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Pete Wells has been restaurant critic for The New York Times since January 2012. As restaurant critic, he says that he has probably eaten close to 800 meals. (And he says, miraculously, he hasn’t gained weight.) Here he gives Insiders a sense of how he does the job.

Q.

First, how do you decide which restaurants to review?

A.

Some get so much buzz they become more or less mandatory: You hear about them so often that you want to know what they’re like.

Most often a celebrity chef or celebrity restaurateur is responsible for that buzz, but once in a while the restaurant itself is a celebrity. When Tavern on the Green reopened, that would have been a mandatory review even if the chef had been a complete unknown.

Those reviews are no-brainers, but unfortunately I have to put some actual thought into whether or not to review all the others.

I’ll look for something a little unusual, like a neighborhood that isn’t really on the foodie radar, or a cuisine that hasn’t reached market saturation yet, or an idea that just sounds novel.

I also look for restaurants that might serve as a diving board from which I can launch into discussion of some idea that seems interesting or important.

This may be a style of dining that says something about the mood in the city; a few weeks ago I reviewed a restaurant that seemed to have been conceived almost entirely to serve people with too much money because, you know, those people need help spending it!



I write a column with the most boring name in the history of newspapers — it’s called Restaurants, although nobody calls it that — but it’s still a column, which means I want to use all the nonmandatory reviews to plot out different points on the map of what I think is significant in New York dining.

Then finally, and this is always in the background of every decision, I am looking for places I can recommend. I would rather tell people where they should go than tell them where they shouldn’t go. If you walk out the door of your building, turn left and walk for five minutes, you’ll pass at least one mediocre restaurant. Pointing them out doesn’t strike me as very useful.

Q.

How many times do you visit before you write about a particular venue?

A.

If I’m going to give stars, I go at least three times. That’s been the tradition at The Times since the 1960s. Occasionally with places I’ve visited fewer than three times, I’ll do a short, more casual write-up that contains some opinion but isn’t a full-bore review. I do that a lot with restaurants away from New York, where it would just take too much time and money to eat three meals with a decent interval of time between each one.

Q.

How many dishes do you sample before you write a review?

A.

If there’s a normal menu, not a tasting menu, I’ll probably taste 30 to 40 dishes. A few of those may be repeats, so I can test for consistency from one visit to the next, but the rest will be distinct dishes. But I spend a lot of nights these days lashed to a tasting menu, so I’ll just eat as many courses as the chef feels like serving.

Q.

You order 30 different dishes? Or return three times and order 10 dishes? Or I’m guessing you take a bunch of people with you when you sample a new restaurant?

A.

That’s right, I go at least three for a starred review, and with a typical à la carte menu I may bring as many as four or five people with me, and I’ll ask them not to get anything that anybody has ordered that night — no overlaps allowed. So with appetizers, main courses and desserts, not to mention the occasional side dish and all of the small snacks that restaurants are now trying to convince us to eat before we start on the appetizers, you get up to 30 or 40 dishes very quickly.

Q.

Do you ever eat at home?

A.

Sure, I do. Breakfast every day (usually oatmeal), lots of lunches and an occasional dinner.

Q.

Or eat alone?

Q.

I’ve eaten alone. Usually I do it because I’m facing a tasting menu, or an omakase meal, at a sushi bar, where the chef decides what to serve, and the dishes will be the same no matter who’s at the table. (On the other hand, it can be interesting to see how a restaurant like that deals with a guest who doesn’t eat animals or gluten.) But sometimes, if I just happen to be in the neighborhood of some place I’m curious about and if there’s room at the bar, I’ll order a few things in an exploratory spirit, to see if it’s worth coming back with reinforcements.

Q.

How do you remember the chicken schnitzel, the improbably fluffy knishes and the rest? Do you take notes when you eat?

A.

Well, not literally when I’m eating, but yes, at some point during the meal I’ll pause to write a few things down.

I used to try to write down literally every last leaf and stem on every plate — I’d have notes like “around the salmon are 7-10 pickled mustard seeds, surrounded by purple kale stems, orange nasturtium, and green mushroom caps.”

And then at some point I gave myself permission to forget a few things. I just decided that the elements of the dish whose flavor stuck in my head were the ones that were really important, and that all the rest of it was more or less parsley.

So my notes began to change from long lists of things I wouldn’t otherwise remember to short descriptions of what I actually did remember.

Q.

Obvious question: Have you gained weight since you started the job as restaurant reviewer?

A.

For the first six months or so, I lost weight. I’d been working in the office every day, and the only time I wasn’t sitting at my desk was when I was on the way to or from the cafeteria, or the snack vending machine, or the Illy coffee bar with those chocolate chip cookies, or the coffee cart on 40th Street, and so on. (I could write a very thorough article on not very good but highly caloric and highly available snacks in the area of 40th Street and Eighth Avenue.) So in the beginning, when I started writing at home and all of that was out of my sight, I lost a few pounds. I’ve probably gained them back, but it’s still the case that I snacked much, much more when I worked in the office.

Q.

Is there such a thing as competition in the restaurant reviewing world?

A.

Not long ago in New York I think there was competition to be first, which was silly and not really in anyone’s best interests.

Things seem to have slowed down a bit lately, and the small group of paid critics gives restaurants a tiny bit more time to find their sea legs. And slowing the process down gives us more time to stop and say: “Wait a minute, is this restaurant really that interesting? Maybe I’ll look around some more and find other prospects.”

Q.

How hard is it to remain incognito at a restaurant you may review?

A.

Sometimes it’s impossible and sometimes it’s not.

The harder they’re looking for critics, the more likely they are to find us. And new restaurants that cost a significant amount of money and/or where a chef is really making a big play for attention look really, really hard. Maybe that’s obvious.

But I’ve been surprised that I’ve been able to get in and out without attracting attention in some restaurants that weren’t necessarily looking for critics, places that have been open awhile and aren’t expecting a new review. Even that is no guarantee.

Q.

Ever been outed as the Times restaurant reviewer. How did that go over?

A.

Once I was in a restaurant where the owner hadn’t spotted me yet. I could tell because he was obviously a somewhat nervous guy, and I was pretty sure he’d be much more nervous if he knew I was sitting there. Over at a corner table was a purveyor who sells to a lot of the restaurants I review, and eats in a lot of them. He’s kind of a purveyor-around-town character. I saw him spot me and wave the owner over, and then the two of them walked into the men’s room together for a conference. I didn’t know real people held meetings in the men’s room. I thought it was just the Fonz.

Q.

Any advice for would-be restaurant critics?

A.

When you invite guests to go out with you, give them a name to call you. If you forget to do it when you’re making the plan, do it as soon as you sit down. And get used to answering to anything.