Earlier this year, I had my first physical exam in longer than I care to admit. At the time, I was about halfway through a list of about 140 restaurants I planned to visit before writing the 2024 edition of “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.” It was a safe bet that I wasn’t in the best shape of my life.
My results were bad across the board: my cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure were worse than I expected, even in my worst moments. The terms prediabetes, fatty liver disease, and metabolic syndrome were bandied about. I was technically obese.
OK, not just technically.
I knew I had to change my life. I promised I would start as soon as I had eaten at the other 70 restaurants on my spreadsheet.
But a funny thing happened when I finished eating: I realized I wasn’t hungry. And I’m still not hungry, at least not like I used to be. And so, after 12 years as the New York Times’ restaurant critic, I’ve decided to bow out as gracefully as my technically obese state will allow.
I’m not going to quit the editorial office. I have a few more restaurant reviews lined up that will appear in the coming weeks, and I plan to stay at the Times long after that. But I can’t stand the weekly critic life any longer.
The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that no one wants to hear you complain. The job of going out to dinner every night with carefully selected groups of friends and family is eerily similar to what other people do on vacation. If you work in New York or any other major city, your field is almost unimaginably rich and infinitely new.
People open restaurants for all sorts of reasons. Some want to recapture the flavors of a place they left and consider their business a success if they win the approval of others in the same place. Others want to create a cuisine that no one has ever tasted or even imagined before and will not be satisfied until their name is known in Paris, Beijing and Sydney.
And there are hundreds of degrees in between. The city is a feast. Exploring, appreciating, understanding, interpreting, and often even savoring that feast has been the greatest honor of my career. And while the number of food critics is dwindling every year, everyone I know who works in this dying profession would probably say the same thing.
So we tend to save our grievances for two or three of us to gather around the tar pits. We then talk about the things no one will feel sorry for us about, like the unflattering pictures of us that restaurants hang on the kitchen walls and the unpleasant food in restaurants that is not worth commenting on.
There is one thing we almost never talk about: our health. We avoid talking about our weight, like actors avoid saying “Macbeth.” We do it partly out of politeness. But mostly, we all know that we are standing on the edge of an infinitely deep hole and that if we look down, we risk falling into it.
“It’s probably the most unhealthy job in America,” Adam Platt said recently when I called him to discuss this taboo subject. Mr. Platt was New York magazine’s restaurant critic for 24 years before leaving the trough in 2022.
“I still feel the effects,” he said. He is being treated by many doctors for gout, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes.
“I never ate desserts, but when I took this job, I started eating them,” he said. “I became addicted to sugar. You drink too much. You eat extremely rich meals, maybe four times a week. It’s not good for anyone, even if you’re like me and you’re built like a giant Brahman bull.”
We have discussed the alarming frequency with which men in our field seem to die suddenly, before retirement age. AA Gill, the restaurant critic for the Sunday Times of London, died of cancer at the age of 62. Jonathan Gold, a critic for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, died at 58, just after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In 1963, AJ Liebling of The New Yorker died after going to the hospital with bronchial pneumonia. He was 59.
These are isolated stories, to be sure, but I would see the headlines projected on my bedroom ceiling when I woke up at night, my insides burning like a fire in a chemical refinery.
The women I admired lasted longer. Gael Greene, who invented Mr. Platt’s work in New York, lived to 88. Mimi Sheraton, a critic for Cue, The Village Voice and The New York Times, lived to 97, despite a declared 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 this to the fact that she “hasn’t been to the doctor,” although she was recently advised to have her cholesterol and blood sugar tested (both came back normal). “I just take little bites of this and that. I never finish a plate at a restaurant,” she said. “If I finished my plate, I would weigh 300 pounds.”
S. Irene Virbila, who ate out six nights a week for 20 years as a restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, used to have a man accompany her to finish her plates. She called him Hoover.
“Restaurant food is rich,” she said. “To create these flavor bombs, you have to have a lot of rich elements in it. It has more of everything than you would eat if you could eat exactly what you wanted.”
