As a food critic, I’d say he’s doing his job. The readership of the NYT extends beyond the august assemblage at WB. A non beef eater who only knows Luger’s name, and is cajoled into going there by their friends, is not necessarily an idiot - unless they still decide to go there after reading his review. And Wells cannot say the sole isn’t good unless he first tries it. I’m sure he knew what he was in for going in.
I really don’t get all the Wells hatred here. He’s funny, readable and, based on the (few) restaurants I have tried after reading his reviews, he does more or less accurately reflect the experience at the places he’s reviewing. He’s certainly a hell of a lot more useful to me than Michelin. But, like many NYT readers, I’m a much more casual and intermittent participant in the NYC restaurant scene than many of the people here.
whether you’re a casual/intermittent diner or not, it’s still possible to view Pete Wells as a bad critic without hating him/viewing him as “POS.” And by “bad,” I’m not referring to the technical aspects of writing or being able to describe food, which Wells should be able to do as a baseline function of his job as a journalist. What’s much more questionable is Well’s judgment, and his decisions in what to review, and how to review those places. If you look at his body of work in reviews, his hack job against Peter Luger’s is part of a pattern going back to others like the Guy Fieri, Per Se reviews from years ago: reviews done in poor taste, that look to be done with the intent to drive clicks and pageviews, without really advancing the dialogue on food within NYC in a meaningful way. You can critically assess an institution without doing it in so obviously a self-serving way; I look at Soleil Ho’s piece on Alice Waters and Chez Panisse as an example, even if it got savaged by some on the old guard in SF. I don’t read Pete Wells and think of someone who loves food, and loves NYC, in the same way that I do when reading Ruth Reichl or even Ryan Sutton (from Eater NY, who I think is much better than Wells), or other thoughtful and conscientious critics like Jonathan Gold when he wrote about food in LA. Even Tejal Rao (who is excellent, and one of the best food critics in California now, to my mind) and Ligaya Mishan are much better within the NY Times food department than Wells.
Part of this may be from an overall decline in the quality of the journalism at the NY Times as a whole. Reading Pete Wells and his approach to food criticism recalls Jill Lepore’s devastating profile of how journalism in the US has declined:
It’s unfortunate to see how closely the Times is becoming aligned to websites like Buzzfeed, and reviews like the Luger one seem like just another example of that decline.
I agree with nearly all of this. Too many of Wells’s reviews are fairly transparently designed to drive clicks rather than advance the dialogue on dining in New York.
I also think he lets his social commentary and anti-elitism cloud restaurant reviews. I’m fine with putting restaurants in their social context. But at some point the commentary swallows the review and it becomes challenging to ascertain the quality of a restaurant’s food/service/atmosphere, and also to ascertain how the restaurant compares with similar restaurants in New York and beyond. I would like to know if a restaurant is “the best sushi,” “top-tier sushi,” etc., and then I can look at the pricing and decide whether it’s worth it to me. (FWIW, I thought Tejal Rao’s reviews of TFL/Single Thread/etc. was probably the worst offender of this issue that I’ve ever seen.)
At base, my issue with Pete Wells is that he’s just not that informative on where I should eat in New York and how New York’s interesting and important restaurants compare to each other and fit in the wider food world. Wells writes pretty well, and he can be entertaining. And his commentary is what it is. But as a food writer, he tells me far too little about food, what I should eat, and where I should eat it.
If he wrote a column criticizing a child’s lemonade stand for having thin, watery lemonade, would that be appropriate? Would critiquing some cookies someone baked for a charity event as dry, lacking depth be appropriate?
Ignoring completely that the restaurant he reviewed is > 2000 miles away from NYC, there’s literally no reason the article should have even been written.
A little absurd given that it’s not a soup kitchen. It’s still a restaurant in the business of making money whose product is the food. It’s not like he just picked out some take down candidates from a list of socially conscious restaurants. As far as I could tell from Gold’s article, it was certainly a restaurant (albeit a different location) that had received a ton of hype. Fair game for a national paper to review.
The people working at Locol are engaged, and seem glad to be there. If Locol can create environments like this across the country, it would be a major achievement.
But first Mr. Patterson and Mr. Choi have to figure out the menu. I understand why they want to take on fast food, but in the neighborhoods they hope to reach it’s one of the few kinds of food available. Why offer less satisfying versions of what’s already there, when they could be selling great versions of something new?
The neighborhoods Locol is targeting have serious nutritional problems, from hunger to obesity, but the solution isn’t to charge people for stuff that tastes like hospital food. If Locol were a nonprofit, then institutional-quality cooking might be unavoidable. It is a restaurant, though, and it is run by two chefs who are famous for cooking food that people really, really want to eat.
This passage seemed to encapsulate the article, and for me, seemed fair. Perhaps you may disagree, but I hardly think it makes Wells a piece of shit. It’s also amusing that Wells gets criticism for being too socially conscious, but also takes down a restaurant built around its social mission by focusing on the taste of its food.
The Locol question is a test for one’s views on what Wells should be doing. In my opinion, Wells absolutely should be writing about places like Locol – places that are important to the narratives surrounding food and dining nationally. Locol obviously is an innovative project by high-profile people and one that set out to be nationally important, trend-setting, and disruptive of traditional dining options in under-served areas. It’s not that different from discussing what Chang did with the Momofuku places, what Robuchon did with l’Atelier, etc. I also frankly like that Wells gave a real sense of the food rather than just focusing on the social aspects. Wells told us what it’s like to eat at Locol, rather than just talking about the fact that Locol exists. So while I love Jonathan Gold’s work generally, I disagree with him here: writing about Locol was the right thing to do and was worth of inclusion in the NYT food section. I wish that Wells wrote more about nationally interesting/important places that aren’t just “decent restaurants in New York.”
I do, however, take issue with the Locol review in two ways:
First, did it really need to be a review instead of just an article? And here is where I probably agree with Gold: it would likely have been better as a feature that mentioned the food’s shortcomings (and I absolutely think Wells should have mentioned the food’s shortcomings), rather than a review. The reason is that vanishingly few NYT readers are going to actually eat at Locol, so I can’t fathom the point of actually going through the exercise of giving it zero stars and detailing the best dishes, etc. Giving zero stars basically says “don’t eat here” – and that’s both harsh and bizarre, since the readership by and large isn’t going to eat there anyway.
Second, the tone. Given the price point, and the newness, and the ambitions of Locol, I found the tone of Wells’s critique to be bizarre – simultaneously overly harsh and overly playful, without enough sensitivity to the issues involved.
The decision to review needs to be made ex ante. If the food had been great, then Locol would have gotten a nice boost from the review. A reviewer can’t start the process and then pull the plug if a buzz-worthy operation doesn’t deliver the goods. That would be dishonest.
As far as geography, Wells reviews outside of New York. Including this nice, three star review of local favorite June Baby (which I don’t like nearly as much as Wells does).
NY Times has about 4.7 million subscribers and many of us no longer live in NY.
That assumes that consumers listen to only critics, and not their own preferences and experiences.
By analogy, many wines which lacked Parker scores, or had low ones, have still garnered strong consumer support. Especially the cheap junk which I drink.
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