[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. After 12 years, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells is moving on. He's scoured the boroughs for the best slice of pizza, given stars to fine dining establishments and food trucks, and even ranked the 100 best restaurants in the entire city. A great Pete Wells review can elevate a restaurant. A bad one, it can be a little trouble.

Now, in an essay for the Times, Pete gets candid about the health concerns that accompanied the job. He shares that reviewing a single restaurant can mean eating up to 36 different dishes. While eating dozens of different smash burgers and cheesecake and tacos around the city can be fun, it's not exactly good for you. As he says, having a job like that at The New York Times is like renting a tux. He's ready to return it. He writes, "At some point, it occurred to me that I am not my job."

Before Pete heads off to something new, we wanted to invite him on the show for an exit interview and to talk about how food in New York has changed in the last 12 years, and to reflect on his time as a restaurant critic. Pete, welcome back.

Pete Wells: Oh, thank you for having me back.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like to invite you in on the conversation. Do you have a favorite Pete Wells review? Did one of Pete's reviews convince you to try a restaurant? Maybe you had to step away from a job for health reasons for some reason? What's your experience? What's your words of wisdom? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call us or text to us at that number. Let's go all the way back. How did you get into food criticism?

Pete Wells: How did I?

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Pete Wells: It's been so long, I don't remember. I've been writing about food on and off since the '90s. I was writing about a lot of other things in the beginning, but food was really always the most fun. It was the one that I kept getting asked to do again and again, so it sort of became my career. It just took off that way. I didn't really think about restaurant reviewing, and I didn't think it would be all that interesting until I got to the Times and it came up as a real possibility. Then I found it totally fascinating once I started doing it.

Alison Stewart: What did you consider your main responsibilities as the restaurant critic for The New York Times?

Pete Wells: That's so interesting. On the basic level of not getting fired, I had to turn in copy every week. I had to turn in one review up until about a year ago when we went to every other week. I had to turn in one review a week and write some other stuff. If you think about the broader responsibilities, it's really interesting and it changes over time. You could think of yourself as trying to reflect the values of the restaurant business, the restaurant industry. I often get letters from people saying, thank you for what you've done for the industry or curse you for the terrible things you've done to the industry.

I think you can get into that way of seeing things, but it's not really the job. The job is not to help the industry or to hurt the industry. The job is to help readers. The longer I did it, the more I thought about that, and the more I had a broader sense of who the readers were, that they could be anywhere, they could have any budget, they could be anywhere in the city, and they might love going out to a fancy meal or they might hate it. I wanted to try to serve all of them.

Alison Stewart: What was your typical process for reviewing a restaurant? What would you go in there and take a look for?

Pete Wells: Wow. You go in and first of all, you do try to eat everything on the menu. Sometimes that's just not possible. A lot of- especially Chinese restaurants, have these menus with hundreds and hundreds of dishes. At some point, you have to say, okay, I will never, ever, ever eat all these things, but I've had 40 or 50, so I feel like I'm getting there.

Then while you're eating and paying attention to the food and all the obvious things that you would do to analyze the food, try to understand it, try to keep it in your memory so you can reproduce it for the reader, you're trying to take in all this other stuff that's happening on the periphery, like, how's the room? Are people at other tables having a good time? Are people at your table having a good time?

Does the service seem hesitant, nervous, out of step, or is it a well-oiled machine? Is it familial and sometimes true, really familiar? Sometimes family-run restaurants have the best service because they're completely comfortable. You're in their home. They're completely comfortable there. All this stuff, you try to absorb it while you're paying attention to the food so that later on you can try to bring the whole scene to life.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Pete Wells, who is stepping away from his role as restaurant critic for The New York Times after 12 years. We consider this an exit interview. If you'd like to join the conversation, do you have a favorite Pete Wells review? Did one of Pete's reviews convince you to try a restaurant, or maybe stay away for one, or maybe you had to step away from a job for health reasons and want to share your experience of words of wisdom? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

Somebody texted, "As a teenager growing up in rural New Jersey, I used to salivate reading Pete Wells' reviews and dreaming of a city with seemingly every type of food. Now I'm thankful every day to live in it. Thank you, Pete. We'll miss you." That's lovely.

