Depending on your disposition, the job of a restaurant critic sounds like either a dream or a nightmare. It takes a special kind of person to dine out six nights a week, sometimes in elaborate disguise; visit the same place at least three and as many as 12 times; and condense the entire experience—as well as what it says about a scene and a moment in time—into around 1,000 words.
But while the key job requirements for a restaurant critic haven’t changed in decades, the audience for their work has. Over the past 30 years, with the advent of cooking shows and social media, high-end restaurants have gone from exclusive sanctums to pop-culture phenomena. Our understanding of what fine dining means—and who can create it—has likewise expanded precipitously. This development is best embodied by two distinct but connected sea changes: The number of food critics at local newspapers has dwindled while TikTok enthusiasts who flout traditional rules (like not accepting free food) attract millions of followers.
To discuss their vocation’s current challenges and contradictions, along with its enduring joys, CULTURED convened three of leading restaurant critics over lunch at La Mercerie in SoHo. In attendance was Ruth Reichl, who served as a restaurant critic for more than 20 years at outlets including The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and wrote a best-selling memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, about her experience in New York; Matthew Schneier, a former reporter, fashion critic, and, later, features writer for New York who became the magazine’s chief restaurant critic in 2023; and Priya Krishna, a bestselling cookbook author and writer known for revealing the unseen stories behind the food we eat, who stepped in as co-interim restaurant critic (with Melissa Clark) for The New York Times after Pete Wells announced his departure from the role last year. A few weeks after the discussion, the Times named its new co-chief food critics, Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao, marking the first time the publication will have two people in the role, only one of whom is based in New York. (Rao lives in California.)
Over little gem salads, buckwheat crepes, and a strawberry tart, Reichl, Schneier, and Krishna discussed the tricks of the trade, why we continue to go out to eat, and how to cultivate a good appetite in both work and life.
How did you find your way into restaurant criticism?
Ruth Reichl: I fell into it. I wrote a cookbook when I was 22, and then I was part of a restaurant collective in Berkeley, but I was writing freelance articles, mostly about art. One of my editors ate dinner in my restaurant a few nights a week. He just looked at me one day and said, “You know, you’re a much better writer than a cook. Have you ever thought about writing reviews?” We were dirt poor. I was living in a commune with my husband. I was not thinking, Oh, this is my new career. All I thought was: free food. It was 1976, and I was waiting for my real life to begin. I never thought that this was going to be my real life.
Matthew Schneier: I started writing food reviews for a downtown magazine called Paper when I moved back to New York as a young graduate because it was what was available. It broke me out of my adolescent vegetarianism. I didn’t end up pursuing [food writing] at that time—there seemed no way to do it. I wrote and eventually edited culture, style, and fashion stories. My predecessor at New York, Adam Platt, stepped away, and they did a long search for his replacement. At a certain point, they came to me and said, “What would you think about throwing your hat in the ring?”
Priya Krishna: I had a column in my college newspaper where I took the food in the dining hall and told students how they [could] transform it to make it taste better. I loved it so much that I decided I wanted to try writing about food for a living. I applied to work at what was at the time my favorite food magazine, Lucky Peach. I addressed the email to [Lucky Peach co-founder] David Chang, as if he were checking their generic inbox. My first job was as a customer service representative, picking up the phone and applying discount codes.
Priya, you are now doing the job that Ruth did in the ’90s. I’d be curious for you to compare notes.
Krishna: Ruth, I feel like New Yorkers waited with bated breath to see what restaurant you would review that week.
Reichl: Yes, food was just becoming part of popular culture. I came [back] to New York [in 1993], the same year that the Food Network started. People didn’t know much about anything except European food. But I was coming from the West Coast, where people were interested in looking south, looking east. My first day, I was sitting in my pod in that grubby old New York Times building. My first call was from a college friend who lived in Morocco. He said, “I was on the plane to Mecca to do the hajj, and I read that you had become the restaurant critic of The New York Times.” At that point, it was international news. That’s not the case anymore.
Do you still feel like critics can make or break a restaurant?
Krishna: I don’t think a restaurant critic alone can make or break a restaurant.
Schneier: It would be easier to make than to break. We’ve all written great reviews of places that were a little bit under the radar and changed their fortunes in the short term. It’s much harder two years later when you’re not the flavor of the month.
Reichl: That is a real change in the restaurant-going public. People were loyal.
Do you ever recall breaking a restaurant? When something that you wrote led it to close?
