How the Past Year Changed Restaurant Criticism
Between calls for racial justice and an industry-devastating pandemic, the traditional role of critic is adapting to the times
The image of the traditional restaurant critic — an older white man, surreptitious in appearance yet hearty in appetite, issuing snobbish judgments from behind a white tablecloth— was out of date long before the pandemic hit. White men aren’t the only ones who have worthwhile opinions on restaurants; upscale iterations of French or Italian cuisine aren’t the only foods worth talking about; and anonymity, the sacred shield of the restaurant critic, doesn’t necessarily work the way it used to. (As the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic Soleil Ho put it, “I am a millennial and I’ve been on the internet for 15 years — it’s really hard to cover up my tracks at this point.”)
Such shifts in the world of criticism and food writing broadly … Read more