CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
After 12 Years of Reviewing Restaurants, I’m Leaving the Table
Pete Wells is moving on from his role as the Times restaurant critic, a job with many rewards and maybe too many courses.
Photos of Pete Wells and other critics hang in many a New York restaurant kitchen. This one, at Gertie in Brooklyn, reads, “Alert management immediately if seen.”Credit...Liz Clayman for The New York Times
By Pete Wells
July 16, 2024
Early this year, I went for my first physical in longer than I’d care to admit. At the time, I was about halfway through a list of 140 or so restaurants I planned to visit before I wrote the 2024 edition of “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.” It was a fair bet that I wasn’t in the best shape of my life.
My scores were bad across the board; my cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments. The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese.
OK, not just technically.
I knew I needed to change my life. I promised I’d start just as soon as I’d eaten in the other 70 restaurants on my spreadsheet.
But a funny thing happened when I got to the end of all that eating: I realized I wasn’t hungry. And I’m still not, at least not the way I used to be. And so, after 12 years as restaurant critic for The New York Times, I’ve decided to bow out as gracefully as my state of technical obesity will allow.
Not that I’m leaving the newsroom. I have a couple more restaurant reviews in my back pocket that will appear over the next few weeks, and I plan to stick around at The Times long after that. But I can’t hack the week-to-week reviewing life anymore.
The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain. The work of going out to eat every night with hand-chosen groups of friends and family sounds suspiciously like what other people do on vacation. If you happen to work in New York or another major city, your beat is almost unimaginably rich and endlessly novel.
People open restaurants for all kinds of reasons. Some want to conjure up the flavors of a place they left behind, and consider their business a success if they win the approval of other people from the same place. Others want to dream up food that nobody has ever tasted or even imagined before, and won’t be satisfied until their name is known in Paris and Beijing and Sydney.
And there are a hundred gradations in between. The city is a feast. Exploring, appreciating, understanding, interpreting and often even enjoying that feast has been the greatest honor of my career. And while the number of restaurant critics is getting smaller every year, everybody I know who works in this endangered profession would probably say the same thing.
So we tend to save our gripes until two or three of us are gathered around the tar pits. Then we’ll talk about the things nobody will pity us for, like the unflattering mug shots of us that restaurants hang on kitchen walls and the unlikable food in unreviewable restaurants.
One thing we almost never bring up, though, is our health. We avoid mentioning weight the way actors avoid saying “Macbeth.” Partly, we do this out of politeness. Mostly, though, we all know that we’re standing on the rim of an endlessly deep hole and that if we look down we might fall in.
“It’s the least healthy job in America, probably,” Adam Platt said recently when I called him to discuss the unmentionable topic. Mr. Platt was New York magazine’s restaurant critic for 24 years before stepping away from the trough in 2022.
“I’m still feeling the effects,” he said. He has a flotilla of doctors treating him for gout, hypertension, high cholesterol and Type 2 diabetes.
“I never ate desserts but when I took the job I started eating desserts,” he said. “I became addicted to sugar. You drink too much. You’re ingesting vastly rich meals maybe four times a week. It’s not good for anybody, even if you’re like me and you’re built like a giant Brahman bull.”
We talked about the alarming frequency with which men in our line of work seem to die suddenly, before retirement age. A.A. Gill, restaurant critic of the Sunday Times of London, was killed by cancer at 62. Jonathan Gold, critic for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, died at 58, right after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Back in 1963, A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker died after checking into a hospital for bronchial pneumonia. He was 59.
These are isolated stories to be sure, but I’d see the headlines projected on my bedroom ceiling when I woke up in the night with my insides burning like a fire at a chemical refinery.
The critic Gael Greene, known for her capacious (and face-obscuring) hats, died in 2022 at 88.
The women I looked up to lasted longer. Gael Greene, who invented Mr. Platt’s job at New York, lived to 88. Mimi Sheraton, critic for Cue, The Village Voice and The New York Times, made it to 97, despite a professed aversion to exercise.
Christiane Lauterbach, a restaurant critic for Atlanta magazine for more than 40 years, told me she is in good health. She attributes that to “not going to the doctor,” although she was recently talked into having her cholesterol and blood sugar tested. (Both were normal.) “I just take little bites of this and that. I never finish a plate in a restaurant,” she said. “If I finished my plate, I would just be 300 pounds.”
S. Irene Virbila, who ate out six nights a week for 20 years as restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, used to bring along a man to finish her plates. She called him Hoover.