Reichl: There were restaurants who think that happened to them. Probably the funniest review I ever wrote was of a Japanese restaurant [Shin’s]—everything that could go wrong on my visits there went wrong. We ordered, sat there for an hour, and then the manager came over and said, “I’m so sorry, your waitress just quit.” They lost my umbrella. The guy who was crumbing the table put all the crumbs into my purse. They bought a full-page ad on the back of The New York Times, reprinted the review, and said, “We’re so sorry. Please come back.” They did close. But they deserved to close.
When do you think a negative review is warranted?
Schneier: I’m not afraid to write a negative review. It’s a disservice not to write reviews of big, often extremely well-funded centers of interest that don’t live up to the mark they’ve set for themselves. I would be much more circumspect about giving a very negative review to some tiny independent operator. I feel more comfortable picking on someone my own size, as it were.
Reichl: There’s no point in telling people not to go to a restaurant that nobody’s going to. American restaurant critics aren’t like the Brits, who revel in writing the nastiest things.
Priya: I lose sleep before any review, but especially a critical review. It’s really hard. I don’t like it.
Reichl: When I did the Le Cirque review, which was my most famous review, I was so beside myself with anxiety at 2 a.m. that I convinced myself I had never even been to the restaurant. The review I’ve been most envious of in my entire career was Pete Wells’s review of Guy Fieri’s restaurant [Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in 2012]. It’s a wonderful piece of writing. But also, he got to write a negative review that would not impact the restaurant at all. It was such a freebie! The people who go there couldn’t care less what the snobbish critic of The New York Times thinks.
Ruth, you are famous for the disguises you wore to restaurants. Is that still a thing?
Krishna: It is, because of Ruth. The first time [I wore a disguise], I was reviewing an Indian restaurant called Bungalow. If the chef recognizes you, especially if you’re Indian, he will just lavish attention on you. So I asked a friend of a friend who is a wig and costume designer on Broadway to give me some tips. There are certain restaurants where it’s made a pretty marked difference in both the food and the way I’m treated. [Editor’s note: The announcement of the Times’s new food critics noted that they would no longer wear disguises.]
Reichl: I was really lucky ’cause I had my mother’s friend, the acting coach, who I called for a wig, and she said, “No, you can’t just wear a wig. Who are you gonna be?” It’s a very interesting process. [The characters] are all powerful. The problem is they got known. When I left the Times, all these restaurateurs bought an ad and said, “Goodbye Ruth,” and they had a reservation book with all the names they knew I used.
Schneier: I try to maintain the element of surprise, which means booking under assumed names or laundering reservations through other people. But Adam Platt took a real stand against disguises. His point was in the age of Google Images, it’s just not the best use of a critic’s time to try to maintain anonymity. I tend to agree with that.
Reichl: I have noticed that an empty restaurant suddenly fills up around me and you think, Oh, they recognize me. They don’t want me to think that nobody comes to their restaurant. These are all their friends, raving about the food.
Schneier: That’s why we go multiple times—different days, different hours, different size groups.
Krishna: Sometimes I wonder if the reason that I feel like I have to do this is because I get treated like shit at fine dining restaurants where they don’t recognize me. When I’m bringing other younger people of color, we get treated like customers who won’t be able to pay the bill at the end. In some of the really high-end new restaurants where they haven’t recognized me, I have received shockingly bad service.
What do you make of the rise of TikTok food criticism and the non-professional enthusiast critic?
Schneier: The entire world has gone user-generated and I’m not gonna upset myself against that. Everybody’s entitled to an opinion.
Reichl: Some of them are filling a gap, actually. Keith Lee, who’s got millions of followers on TikTok, is writing about Black restaurants for Black people. I really enjoy what he’s doing and he’s found a niche that no one else was filling.
I realized fairly recently that when I became the restaurant critic of The Los Angeles Times, every major restaurant critic in America, or almost every, was Jewish. We took a job that there wasn’t really a definition for—it didn’t exist. We went into a place that nobody wanted and we found a space to write in. So, Keith Lee found a space that nobody was occupying.
Krishna: I do find, though, that a lot of the critics who are allowed to be generalists on social media are still pretty white. There was this review that sent shockwaves through the Indian community—this TikTok from these girls who call themselves the VIP List. They posted a review of Semma, this restaurant that pretty much all Indians agree is fantastic. It’s okay if you don’t like it, but the reasons they didn’t like it were so uninformed. They were mispronouncing the names of Indian dishes that didn’t even exist. It just felt so flippant, so careless.
Reichl: We’re talking about two things here. One is restaurant review as consumer reporting: “This is where you should spend your money.” That’s not what critics do. If you were writing about Semma, you would write a piece for an audience of people who are probably fairly ignorant about real Indian food, and you would give them new tools to appreciate that restaurant.
Schneier: The difference between a restaurant getting 4.5 stars on Google and a restaurant getting a positive review is that I’m trying to understand and communicate how this restaurant fits into the wider culture. I don’t aspire to be someone who knows the best bagel.
