The NYT's Two New Restaurant Critics Are...
Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan are the new chief critics for the storied paper, and their roles bode well for the future of criticism...as they shed the vestiges of anonymity
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Big news in food media!
Nearly a year after Pete Wells stepped down as chief restaurant critic for the New York Times, the paper has named not one, but two replacements.
Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan will serve as chief critics. This is good news, because individual journalists can only eat and write so much! In another positive development, other Times critics will also (eventually) publish brief starred restaurant reviews. More on that in a bit.
Previously, stars were the domain of one person.
As part of their new roles, Rao and Mishan will shed the proverbial cloak of anonymity, something that fewer food critics employ in our hyper-online era. Both appeared on camera for a short video interview this morning.
Rao, who joined the Times in 2016 after reviewing restaurants for Bloomberg News and the Village Voice, will devote her efforts “entirely” to the national scene, according to the paper. She had been working as a critic-at-large based out of Los Angeles.
Mishan, whose own restaurant reviews and reported essays have appeared in the Times for over 15 years, will split her efforts between covering New York and the rest of the country.
These are the paper’s first permanent female chief restaurant critics since Ruth Reichl left in 1999. That said…Priya Krishna and Melissa Clark served as interim co-critics for the past year, filing high-profile reviews of Carbones across the country, and of Thomas Keller’s Per Se and The French Laundry.
This is all good news. The new roles — and the promise of more restaurant reviews by more writers — reflects a commitment to criticism. Even as the Times (smartly) pushes into the listicle space. Even as other journalism outlets have eliminated these jobs or cut back on reviewing. Even as restaurant guides outside the traditional journalism world — like Michelin, The Infatuation, and World’s 50 Best — continue to grow with a more service-y model of “content.”
Wells held the critic’s job for 12 years, and is best known for publishing viral reviews of Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant and Peter Luger steakhouse.
But the critic also expanded the scope of the job.
He occasionally ventured out to the West Coast for starred reviews (or zero-starred reviews). And he flew to Noma in Copenhagen for an FAQ-style explainer of René Redzepi’s celebrated restaurant. He also appears to have been the first chief critic to regularly issue formal reviews of street vendors — including Birria Landia in Jackson Heights (two stars!), Forever Jerk in the Bronx, and Foda Egyptian Sandwiches in Astoria.
Both Rao and Mishan will have their own chances to put an imprint on these high profile jobs — and on our larger culinary world. That’s especially true during this era of pop-ups, caviar everything, authoritarian immigration crackdowns, volatile tariffs, the hunger crisis in Gaza, oligarchian omakases, cuts to food aid abroad, proposed cuts to domestic food aid, and sky-high prices at the grocery store and restaurants.
Of course, both journalists have already left a sizable mark on our industry.
If you’ve followed food media at any point over the past two decades, you’ll know this isn’t Mishan’s first job at a restaurant critic; she authored the paper’s “Hungry City” series — a successor of sorts to the “$25 and under” affordable eats column — for roughly eight years in the 2010s.
The hiring of Mishan is a boon for New York criticism. Her writing style is poetic yet approachable, with an active vocabulary and economy of language that most novelists would be jealous of. Here’s one of my favorites lines: “The glory of banchan at [Sunn’s], including acorn jelly, delicate, eluding chopsticks, calling back to some lost forest floor…” Where is that line from? A full review? Nope. A humble Instagram caption.
More recently, Mishan authored a steady stream of reported columns for T Magazine, including: “What Do We Gain by Eating With Our Hands?,” and “Why Do American Diners Have Such a Limited Palate for Textures?"
Here’s a line from the latter piece:
And yet an English speaker must flounder for words to delineate these textures, beyond “crunchy” (which some etymologists date back to the late 19th century) and “crispy” (from “crisp,” which originally meant “curly” but came to signify “brittle” in the 16th century). Other languages are more bountiful.
