Have I done a good job covering these dizzying changes over the years? Probably not, but I’ve done my best. These days, the most effective critics are part carnival barker, madly yelling into the TikTok-addled maelstrom of public opinion part social anthropologist and part reporter, covering an industry that’s more central to the economic and spiritual well-being of the city than ever before. Once upon a time, we ambled from one establishment to another, scribbling notes under the table, dictating dining tastes and trends to a much smaller, more accepting public.
The COVID crisis sped up these changes and shot them forward a decade or two, and it did the same for the role of the all-knowing, Anton Ego–style restaurant critic, which has long been marked as something of an endangered species and now, finally, seems poised for extinction. Instead of prattling on about the glories of Continental cooking, diners can wax on about vegan or Oaxacan or Jamaican cuisines and will spend hours expounding, over a glass of orange wine, on where to find the finest birria taco in Queens.
Thanks to the chaotic wonders of the digital age, diners are more confident and informed than ever, and thanks to writers like Gold and Anthony Bourdain, they don’t see restaurants as stilted, ritual forms of entertainment the way their grandparents did but as windows into cultures from around the globe. Most important, and perhaps most intoxicating of all, is the sense of having an all-expenses-paid front-row seat to the life of a great city as the culture moves and changes around you.ĭuring my time on the job, the restaurant and dining world, which once occupied its own eccentric corner of the culture conversation, moved to the very center of things, then simply became part of the mainstream. You get to gather your friends and boss them around and treat them to a little party of your own choosing pretty much any day of the week.
You are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, fawned over.
A steady column that includes lots of free food is a good gig for any working writer, provided you have the constitution for it, and when you work as a prominent restaurant critic in a great dining town like New York, there are many other sorts of perks and privileges that are easy to get used to. Some of the reasons for this longevity are obvious, others less so. Gill of The Sunday Times in London, expired on the job way before their retirement years, and even my friends and colleagues who have survived the obvious perils of the occupation (budget cuts, creeping drunkenness, heart failure, choking on a stray chicken bone) do so in a way that is decidedly less glamorous than it was in the glory days, when a friend of mine called it “the last great job of the 20th century.” Some of the greatest critics of my generation, including Jonathan Gold of the Los Angeles Times and A. A.
Before I became the restaurant critic for this magazine in 2000, Gael Greene - who had been given the job in 1968, the year New York Magazine was founded - held on to it fiercely for decades.
There has never been a study on the average shelf life of a professional book, television, or movie critic, but those of us who eat for a living tend to stay on the job longer than most.