Good morning on this damp Monday.

Here in New York, everyone’s a critic. And Restaurant Week, kicking off today and running through Feb. 9, offers amateur food critics their biannual chance to evaluate three-course lunches ($29) or dinners ($42) at hundreds of restaurants across the city.

But to be a professional restaurant reviewer, you need more than a reservation and a hot take on udon noodles. The job demands a hearty appetite, an iron stomach, and a touch of spycraft to avoid fawning treatment from staff and chefs.

The New Yorker has a new food critic, Hannah Goldfield. We asked her and Pete Wells, The New York Times’s restaurant critic, for the inside scoop on writing about food for a living. Their responses are lightly condensed.

How do you choose what to order?

Mr. Wells resists the “cliché of foodie insiderism” to order the “craziest thing on the menu.” He lets his guests choose many of the plates: “I’m really interested in the item in the menu that’s written in a way that it sings out to people.”