How Writer Soleil Ho Reimagined Restaurant Criticism

Before a national audience, the San Francisco Chronicle-columnist reimagined the role of restaurant critic by eliminating starred reviews, considering public transportation, and prioritizing ADA accessibility and plant-based options.
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Soleil Ho

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One brisk evening last spring, Soleil Ho dressed in thrifted drag and set off for an unusual assignment: reporting incognito from a secretive gathering of San Francisco conservatives who were meeting to discuss, as Ho later recalled, the “Trans Conspiracy to Destroy the American Family.” The queer 36-year-old Chronicle columnist entered the backroom of a North Shore restaurant with the intent to explore “how deep into the anti-trans rabbit hole the local wing had descended.” As bans on gender-affirming healthcare for minors have widened to target trans adults, Ho wanted to know, “Are local anti-trans activists willing to go that far?”

Infiltrating a Bay Area anti-trans meeting is hardly standard fare for a restaurant critic, but Soleil Ho isn’t your average food writer. Over the last ten years, the writer, chef, and podcast host has redefined restaurant criticism, expanding its lens to consider how systems of power intersect with food to shape people’s everyday lives. During a four-year tenure as the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic from 2019 to 2023, Ho’s dynamic reviews prompted readers to question, “Does a restaurant celebrating French colonialism belong in San Francisco?” and “What do you do when you know where your potatoes come from and they’re bad?

Ho’s approach to food writing has led them off the beaten path, including to an East Palo Alto Buddhist temple tucked behind an IKEA and a pop-up kitchen where smashing burgers into crisp patties soothed chronic depression. But few places Ho has traveled were quite so jolting as their meal with transphobic parental rights advocates.

The writer doesn’t usually wear a disguise to dinner, but that night they needed to pass as cis and straight to blend in. After thrifting a Goodwill outfit they later describe as “church lady drag,” Ho pinned a wig over their hair, tied a string of pearls around their neck, and braced themself for a raucous spectacle of bigoted mockery and bland food.

Hosted by San Francisco's Republican Party, the event featured speakers representing anti-trans groups like MOM Army, Moms for Liberty, and Moms for America. Ho was less interested in the food, although they paid extra for the buffet dinner out of morbid curiosity. Through their report, Ho digested hours of stomach-churning propaganda with a darkly humorous wink, offering an on-the-ground window into the bowels of anti-trans hate. Apart from a handful of dunks on Republicans’ taste for “beige chicken piccata,” the piece has little to do with food. It’s a reflection, rather, of Ho’s omnivorous approach to criticism.

Writing for a national audience during a pandemic that threatened the future of the service industry, their reviews and weekly newsletter, Bite Curious (a salute to bisexual humor), did far more than survey the local food scene. In their first year, Ho restructured the Chronicle’s annual Top 100 Restaurants List and published a new listicle methodology, which centered diversity, affordability and prioritized neighborhood restaurants over fine dining tasting menus. Ho eliminated starred reviews, used public transportation, and underscored ADA accessibility and plant-based options. Their approach was nothing radical, Ho contends, just a basic degree of care and courtesy that they extended to criticism. By 2022, they had won the prestigious James Beard Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award. “If you are trying to be inclusive and also trying to make sure you have a good time and everyone has a good time, that's stuff you think about,” they tell me. “I was just putting on the page the things that were already happening.”

A friendly introvert with strong Virgo placements and social anxiety, Ho didn’t intend to be a restaurant critic. Even the words connote a pedigree of snobbish good taste that evokes Ratatouille’s Anton Ego. But Ho views the position as more of a civil servant than a social elite — a way to collapse the false binary of “good” and “bad” taste. “To me, the job of a critic is to be the person outside of all sorts of discourse, and to pick it apart for people and help them see the skeleton of everything that's going on,” says Ho.

Rather than chasing trends, Ho’s work strives to interrupt the mentality that encourages diners to consume without thinking about tipped wages, farmworker labor, or the choreographed media hype that buttresses trendy new spots and acclaimed chefs. Instead, they have demanded accountability from restaurateurs who punch down on Chinese American cuisine or chefs who attempt to trademark the word Aloha while also encouraging diners to question the lifestyle they are being sold beyond the food on their plates. Reporting on new restaurants and delicious local food is part of the gig, but Ho doesn’t want to encourage readers to rush to the next new thing for the sake of coolness. Rather, the refrain on loop in Ho’s head is that there is already enough — enough food, enough housing, and enough jobs for everyone to live a good life. “The idea that we have enough for everyone is a great starting point for a lot of things, especially in San Francisco and the Bay Area where there's so much disparity and so much hand-wringing over what to do about poor people or the mentally ill or unhoused people,” says Ho. “The answer flows naturally from that one value: We have enough. We can take care of people. We just choose not to.”

A second-generation Vietnamese refugee, Ho shares that their worldview was shaped early on by their family’s history of displacement. They were born in rural Illinois, where their grandparents settled with eight children after fleeing the Viet Cong on a fishing boat in 1975. Ho notes that their intimacy with the violence of war is something they’ve grappled with their whole life. “It feels very potent and very real to remind myself and other people of the circumstances of my family,” they reflect.” We’re not here because America was nice.”

The critic came of age in New York City, living with their sister and mother, Francie, who worked in the fashion industry in the ’90s, when magazines had wardrobe budgets and “fashion was very queer,” Ho recalls. They lived an eclectic middle-class life stuffed into one-bedroom apartments where someone always had to sleep on the couch. Their favorite show was Sailor Moon and their go-to meals were packets of instant Mee Goreng noodles. The family ate out a lot, too, dining across Chinatown, Union Square, and pre-gentrified Williamsburg, shaping both Ho’s palate and their penchant for people-watching.

