Pancakes Are Put on Trial

A jury decides that a review can be libelous

For Michael Chow, proprietor of Mr. Chow's Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, the key questions facing the jury were purely factual ones. Was Guide Gault-Millau correct in asserting that the pancakes served with his Peking duck were "the size of a saucer and the thickness of a finger"? Was it true that his "sweet-and-sour pork contained more dough (badly cooked) than meat," as the pugnacious Parisian guide to New York City proclaimed? To prove otherwise, Chow brought his chef into Manhattan federal district court to demonstrate to the jury his technique for making paper-thin pancakes.

The mouth-watering evidence was persuasive. The jurors decided that Chow, who also owns restaurants in London and Beverly Hills, had been libeled by the Gault-Millau review and awarded him $20,000 in compensatory damages along with a $5 tip for punitive damages. The Shanghai-born restaurateur feels that justice was done. Said he: "Freedom of the press is designed to protect the right to tell the truth, not to print lies."

The significance of Chow's victory, however, could be far heavier than his pancakes. At stake in the case, say libel experts, is the right of critics to express their own judgments. Reviews, which are by nature subjective opinions, have generally been exempt from the standards of libel applied to news stories. But the distinction in libel cases between reporting and criticism is now being called into question.

The Supreme Court, which has not made a ruling on libel since 1979, last month heard oral arguments on a case involving critical judgments. Bose Corp. had sued Consumer Reports magazine for writing that one type of its audio speakers produced sound that "tended to wander about the room." A federal judge awarded Bose $115,000, but an appeals court overturned the decision on the ground that the company had not proved that the magazine was guilty of malice. The appeals court ignored the issue of whether the statements in question were presented as fact or opinion. Since the principal service provided by Consumer Reports is comparison of various products, a defeat for the magazine in this case might lead to lawsuits from other manufacturers, which could paralyze, if not bankrupt, the publication.

The publishers of the Guide Gault-Millau plan to appeal the Mr. Chow verdict. Henri Millau suggested that the suit was "a publicity stunt," adding: "I guess that in the next few days people will flock to his restaurant and they will no doubt be sadly disappointed by the so-called authentic Chinese cooking." Said New York City Restaurant Critic Mimi Sheraton (who also pans Mr. Chow's): "It was the most outrageous award I've ever heard of. If this decision were upheld, I would feel inhibited in writing reviews in the future." At the very least, it could lead to an intriguing variety of appeals in court. Actors who got stinging notices on opening night might decide to re-enact their scenes for a judge and jury as a way of proving that their performances were misreported. Critically wounded sopranos might end up singing arias as evidence. Says Henry Kaufman, general counsel for the Libel Defense Resource Center: "The Mr. Chow case could set a dangerous precedent." - This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.