Soleil Ho discovered just how varied food could be via her landline. The daughter of a single mother, Ho grew up in New York City, and her mom often ordered in for dinner. “She would fan out the restaurant menus and just have us pick,” Ho remembers. “I learned so much about all kinds of cuisines from there. One night it’d be Indian and then one night it’d be Italian or Mexican or Chinese.” Knock Seamless (although Ho’s childhood predates it), but takeout can be a passport to another world.

Ho, 31, is now the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic, and she has to eat in restaurants for work most nights each week. She started the gig 10 months ago, replacing someone who had held the position for over three decades. Which means Ho wasn’t alive the last time the role was available. Before it fell to her to review some of the most ambitious food in America (in an area that is known for both profound wealth and a homelessness crisis), Ho was a freelance writer and chef. In kitchens, she worked for a parade of men. She launched a podcast called The Racist Sandwich, dedicated to the exploration of cultural appropriation in food. Each spring she studied the James Beard Award winners, noting that while the gender balance showed signs of improvement the list was still on the whole…white.

She can’t transform that alone, but she does know that her responsibilities at the Chronicle put her in a position to decide which restaurants get attention and what kinds of cuisine “merit” a review in the paper. She has her forebears to look to for examples. The first critics she followed were Gael Greene at New York and Ruth Reichl at the New York Times. In the L.A. Times, the late Jonathan Gold celebrated mom-and-pop joints and immigrant kitchens.

But Ho’s approach isn’t copied from an earlier model. It’s based on her sensibilities and boils down to a profound belief that restaurants and food are inextricable from the world around them. At the Chronicle, she’s eliminated the star ratings to better account for the wide range of food she wants to review, from street-cart tacos to elaborate tasting menus. She scopes out bathrooms looking for gender-neutral signage and weighs how accessible restaurants are to those with disabilities.

She is also interested in shedding light on who backs a restaurant and what their motivations might be. When she worked in kitchens, Ho saw how lean the margins were, how hard that made it for even chefs of principle to turn down investment from someone who might not, as Ho puts it, “comport themselves in a manner that is civil towards employees and staff.” Now that she’s in a newsroom, she doesn’t just have to look on. “I’m better equipped to follow the money,” she says. “I have the time and the resources to pursue that.”

“For me, it’s just providing tools for people to talk about this stuff,” Ho explains. That could mean spending time articulating the taste of a certain dish or it could mean having a nuanced conversation about whether a restaurant’s food veers past tribute toward appropriation. “Most of the discussions that I have witnessed about that can be boiled down to, as [the writer] Ijeoma Oluo has talked about it, the series of asking for permissions. Like, ‘Can I do this? Can white people do this? Can I wear this? Can I eat this? Can I cook this?’ But the real question is, ‘What does appropriation tell us about wealth?’ To me, that’s the deeper question. It’s not about permission, it’s not about individual action; it’s about systems. It’s about who is getting paid to do this and how much? How much is their labor worth to us?”