyna: Yes, I think that we have more and more freedom to communicate using the culinary language ,and the courage to say what we like and what we don't like. I hope that more and more people stop being embarrassed by what they think should be said. Let's take the example of a sommelier who describes wine bouquets using sophisticated words, and then there comes silence at the table because everyone is afraid to say anything, as it might be considered profane.

Everyone has plenty of them: from picking aromatic strawberries in grandma's garden, to the smell of the forest when you picked your first mushrooms, to the smells of smoked meat or freshly picked plums stolen from your neighbour over the fence. You smiled, and that's good, because there are many such memories which evoke an inner, warm smile and make us feel good.

Tomasz: Which trends of the last several months will stay with us and which will pass?

Justyna:Over the past few months, you could see a huge acceleration of trends that were already apparent. From this perspective, nothing new has happened. However, everything has galloped forward. For example, fine dining, which is very formal and demanding in its reception.It wasn't  very popular in 2019 and is even less popular  in 2021. In the latest edition of the Gault et Millau guide there were three restaurants awarded four hats out of a possible five. None of them exist today. There were more than twenty restaurants with three hats - half have ceased to operate. The more relaxed, unpretentious a place is, the better it holds up. So we are seeing a trend of loosening ties, removing tablecloths and starched shirts.

Casual dining used to be simple, undemanding food made from basic ingredients. Today, this style has become much richer: dishes are of very good quality, made from refined products, but served in a relaxed, thoughtful form. Such cuisine is served by many good restaurants, such as Port Royale, Andrzej Polan's Polana Smaków or Klonn, located in the place of the old Atelier Amaro. You can go there without a suit or an evening dress, sit down with friends and spend a super cool evening, order different things to share, eat with your fingers. Less formality, more quality.

Another trend is natural wines and orange wines in particular, without chemicals, which boldly show the personality of the winemaker. We are now observing a fashion for wines from our part of Europe, from Slovenia, through Slovakia to the Czech Republic, Austria and a piece of Germany. Also those places which were not perceived as interesting for wine, such as Georgia or Moldavia, are gaining importance. It is great to observe the growing quality and popularity of Polish wines.

Tomasz: When talking to you, it is impossible not to mention luxury. What does it mean to you?

Justyna: I have just started a course on luxury brand management, which I developed and co-lead at SWPS University. We devote an entire year to this subject.

So if we approach it in a professional, business-scientific way, we have to say that no one has yet prepared a definition of luxury that everyone would agree on. So you have asked the perfect question, to which there is no good answer.

As a business strategist, however, I am most interested in how luxury is shaping trends. Fortunately, after many decades of being enthralled by glitz, big, exaggerated logos and other attributes that screamed loudly but said little, luxury has returned to its feel-good status. It has moved to a balanced place that creates smart trends. One of the most important ones that I cheer for is social responsibility and all that we call sustainability in English. Even the great, coveted and dreamed-of Louis Vuitton has started marketing second-hand items. One of the most expensive hotels featured in my programme "Embassies of Luxury", where a night costs as much as a studio apartment in a medium-sized city in Poland, is made mostly of logs fished from the ocean. All guests have a carbon footprint and no beef is served at all, the production of which pollutes our planet most. We can smile wryly if we like, but we cannot ignore the fact that it is the luxury brands that are being followed by a whole wave of imitators from the lower end of the market. This means that responsibility for the planet and prudent consumption will be in vogue for decades to come, for which I am keeping my fingers crossed.

For me, luxury is definitely about quality, not price. Anyway, this was the motto on the cover of each guidebook.

And it is not a happy smile, rather one full of disbelief and wondering who and why needs to treat his complexes in this way, when this money can be spent on things that represent true quality.

Speaking of caring for the environment, I have a question about the market for vegan luxury goods. Does such a market exist or is it in the pipeline? Until now, Veganism appeared to me as a need rather than a luxury, which I associated more with expensive steaks, caviar, seafood...

But let's hold our horses! And truffles? We can indulge in gold flakes too, although I don't recommend that, as they don't have any meaningful taste appeal. The vegan luxury market is and will continue to grow tremendously. There are more and more sublime quality things not so much aimed at vegans, but simply vegan. Veuve Clicquot, which I am an ambassador for, is a vegan champagne. There are more and more wines with this designation. Some people might be surprised, wondering if there could be anything non-wegan in wines And yes, there is . At several stages of the winemaking process it is  a standard practice to use elements of animal origin.

There is also the whole area of fashion. One of my favourite artists, Anna Orska, a gorgeous girl who embodies class, charm and modesty, which is my beloved combination, released a series of fantastic handbags made from vegan leather a few weeks ago. They look just like leather but are made from fruit waste, for example apple peels, bananas, pineapple leaves. They look wonderful, they wear great. I wear them all the time and love them. It shows that we can replace things that we would think are not replaceable.

Tomasz: How do you prepare a luxury experience without spending a fortune? For example, at home?

Justyna: Preparing luxury experiences is my area, the whole experiential luxury that I will be lecturing about. As I have already mentioned, luxury does not always have to be expensive. However, it requires attention, knowledge and a strong competence base.

As for an example, I do not want to give advice in the style of popular magazines, but you can pour champagne in good glasses, serve simple dishes but composed of selected products on very good tableware, with good cutlery and napkins. Play your favourite music in the background. The only thing we have to take care of is good company!

Tomasz: Finally, I would still like to ask you the inevitable question about the pandemic. What did  closing off large parts of the spheres of normal life teach you personally?

Justyna: It allowed us to separate  those things that seemed necessary and indispensable, but they merely served us to kill the time and fill our schedules.  It allowed us to separate the wheat from the chaff and to clean the tablecloth on the table, if I may be allowed a restaurant metaphor. I cleared my social calendar from a lot of small talk and entered into a more limited version of intellectually and emotionally interesting relationships. The same was true about business . I was in a constant rush. Pandemic let me sit back and relax from the turmoil, the subsequent deadlines. To think about what I want to do.

Tomasz: At the very end, I'd like to ask a series of less serious questions to get to know you even better.