Do read the whole article, but I tease out that part because it highlights how Mishan’s language and argumentation can recall academic research and criticism — though in an easygoing and super readable way! Her writings sometimes remind me of the deeply researched and erudite film reviews by The New Yorker’s Richard Brody.
Just the same, Rao’s new job is a victory for national criticism. The Vilcek prize-winner has authored sharp, searing missives on fine dining, as well as seminal essays like “Twilight of the Imperial Chef,” a meditation on bad actors and who gets the credit for amazing meals (a big deal chef) and who doesn’t (often, everyone else). On that note: Her column on Nobu Malibu is one of the few reviews to sing praises for — let’s see here — the bussers, the parking valets, the guy who turns on the heat lamps, and the staffers who take photos of guests.
Here’s one of my favorite lines by Rao:
For just one, maybe two glorious minutes, the paratha will be hot, almost hot enough to scald the tips of your fingers. This is the moment to rip it apart, while the paratha is limber with steam, and its char is crisp. Inside, you’ll find a fine, even smear of mashed potato and cauliflower, flecked with onion, ginger and green chile. The road can wait for you, but the paratha cannot.
Where is this restaurant? In Bakersfield…on a highway.
Rao was writing about Punjabi Dhaba, a truck stop in the Southern Central Valley, a spot that’s as important for its tasty food as it is for what it reveals about our changing country. All told: Rao dedicated 125 words to this single $3 bread, this “masterpiece,” as she called it, which is about as much space as the Michelin guide devotes to its entire writeup of Masa, the country’s only three-star omakase spot.
Michelin, of course, doesn’t usually have much to say about anything.
As I’ve said before, I like to divide this very weird job, which I’ve been doing for quite some time, into two overlapping halves: criticism and reviewing.
The C and the R.
In very broad strokes: The reviewing part deals with evaluating a restaurant. Is the tofu burger overcooked or undercooked? The reviewing part is about helping people decide whether to spend a little bit of their small (or large) paychecks out on the town.
The criticism part is very different. It involves probing the ideas a restaurant is based on (“what does it mean that Eleven Madison is vegan”). It considers and finds the right language for a trend (See: “The Great Regression” versus “The New Nostalgia”). Criticism might try to center the voice of an overlooked cookbook author, or politely refute another critic’s argument.
Good criticism is Helen Rosner, in her review of Confidant, meditating on whether Industry City is a real neighborhood. Answer: probably not.
Good reviewing is Helen Rosner, in her writeup of that same restaurant, evaluating the dry-aged steak through smart observations and delightful pacing: “the chefs hide its funk and complexity under too many frills and garnishes: compound butter, and grilled scallions, and garlic confit, and a shaving of horseradish.”
In any given restaurant column, you’ll hopefully find both the C and the R, but you’ll generally find more reviewing than criticism. That’s opposed to a visual art column or architecture review, where you might find the opposite ratio. Take Alexandra Lange’s Pulitzer Prize-winning column on skate parks; it’s more of an urban planning inquiry, less of a listicle on where to do a kick flip.
This all makes a certain degree of sense, because while we might not go to the ballet every day, some of us eat out every day. And sometimes, you just want learn about a good burger or a slice of pizza without too much bother.
But where things get interesting is picking out which publications lean more into the C or the R. If you want restaurant columns with pure reviewing and “best of” lists — sort of like recipes with very short or non-existent headnotes — you maybe spend a lot of time reading The Infatuation or the Michelin Guide. Not my favorites.
If you want something that leans super heavily into criticism, you generally have to look past the standard restaurant review, and into something along the lines of “Margaritaville and the Death of American Leisure,” by Eater’s Jaya Saxena, or “The White Lies of Craft Culture,” by Lauren Michele Jackson. Or you read Vittles. Or you re-read one of Mishan’s fine works for T Magazine. That’s the good stuff, right there.
And if you want both the C and the R, you hopefully read good restaurant columns on a regular basis. And you support your local papers and indy pubs.
But it’s a bummer, man, when you look at the food media landscape, and you notice that the digital media machines doing the least amount of criticism — and the largest number of “besticles” — are usually the ones doing the heaviest expansions.
