Pete Wells Is Stepping Down as NYT Food Critic

Pete Wells:

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. [...]

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 a funny thing about getting older. You put on weight yet you can’t eat nearly as much as you used to. Somehow, though, here in Philly, Craig Laban has been The Inquirer’s restaurant critic since 1998, and he’s still going strong.

Good critics — whether their beat is food, movies, books, whatever — review every genre, with an open mind. Some of Wells’s best writing was about the most approachable restaurants. This recent review of Hamburger America makes me hungry just glancing at it. His scathing review of Guy Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar is famous, but don’t miss his review of the unsurprisingly-now-closed Señor Frog’s in Times Square:

Señor Frog’s is not a good restaurant by most conventional measures, including the fairly basic one of serving food. One night I got just two of the half-dozen appetizers I had asked for. Another time, the starters showed up on schedule, but after nearly two hours the main courses still had not appeared.

“What happened to our food?” we finally asked.

“That’s what I’m wondering!” our server said brightly. “Like, where is it?”

Getting just half of what you order at Señor Frog’s can be a blessing if it’s the right half.

★ Wednesday, 17 July 2024