After leaving her job, she lost 20 pounds in two months, “without even thinking about it.” Today, apart from taking medication for a hereditary vulnerability to cholesterol, she is healthy.
Almost all of my 500 reviews are the result of three meals at the establishment I was reviewing. I usually took three people with me and had each order a starter, main course, and dessert. That’s 36 dishes that I tasted before writing a word.
This is the simplest math for writing a restaurant review, but there is a more complex math. Critics eat at many restaurants that Gael Greene described as “neither good enough nor bad enough” to be reviewed.
Then there are the benchmark dishes, the ones you eat to stay informed, to not be an imposter. This is often where I got myself into real trouble. How many smash burgers did I have to taste, or re-taste, before I could write about the ones at Hamburger America, a restaurant I reviewed in the same months I was eating my way onto my “Top 100 Restaurants” list, where I had to make sure that the handmade Uighur noodles, Puerto Rican lechon asado, and Azerbaijani offal hash I loved were, at least arguably, the best in town?
This is probably a good time to mention that naming 100 restaurants was entirely my idea. My editors asked me for 50, and I bet they would have settled for 25. When I did 100, and had to do it again a year later, they didn’t ask me to go back to each one. That was my idea, too.
Omnivorousness, in the figurative sense, is a prerequisite for being a good critic. My favorite film critic remains Pauline Kael, who wrote as if she had seen every film ever made. But films do not, as a rule, give you gout.
The most impressive omnivore in culinary literature was Jonathan Gold. There didn’t seem to be a single dish served 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 catching up with him.
A few years ago, he would tell people he had eaten every taco on Pico Boulevard. It was just an appetizer. His goal was to eat at every restaurant on the street “at least once.”
Pico Boulevard is over 15 miles long.
I haven’t eaten at every restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, by far my city’s most important artery for tacos. There were nights, though, when I was walking for miles under the No. 7 elevated train, watching women press disks of fresh masa and men cut cherry-colored strips of al pastor pork from slowly rotating trompos, when it seemed like a great idea.
At some point, this kind of research begins to resemble pathology.
“Your body changes over time,” Platt says. “You have this giant, distended belly that’s begging to be filled. All these weird sensors in your brain that are screaming for a good time are on DEFCON 1 all day. You get addicted.”
When you’ve spent enough hours in the line of duty filling your tray with mashed potatoes, rolls, biscuits and an extra slice of pie, you eventually have to ask yourself whether you’re lining up at the buffet for the public or for yourself.
“Truthfully, I have to say I probably chose this career as an excuse to overeat,” Mimi Sheraton told interviewer Terry Gross in 1987. “I think the people who are really good at it are all in that situation.”
Did this apply to me? Not at first. But over time, I came to see relentless gorging as a way to get really good at it. By running around town like a goat, I could try to level a playing field that is deeply tilted in favor of restaurants with money. Sea urchin spaghetti factories in Manhattan can still get attention. It’s not as easy for a soul food restaurant in Stapleton or a Palestinian kitchen in Bay Ridge or an Ensenadan aguachile specialist in Jackson Heights. So I would walk away, because if I didn’t, a truly important restaurant might be overlooked.
All this seemed normal until May, when I stopped going to restaurants for two weeks to recover from hernia surgery. The night after surgery, I wasn’t hungry. The next night, I ate soup. The next day, salad. With no menus, no guests, and no notebook to fill out, I ate just what I wanted and nothing more. I slept all night. I stayed up all day. I took long walks, which didn’t always end in bakeries. And at some point during those two weeks, I realized that I was not my job.
When I arrived at the Times in 2006, a reporter advised me not to identify too much with my job. “Any job at the Times is a rented tuxedo,” she told me.
I nodded, but didn’t see the point until this year.
It’s time to return the tuxedo. I had the pants adjusted a few inches, but a tailor can fix them. As for the stain on the jacket, it’s just pork fat. I think it adds character.