So! When the NYT announces it’s hiring two reviewers with strong backgrounds in actual restaurant criticism, and when the Times tells us that they’re growing their criticism program, that’s a rarity these days. That’s something to be stoked about. And since the Times is also leaning into (good) lists these days — something I wrote about in detail recently — it’ll be fun, to see how these two experienced reviewers add their own critical voices to those popular and accessible forms of journalism.
If you’ve paid any attention to the NYT food section over the past year, you’ve surely seen short videos by Clark and Krishna discussing their reviews…on camera. I reckon we’ll see similar videos from the two new critics as well.
It’s a relief to know that Rao and Mishan won’t be anonymous, though I’m not unbiased in this regard.
I’ve been laying low for twenty years! And while I stand by my efforts to fly under the radar, I’m also…pretty tired of doing so, lol? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always make pseudonymous reservations to avoid giving restaurants advance notice (though really, I usually dine as a walk-in). That said, it’s tough not being able to connect with readers the way so many others do: through their likenesses, by showing their faces.
One of the lynchpins of criticism is staying in conversation with one’s peers. That doesn’t mean we need to quote everyone or be on every platform. But given how so many folks are broadcasting their opinions to millions on social video and YouTube — and given how TikTok reviews might inspire our own writeups — it feels increasingly out-of-touch for folks like me to stay confined to text.
I realize being on Insta doesn’t require one to be on camera, but it also feels entirely more human to be a real person with a face as opposed to a…weird movie trailer voiceover dude.
So is it possible you’ll see my Sutton Face sometime later this summer, or in the early fall? I’d say that’s very likely. My Keanu-esque beard is looking good these days!
Here’s one of the biggest surprises to today’s announcement: “In the coming months, we’ll start publishing brief, starred reviews from other Times critics.” I look forward to that in particular; one of the nice things about the old “Hungry City” column is that it gave a nice platform to other writers, including both Marian Bull and Mahira Rivers.
This is no small matter. Restaurant criticism can be tough to break into for a variety of reasons. The funds to review these places is a big barrier to entry, for both the journalists, who sometimes end up paying for their own meals, and for the institutions, who publish these very expensive columns.
Another reason is the fact that younger journalists sometimes can’t write these types of reviews because of The Hierarchy. So the fact that more than two people will be able to publish starred reviews….that will help showcase more restaurants, and more voices. I hope.
On that note: While I’m disappointed that Vox Media’s Eater no longer employs restaurant critics (both Robert Sietsema and I were laid off in recent years, and Bill Addison’s national job was not re-filled), I’m excited that the site now gives great folks like Caroline Shin, Nadia Chaudhury, Andrea Strong, and others a chance to review restaurants through their short Scene Reports. I hope that rubric evolves, and that the editors let more folks write longer, expository criticism.
Mishan’s new role adds to an already strong New York reviewing scene, which includes regular dispatches from a variety of full-time and independent journalists, including: Tammie Teclemariam, Mahira Rivers, Matthew Schneier, Robert Sietsema, Charlotte Druckman and Mia, Helen Rosner, Scott Lynch (shout out to Hell Gate!), and me, Ryan Sutton!!! And props to the folks at Found NY for their first-look reviews.
I’ll have a review coming your way soon, probably early next week!
In the meantime, be excellent to each other, and please send good energy to my good friends at Eater for their union contract negotiations!
Ryan!!!
This column has been updated for clarity throughout, including in the final paragraph of the C and R section!
So good, Ryan! I appreciate the s/o. It's true that Michelin doesn't do a good job of conveying the nuance behind each award, but that doesn't mean we weren't still putting in the hours thinking about and critiquing every meal. There was a lot of thought and consideration (and discussion), it just wasn't made public.
Ligaya Mishan's food writing just might be the most beautiful I've read. I also really appreciate her approach to the intangible, emotional aspects of dining out (the particular quality of a restaurant's "hospitality)