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After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

nytimes.com

11–20 of 180 posts

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#11
My favorite is his 2015 review of Señor Frogs in Times Square: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/dining/senor-frogs-review...

The following year The New Yorker wrote a profile of him which features some of the backstory. "Is it possible to say with a straight face that Señor Frog’s is a better restaurant than Per Se? Can you get those words out without collapsing under your own idiocy?"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/12/pete-wells-the...

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#13

Yeah, I think anyone who travels a lot for work very quickly realizes that restaurant food eaten everyday, if you're not careful, will very rapidly put pounds on you. Now with Wells' article we know how much worse it becomes if that's your job too. As Anthony Bourdain wrote... "In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal." He's not exaggera…

fat tastes good...who knew

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#14
post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

This is why eating out is so bad if you're on a diet. Too much oil and fat, sugar, salt, fat, and other stuff

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#15
post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

This is why eating out is so bad if you're on a diet. Too much oil and fat, sugar, salt, fat, and other stuff

I feel like restaurants really have an unfair advantage there as far as flavor goes. Whenever I try to make something following a recipe, I balk at the amount of butter/sugar/oils/salt and cut way down or leave them out entirely, with predictable results. With a restaurant this is completely abstracted away so it's easier to get past.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#16
post #9

Just start on semaglutides, and eat in smaller portions like the women critics he describes in the article do. I think quitting a good critic job for your health is pretty silly when there are modern workarounds that mostly solve the issue.

how would that work? the job is to eat the food

The author literally described how women food writers keep their health while writing food columns - they taste the dishes but don't eat the whole plate. He doesn't say this makes women worse food writers at all.

He could just copy this strategy. If he doesn't have the will for it, semaglutides would make it really easy. You still enjoy and taste food the same on it, you just get full quicker.

So there is an easy solution to his problem.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#17

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

Barry-Jester kept her cool on her burrito quest, where Jim Haggerty drove his RV into the depths of madness searching for our greatest barbecue, in Porkin' Across America.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#18
post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

This is why eating out is so bad if you're on a diet. Too much oil and fat, sugar, salt, fat, and other stuff

I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US. Oddly enough, the higher end restaurants start to move in the other direction and shrink portion sizes.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#19
post #6

Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/

I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never dream of using at home.

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