Krishna: But critics are being asked to do a lot of the things that you see on social media—to make lists of the best pizza in New York, to make TikToks. I’m about to release the list of the top 100 restaurants in New York. The world is changing and, at least at the Times, they want us to change with it.
Reichl: Don’t forget, food has become one of the two major economic engines of the New York Times [along with games]. One of the purposes of restaurant reviews has always been to sell newspapers.
I’m curious how you think about price and value when it comes to evaluating restaurants, especially as it becomes more and more expensive to eat out.
Krishna: When I arrived in New York at 21 years old, my starting salary was $30,000. If I read a review in The New York Times that excited me, I would go to that restaurant and blow my week’s pay. And it would be so hard if that restaurant ended up being really disappointing.
Schneier: Value is a different category than price, and it’s the one we’re focusing on. I have had meals that I considered extremely valuable at $250 a head and ones where I would’ve been better served with a $1.50 slice of pizza. I try to keep in mind a diversity across the spectrum, not only of geography, cuisine, and location, but also price point.
Reichl: It is a labor-intensive business. Corporate restaurants have economies of scale that non-corporate restaurants don’t. I’ve always tried to remember, and remind readers, that the best part of this business is that it’s money that’s staying in the community. That, and it’s a valuable experience.
A number of critics have cited health as one of the big reasons that they stepped down from the job. How do you think about the physical demands of what you do?
Schneier: Well, I started statins on day one. I had a conversation with my doctor where she said, “I think we can wait a couple years on this.” And I said, “I don’t think a couple years are gonna improve the situation.”
Krishna: I get asked three or four times a week, “Why aren’t you fat? Are you actually very fat and you do a good job hiding it?” This job certainly gives you, especially if you’re a woman, a sense of body dysmorphia. I think the biggest thing is, if it’s under 45 minutes, I’ll walk to the restaurant, even in the rain. I try to live an active lifestyle. There are some critics who just take small bites and that’s it. I’m not a small-bite critic. I don’t like waste. I take food home. I eat it for lunch the next day.
Reichl: In some ways, I ate less as a critic than I did in real life. You have to moderate your eating because you’re having a big lunch, but you know you’re gonna have a big dinner too, and you want to be fair to the restaurant.
Do you all have a deep bench of dining companions?
Krishna: Extremely deep bench. Some of my favorite people to take to dinner are comedians because they are actually observational journalists.
Reichl: I’ve always had starving-artist friends, and I would tell them, “Bring three people.” The one thing that nobody really understands about being a professional critic, where you’re eating out twice a day for most of your days, is you have to be social. You are spending hours sitting at a table talking to people. And then when you’re at The New York Times, famous people call you up and say, “Take me to dinner.” Mike Nichols. Peter Jennings. The secretary of state used to call me when he was coming to New York.
Schneier: The prospect of a free restaurant meal completely enraptures even the richest people. Someone can be an absolute titan of industry, able to buy out the restaurant 15 times over, and if you say, “It’s on me, order whatever you want”—it’s like Christmas morning.
How do you choose what to review?
Schneier: There are some places there’s a ton of expectation about, and it’s our responsibility to have a take on that. But you want to make sure that you’re not reviewing 15 Italian restaurants in a row with the same price bracket in the same part of town.
Krishna: I review restaurants that are interesting to me. Restaurants where you can tell a story that extends beyond the four walls of that restaurant.
Reichl: There are places it is obvious everybody’s gonna review. Somebody is going to review [Daniel Boulud’s new steakhouse] LaTête d’Or, right? Talk about price—I was so offended by the idea of paying $130 for prime rib.
Schneier: I’ve got bad news for you about several prime ribs in this town.
Krishna: We should do a series where we just show Ruth the prices of things.
Do you have any tips for how to write an entertaining review?
Reichl: We don’t have many words for taste and flavor. So you’ve got to use your imagination when you’re writing about food, which is part of the fun. How does it make you feel? What does it sound like? In the end, the thing that’s really different about food criticism is none of us knows if I taste the same thing as you taste. So all you can do is describe the sensation of what’s happening in your mouth when you’re eating. You’re using every tool in a writer’s box.
Schneier: It’s also important to make the reviews feel like episodes in a serial social comedy, which is how I think about dining in New York. The more that you can create that scene for a reader, the more they understand not only if they want to eat there, but if they want to be there. That’s the other thing about restaurants—you’re spending your night with them. You can get pretty good takeout if that’s all you’re interested in, or learn to cook. But the holistic experience is what a restaurant gives you. And that’s what a review can give you too, over and above how it tastes to you on any given day.