Good morning.

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I’m the food editor of The Times and I took to Twitter on Friday morning to report some very good news for fans of California’s vibrant and exciting restaurant scene: Tejal Rao has been appointed our first-ever California restaurant critic.

It is high time we did so, right? Not only does The Times have more readers in California than in any other state save New York, but California has more restaurants and a wider variety of them than any other state, bar none. That is an irresistible combination platter for a news organization like The Times.

We are devoted, after all, to the business of helping readers understand the world in which they live. Close and critical coverage of restaurants is a great way to do that in California, from south to north, east to west. The consideration of restaurants — there are 72,000 in the state! — will allow Tejal to explore how Californians live and what matters to them, across cultures and cuisines and into their (delicious!) commingling. She’ll tell us where to eat and why.

And she is the perfect person for the role. A reporter on our Food Desk and an “Eat” columnist for The New York Times Magazine for the past two years, Tejal has reported on food trucks in New York and the Lost Kitchen in Maine, on the indigenous cuisine of the upper Midwest and on the return to Thailand of the chef Pim Techamuanvivit. She has written columns about oysters, mango kulfi and the case for canned tuna. She’s gone deep on panettone. Her interests are wide and varied. Moreover, she has been a restaurant critic before, at both Bloomberg News and The Village Voice in New York. In both postings she was awarded a James Beard Award for restaurant criticism.