“Restaurant food is rich,” she said. “To make those flavor bombs it has to have a lot of rich elements. It’s more of everything than you would eat if you could eat exactly what you wanted.”
After she left the post, she lost 20 pounds in two months, “without thinking about it.” Today, aside from taking medication for an inherited vulnerability to cholesterol, she is in good health.
Virtually all of my 500 or so reviews were the result of eating three meals in the place I was writing about. Typically, I’d bring three people with me and ask each to order an appetizer, main course and dessert. That’s 36 dishes I’d try before writing a word.
This is the simple math of restaurant reviewing, but there is a higher math. Critics eat in a lot of restaurants that Gael Greene once described as “neither good enough nor bad enough” for a review.
Then there are the reference meals, the ones we eat to stay informed, to not be a fraud. Often, this is where I got into real trouble. How many smash burgers did I need to taste, or taste again, before I could write about the ones at Hamburger America, a restaurant I reviewed in the same months I was eating my way toward my “100 Best Restaurants ” list, for which I needed to make sure that the Uyghur hand-pulled noodles and Puerto Rican lechon asado and Azerbaijani organ-meat hash that I loved were, at least arguably, the best in the city?
This is probably the place to mention that naming 100 restaurants was totally my idea. My editors had asked for 50, and I’ll bet they would have settled for 25. When I did do 100, and the time came a year later to do it again, they didn’t ask me to go back to all of them. That was my idea, too.
How many smash burgers would a critic need to taste in order to fairly assess the ones shown here, at Hamburger America?Credit...Colin Clark for The New York Times
Omnivorousness, in the metaphorical sense, is a prerequisite for a good critic. My favorite movie critic is still Pauline Kael, who wrote as if she had seen every film ever made. But movies won’t, as a rule, give you gout.
Food writing’s most impressive omnivore was Jonathan Gold. There didn’t seem to be a dish served anywhere in Los Angeles that he hadn’t eaten at least once, and usually several times, until he was sure he understood it. His knowledge inspired me. It also tormented me — there was no way to catch up to him.
Years ago, he used to tell people he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. This was merely an appetizer. His larger goal was to eat in every restaurant on the street “at least once.”
Pico Boulevard is more than 15 miles long.
I have not eaten in every restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, far and away the most significant taco artery in my own city. There have been nights, though, as I walked for miles under the elevated No. 7 train, watching women press discs of fresh masa and men shave cherry-tinted strips of al pastor pork from slowly revolving trompos, when it seemed like an excellent idea.
At a certain point, this kind of research starts to look like a pathology.
“Your body changes over time,” Mr. Platt said. “You have this giant distended belly which wants to be filled. All those weird sensors in your brain that cry out for deliciousness are at DEFCON 1 all day. You become an addict.”
When, in the line of duty, you have spent enough hours loading up your tray with mashed potatoes, rolls, biscuits and an extra slice of pie, you eventually have to ask yourself whether you are standing in the buffet line for the audience or for yourself.
“In truth, I would have to say that I probably have pursued this career as an excuse to overeat,” Mimi Sheraton told the interviewer Terry Gross in 1987. “I think that the people who are really good at it are all in that position.”
Did that apply to me? Not at first. But over time, I came to see relentlessly stuffing my face as one way to become really good at the position. By browsing my way across the city like a goat, I could try to level a playing field that is deeply tilted in favor of restaurants with money. Manhattan’s sea-urchin spaghetti factories can always buy attention. It’s not as easy for a soul-food hangout in Stapleton or a Palestinian kitchen in Bay Ridge or an Ensenadan aguachile specialist in Jackson Heights. So off I would go, because if I didn’t, a really important restaurant might be overlooked.
This seemed normal right up until May, when I took two weeks away from my restaurant rounds while I recovered from a hernia repair. The night after the operation I wasn’t hungry. The next night I ate soup. The next day, salad. Without menus and dinner guests and a notebook to fill, I ate just what I wanted and nothing more. I slept through the night. I stayed awake through the day. I took long walks, not all of which ended at bakeries. And at some point in those two weeks, it occurred to me that I am not my job.
When I first came to The Times in 2006, a reporter warned me not to identify myself too heavily with my work. “Any job at The Times is a rented tux,” she said.
I nodded, but didn’t get the point until this year.
It’s time to return the tux. I’ve had the trousers let out a few inches, but a tailor can take them in again. As for the stain on the jacket, that’s just pork fat. I think it adds character.