Pete Wells: Oh, thank you.

Alison Stewart: You're very candid in your essay that one of the reasons you're leaving is the job's taken a physical toll on you and that issues around health are sort of a little bit taboo topics among restaurant critics. Why do you think they felt taboo?

Pete Wells: We just don't like to talk about it because we all know that it's a dangerous job, and if you talk about it too much, you're sort of tempting fate, I guess. It's depressing. It's depressing to admit that you're frail and mortal. It's depressing to admit that there's anything wrong with your body and that you can't just take it, that you should be able to just put away all these meals and all the wine and the cocktails and everything else that comes with it and just take it in stride. When you're younger, you kind of can do that. It just gets harder every year.

Alison Stewart: You write in your farewell essay, "When in the line of duty, you have spent enough hours loading up your tray with mashed potatoes, rolls, biscuits, and an extra slice of pie, you eventually have to ask yourself whether you were standing in the buffet line for the audience or for yourself." Did you answer the question?

Pete Wells: Well, I don't know if I've totally answered it, because the tricky thing about it is it's really both. As a restaurant critic, you're a reporter, you're a journalist, so you're gathering material, you're gathering string, as journalists say, and you're filling your notebook as you're filling your stomach. The two things are hard to separate. Maybe I do need to eat all 200 things on the menu. Maybe 50 isn't enough. Maybe I need to come back two, three, four more times. Sometimes I've gone down these just paths of gluttony because I thought I needed it to be able to report, to be able to understand the place. It's hard to tease out.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Paul from Manhattan has a question for you. Hi, Paul. Thanks for calling All Of It. What's your question?

Paul: Hey, Alison. Yes, I just had a question for Pete, and I love his reviews. They're always eloquently written. When he goes into a restaurant, does he go by himself, or does he bring a group of people, and the different people order different things so he can try them all, or does he sit there and eat entree after entree after entree?

Pete Wells: Well, I do bring back up. In a normal a la carte restaurant, I need help, partly just because you would look so strange if you ordered the whole menu. I do want to taste, as you said, about 36 things at the minimum before I can write a review. If I ordered all 36 at once and sat there and tasted them, the whole dining room would be staring at me. You bring people so you don't look like you've lost your mind. They're also helpful. They notice stuff. They point things out. They often draw my attention to things that I might have missed.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Mark from the West Village. Hi, Mark. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air with Pete Wells.

Mark: Hi, Alison. Hi, Pete. Thanks for taking my call, Pete, the Guy Fieri review is a masterpiece, obviously. It may not have been your intent, but it certainly inspired me to bring all my friends to go to the restaurant. The way that you so exquisitely described how poorly done the dishes were was exactly how bad the jack nog was, exactly how bad the donkey sauce was. It really taught me that the reviews are so thoughtful and that you can look at the reviews, go to the restaurant, experience it in a new way. Really grateful for that.

Alison Stewart: Thanks.

Pete Wells: Wow. Thank you. What's wild to me about that story, and I've heard it from other people, is that the restaurant had time to repair all of those things before you went in there. Somehow that didn't happen. It's one of the many, many mysteries of that restaurant.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to read a paragraph because it's beautiful. "Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane? Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?" Of the Guy Fieri's restaurant. How frank do you decide to be in your reviews?

Pete Wells: How frank? Well, at a basic level, you do want to be honest with the reader. An older critic told me when I was starting that his policy was to be completely honest and then pull back a step or a half step. If a place was bad, to say exactly how bad it was, and then he would soften it just a little bit. Sometimes, if you say how bad it is, people don't believe you.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Pete Wells: You strain credulity. That's the case with probably all of my really well-known negative reviews. I held back a little bit.

Alison Stewart: This is from Emma in Brooklyn. "Pete's review of Mama's Noodles in Bensonhurst from a few years ago is a family favorite. We drove out there during the pandemic often to stock up their frozen dumplings and pick up their mapo tofu. My favorite part of his reviews and work is the way he explores New York is such a part of it. I love going to new neighborhoods just because Pete reviewed a restaurant there. He's taken me all across the city to places I wouldn't often go. My family will certainly miss him.

