“So, what was the worst dish on the menu?”

In over 25 years of writing about restaurants, no chef had ever asked me that question before.”How was the meal?” is the usual post-prandial query, and I usually have a ready list of highlights to recount to gratify the chef. If I can’t think of anything to compliment, if the food was boring or hopeless, I just say, “It was good.”

There is nothing more damning than faint praise.

After all, my Japanese mother raised a polite guest, not a critic. But when Valencian chef Vicky Sevilla repeated the question, I saw she was looking for an honest answer. She was asking, not out of some kind of bravado masochism, but in search of constructive feedback. She wanted to know what she could improve.

Growth mindset, they like to call it in California. It only happens when intelligence meets humility, and it is a rare quality.

For an ambitious young chef, growth mindset is an essential quality, maybe the most important of all.

She was paying me a compliment, acknowledging my extensive international fine dining experience and seeking an informed opinion. But behind the compliment was also a challenge. I’m experienced enough to know that, in this freewheeling social media world where everyone is an influencer looking for comped luxury meals, chefs take a very dim view of the too often ill-informed, sycophantic, and parasitic opinions of food writers.

As a chef, Vicky Sevilla continues to invest diligently in her own professional education. When she isn’t cooking at Arrels, her Michelin-starred restaurant in a restored 16th-century stone stable in the small Valencian hilltop town of Sagunt, she is traveling and eating, often with her 5-year-old son, who already has formidable gourmet training. At the tender and cash-strapped age of 20, she booked herself a table at Mugaritz. El Cellar de Can Roca was her first three-star experience.  She rightly expects no less from those who presume to write about her and evaluate her work.