Taste was always part of the conversation at home. As a fashion buyer for catalogs, part of Francie’s job was “to anticipate taste, to figure out what people are going to want this season, next season, the season after that,” says Ho. The fashion gays and magazine editors who streamed in and out of their apartment taught a young Ho that taste “is very much sculpted, and the construction of many people.”

“It was work,” they tell me. “It was labor. It was thought that was put into manufacturing seasons and trends, and it extends so much to food as well — knowing that taste is not just given to you. It does not descend from heaven that this season’s color is mustard. I think it's good to keep in mind as a critic.”

During high school, they saved up lunch money to dine out solo, savoring griddled Cuban sandwiches and buttery French pastries in cafés near their Lower Manhattan school. After attending college in Iowa, Ho started writing about food. At the same time, they cooked in restaurant kitchens where workplace abuse often cut deeper than chef’s knives, and coded racism punctuated back-of-house shifts. Neither job offered economic security.

In 2013, Ho penned their breakout essay, “Craving the Other,” which dug uncomfortably deep into the trap of authenticity, their own appetite for assimilation, and the misplaced nostalgia their white classmates had for other people’s food. “‘Oh, you’re Vietnamese?’ they’d ask. ‘I love pho!’ And then the whispered question— ‘Am I saying that right?’” Ho wrote. “What can one say in response? “Oh, you’re white? I love tuna salad!’” They singled out the weird and patronizing behavior of people who claim authority over a cuisine and romanticize intimacy with another culture simply because they have eaten its food. Three years later, Ho launched the acclaimed podcast Racist Sandwich with journalist Zahir Janmohamed, recording candid conversations with people in the food industry about issues that rarely made headlines: undocumented food service workers, decolonizing food travel, diet culture, racism in the wine industry, and more.

Ho garnered an audience that included comic artist and fellow writer, Blue Delliquanti, who was working on a graphic novel, MEAL, on eating bugs, queer desire, and opening a restaurant. In 2017, they asked Ho to collaborate on the novel; Ho, a long-time fan of Delliquanti’s, jumped at the request, eager to research food cultures around the world that have traditionally incorporated local insects into their cooking for centuries, often as seasonal delicacies.

Set in Minneapolis, where Ho and Delliquanti have both lived, MEAL follows Yarrow, a young California transplant eager to work as a line cook at La Casa Chicatana, a soon-to-open Oaxacan restaurant. It’s a playful tale of entomophagy (eating insects), a scrappy restaurant, and a caring network of people who bring it to life. Ho’s food writing stands out in the descriptions of traditional Oaxacan foods paired with Delliquanti’s illustrations of mealworms, crickets, and tarantulas that invite curiosity and dispel the squeamishness of Western taboos. “You can find insects in dishes across Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas,” explains Yarrow to their crush, Milani. “Only in Europe were insects only ever seen as pests too puny to pan-fry!”

The graphic novel offers an antidote to the short-lived trend of sustainable cricket flours pushed by white food producers as the future of insect-eating. “Blue and I were totally aligned when it came to our outlook that promoting food based on its functionality just isn’t the way,” says Ho. “It otherizes these cuisines, and their eaters, and we’re not about that shit.”

Celeste Noche

Ho makes a point of defining the values that drive their work: empathy and respect for others, and an evolving political consciousness. “You have to have some sort of opinion, some sort of bedrock to operate from otherwise, what are you doing?” Ho asks. “You’re just figuring it all out as you write and no one knows what the hell you're about.”

When they accepted the role of Chronicle restaurant critic in 2019, Ho published a list of words that they would not use in their reviews. The list includes “crack, guilt, authentic, ethnic, slutty, and up-and-coming neighborhood.” “Some might call this self-censorship or being too politically correct. But, as a writer, I think pretending that word choice doesn’t matter would undermine my whole profession,” Ho explains. It’s worth the effort for them to use more creative language to describe food in ways that don't make light of people’s real struggles with addiction and substance abuse. Likewise, food writing that camouflages gentrification rather than naming it, functions as “the language of real estate marketing,” Ho points out.

Marcelle Afram
When the D.C-based chef began organizing in support of a free Palestine, they unearthed another deeply buried truth about their trans identity.

Ho’s writing about gentrification in particular has included critiquing classism within queer communities. In the Castro, a historically queer district where runaway LGBTQ+ youth once sought refuge, Ho has reported on an uptick in wealthy gay homeowners’ and gay-owned small businesses’ support for homeless encampment sweeps, which push unhoused people, many of whom could be queer and trans, off the sidewalks with nowhere else to go. “Having friends literally living in squalor because they’re disabled and cannot work and have been rejected by their families and just doing anything to make sure they are not homeless — how do you forget that? How do you stand apart from that?” says Ho, who relates more with the queer kids sleeping on the street than the gay bar owners who want encampment tents trashed. “To me, it is so intrinsic. Not that a queer identity correlates to economic precarity, but that economic precarity comes for us all. It is stalking us all,” says Ho. “I’m one paycheck away from being destitute and I make the most money I’ve ever had in my life.”

These days, in the shadow of gentrification and rising housing costs, Ho continues to do what makes them feel rooted in their community: handing out free burritos in the Tenderloin, cooking big meals to feed their friends, and, on some days, simply going outside. “As someone who has a tendency to just hole up, it's nice to force myself out there,” says Ho. Through routine acts of care, they hold tighter to the thread that has run through their work in the face of a precarious future: “You can fall into a liberal trap of figuring out which one's more important, class or race or whatever. But I think it's all tied together,” they say. “That's what solidarity is about to me: not averting your eyes when something doesn't fit the story.”

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