Pete Wells: Oh, that's so great. That's probably the best thing I could hear.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jackie calling from the Upper East Side. Hi, Jackie. You're on the air with Pete Wells.

Jackie: Hello, Pete. Thank you so much for all your service these past years. I have clipped many of your reviews and found myself into new culinary adventures as a result. I've also experienced some health problems myself and I related to your article this morning. My question is, do the health challenges that are posed by one restaurant reviewer suggest that we need a new model of restaurant review? Maybe more along crowdsourcing, perhaps?

Alison Stewart: Jackie, thanks for the question.

Pete Wells: Yes, that's a great question. That's going on and has been going on for some time. I think there are many, many, many people who get their information about food from social media, from the Google reviews, or Yelp, and they try to look at what many, many people have said and take the average of them or sort whatever system you use to sort through and try to find a median.

The old traditional restaurant review is a different model. It's extensively reported and some time is spent in thinking about it and writing it, putting it together, and editing it. It may be a bit of a dinosaur at this point, but I've enjoyed doing it.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about internet and TikTok culture. There are so many food influencers telling people where to eat in the city. How do you think the advent of TikTok has changed the landscape of food criticism and the restaurant world in general?

Pete Wells: Well, I don't know if it's changed food criticism so much as it sort of opened up new avenues of information and maybe new ways of marketing food, new ways of getting your food out in front of the public, which in turn, have changed the kinds of food that people are making. If you make something that's very extreme looking, it's really huge, or something happens to it while you're eating it, or you cut it open and it-

Alison Stewart: [laughs]Explodes.

Pete Wells: -sauce explodes, all of that stuff is great for TikTok because in five or six seconds, something unexpected happens. It gets your attention. You watch it again. Those kinds of dishes that stop you in your tracks and make you go, "Oh, what was that? That's weird," that didn't used to be a good thing. Serving food that people thought was weird was not necessarily a good thing. Now, I think it kind of is because it'll cut through all the noise in people's internet lives and get them to remember.

Alison Stewart: There seems to be this interest in fine dining, from dark comedies like The Menu to The Bear. Why do you think stories about fine dining are so fascinating?

Pete Wells: Well, it really encapsulates so many things going on in our culture. There's a kind of the pursuit of pleasure that is kind of always part of American culture. Taken to these real extremes, there's the class stratification that everyone feels and everyone senses. A lot of people have this growing resentment about. In The Menu, all the customers are kind of the elite of society, and they're all awful people, and you're allowed to cheer when they die because they're so terrible, these class issues that, like, they're hard to talk about sometimes, and yet we all sense that they're there, and restaurants are a place where that all plays out.

Alison Stewart: Pete, what is next for you? What are you going to do? [chuckles]

Pete Wells: I hope kind of the same thing without the calories. That's my dream. [laughter] I don't know how that's going to work exactly. My hope is to write more cultural criticism, but still with a food focus and without the need to go out every single night.

Alison Stewart: "Hi, Pete. Over the course of his time as a New York critic, hasn't noise become a major hindrance to enjoying the evening?" David want to know what you think about that real quick.

Pete Wells: I have conflicting feelings about noise. I kind of think noise is great because--

Alison Stewart: Oh, did we lose Pete? See, it's Pete is about to start his new job, his new team right now. We lost Pete

Pete Wells: I'm still here.

Alison Stewart: You're there. Okay. In 20 seconds, what's next for the next critic? What advice would you give them?

Pete Wells: Oh, try to make the job bite-size. Don't feel like you have to eat every single thing in New York because there is so much, and it just gets bigger every day. You don't want to get bigger every day, so just be careful.

Alison Stewart: : Pete, we're going to miss your restaurant reviews. We can't wait to see what you turn up, what you write next. Thank you so much for being with us and for all of your work.

Pete Wells: Thank you. Thank you. It's been nice to be back. I hope I'm still interesting in the future and we can talk again.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] That is All Of It for today. Before I go, I want to remind you about the people's concert at Lincoln Center. It's our public song project. Our specialist, as well as Nicole Zarettis and musical guest Jake Blunt will be there as well. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. Hey, Kusha's going to be here tomorrow. Yes, Kusha tomorrow. I'll see you next time.

[MUSIC- Luscious Jackson: You and Me]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.