Restaurant critic's departure reveals potential hazards of the job

Restaurant critics appear to have the best job in journalism, enjoying meals a few nights a week on someone else’s dime.

But New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells had painted a more complicated picture. In a recent column, Wells announced he’s leaving the beat because the constant eating has led to obesity and other health problems.

“Intellectually, it was still really stimulating, but my body started to rebel and say, ‘Enough is enough,’” Wells told The Associated Press. “I just had to come face to face with the reality that I can’t metabolize food the way I used to, I can’t metabolize alcohol the way I used to and I just don’t need to eat as much as I did even 10 years ago.”

To write a review, food critics usually make two or three visits to a restaurant and bring a handful of dining companions so they can taste as many dishes as possible. If the restaurant has a special focus on wine or cocktails or desserts, they try those, too.

“You have to sample the full range of the menu,” said Ligaya Figueras, the senior food editor and lead dining critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “If I really felt like a salad today, I can’t just have the salad.”

Special features, like lists of the best places to get pizzas or hamburgers, may have critics eating the same fare for weeks. MacKenzie Chung Fegan, a restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, sampled Peking duck all over the city for a story about a restaurant that specialized in the dish.

“There was a two-week period where I was eating more duck than anyone’s doctor would advise,” Fegan said.

All that restaurant eating can take a toll. In a 2020 study published in the Journal of Nutrition, researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University found that 50% of meals at full-service U.S. restaurants – and 70% of those at fast-food restaurants -- were of poor nutritional quality, according to American Heart Association guidelines. Less than 1% were of ideal quality.

Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and Tufts professor who was one of the study’s authors, said restaurant meals tend to be lower than ideal in whole grains and legumes, modestly lower in fruits and vegetables, and modestly higher in salt and saturated fat.

For the period the study examined, between 2003 and 2016, the nutritional quality of food in grocery stores improved, Mozaffarian said. But restaurants didn’t make similar changes, he said.

“I can’t tell you how many restaurants I go to and on every person’s plate there are French fries,” Mozaffarian said. “There are not an equal and diverse array of healthy and unhealthy menu choices.”

To be fair, Fegan said, diners are looking for something delicious when they go out to eat, “and a lot of times that means something with fat and sodium.”

“If I’m looking at the menu thinking, ‘What is the most exciting thing on this menu?,’ it’s probably not a side of broccoli rabe,” she said.

Figueras deals with the challenge in several ways. On the nights she’s not dining out, she says she is “hypervigilant” and eats mostly vegetables. She plays tennis and walks her dog to stay in shape. And when she’s heading to a restaurant, she eats fruit or another healthy snack so she won’t arrive hungry.

“Everything tastes good when you’re starving,” she said.

Lyndsay Green, the dining and restaurants critic at the Detroit Free Press, also tries to eat healthy on her days off, getting most of her food from a local farmer’s market. Green says she thinks menus are getting healthier. Many chefs are offering gluten-free or vegan options, she said, and are getting more creative with their non-alcoholic cocktail menus.

Green thinks restaurant critics can help readers by being open about their own needs. A pregnant critic, for example, could write up a restaurant guide for other expectant parents.

“Nearly everyone has health concerns and dietary standards, so I think it can also be our job to talk about that in our work,” she said.

Wells isn’t the only restaurant critic to make a change in recent years. Adam Platt stopped covering restaurants for New York magazine in 2022, also citing the toll on his health. Wyatt Williams stopped covering restaurants for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2019, saying he had simply lost his appetite.

Fegan and Wells both noted that women seem to have more longevity in the business. Mimi Sheraton, a former restaurant critic for The New York Times, died last year at age 97 after a six-decade career in food.

“I think if you are socialized as a woman in America, you’ve already spent a lot of your time thinking about portion and weight and control,” Fegan said.

Wells will file a few more reviews before stepping down in early August. He will remain with the Times. Times food writers Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna will step in as restaurant critics on an interim basis, the newspaper said.

Wells said he will continue to go to restaurants and maybe even enjoy them more now that he’s not distracted by work. He said he will be sorry to lose touch with New York’s seemingly infinite restaurant scene, but glad to find more balance in his own life.

“Eating out constantly, you lose touch with your own normal appetite,” he said. “I didn’t know anymore what was normal for me.”