Tejal Rao: It’s torture because there’s so much ground to cover: So much good food and so little time! I’m new to the state, it’s only been a couple of months, so for now I think of every single place I visit as a kind of vital lesson. Every meal is giving me context and helping to establish the ins and outs of California dining culture.

In deciding where to go, I’m always paying close attention to cooks, friends, readers, purveyors, local newspapers, menus, everything, and trying to gather as much information as possible so that I can decide how to spend my time strategically, since it’s limited. (If you want to email me a tip about where to go, I’m at tejal.rao@nytimes.com.)

Can you tell us about how your review process works? Are you factoring in things beyond the experience of eating at a place? (For instance, you considered how Angler’s chef is adapting to climate change.)

I don’t have a formal process. It’s all pretty messy and intuitive, but it does start with the food. With the pleasure of it, ideally, but not always. Basically I know a meal has the potential to be a review if I can draw readers’ attention to a restaurant that’s interesting and I can weave in other narratives and ideas into the criticism.

I tend to do a lot of reporting and research that maybe doesn’t make it into a story, but does help to shape it. Calling professors, interviewing fishermen, reading academic papers or old cookbooks. Yes, eating at the restaurant is at the heart of the review, but eating can’t exist in a vacuum or it’s pretty boring.