Does Restaurant Criticism Still Matter?
Tejal Rao, Helen Rosner, MacKenzie Fegan, and J. Lee discuss wigs, fake names, and the powers and pitfalls of the written review.
A few weeks ago (almost a year after Pete Wells stepped down from his critic position), the New York Times made a long-awaited announcement about their new chief restaurant critic. The announcement was a three-part surprise. The new critic would show their face openly in video content and work on a national level, no longer confined to the five boroughs of New York City. Lastly, this new person would actually be two people — Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan.
The departure from tradition came during an existentially fraught time for restaurant criticism, when many legacy publications wondered how they would compete with the shocking volume of free, digestible social media content about restaurants. At the end of last year, Eater laid off the last of their restaurant critics, Robert Sietsema.
In our first-ever Best Food Blog roundtable of restaurant critics, we brought together Tejal Rao of the New York Times, Helen Rosner of the New Yorker, MacKenzie Chung Fegan of the San Francisco Chronicle (author of that Thomas Keller story), and J. Lee of Feed Me and Interview magazine. They discussed the art of the restaurant critic disguise, how to come up with a good fake name, and their own personal food writing pet peeves. Oh — and that time a bad Sam Sifton review forced Eddie Huang to close down his restaurant, accidentally launching his career as the author and producer of the book-turned-hit-sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. —Anna
