On Wednesday, The Times announced that Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan are the new chief restaurant critics, filling — and expanding — the role Pete Wells left in 2024. This appointment is one of a few changes we’re making as our food criticism becomes more national, and as we bring it to life in new ways.
Who Are the Critics?
Both Rao and Mishan are longtime reporters and critics for The Times, though this is the first time either has been chief critic. Most recently, Rao has been a California-based critic at large, writing broadly about food culture. Mishan was an Eat columnist for the Times Magazine and a writer at large at T magazine. She also wrote the Hungry City restaurant column from 2012 to 2020.
Why Does The Times Need Two Critics?
For decades, the restaurant critic for The Times focused almost exclusively on New York City, writing weekly reviews and notebooks and awarding star ratings to individual restaurants. But with subscribers in every state, and great restaurants in each of them, we’ll now use two critics to deliver starred reviews of restaurants all over the country. The idea is to expand upon the work we started with the Restaurant List, our annual national roundup of the 50 places our staff is most excited about, and our lists of the best restaurants in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Austin, Texas.
Who Does What?
Rao will be dedicated entirely to the national dining scene. Mishan will split her time between reviewing the best and most newsworthy restaurants in New York City and covering the rest of the country with Rao. The goal is to capture particular moments in American dining — the restaurants that are most interesting, exciting and emblematic of our times.
With All That Travel, Will There Be Fewer New York Reviews?
New York is one of the world’s great restaurant cities. It’s where The Times built its authority on the subject of where best to eat. We have no plans to back away from that, and in fact will offer even more New York restaurant coverage. In the coming months, we’ll start publishing brief, starred reviews from other Times critics. The Where to Eat newsletter will continue to send restaurant recommendations to subscribers’ inboxes every week. And, of course, we’ll keep producing The Times’s annual list of the 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.
Aren’t Times Restaurant Critics Meant to Be Anonymous? Their Faces Are in the Video at the Top of This Page!
Yes, indeed. No disguises, distorted voices or blurred faces. In a break with Times tradition, the new chief critics won’t attempt to hide their faces publicly — the internet has made such subterfuge all but impossible. Previous critics did it to avoid special treatment when they were dining at restaurants, though as Pete Wells can tell you, a restaurant on the lookout for critics will just about always spot them in the room. Critics at many other publications have already abandoned the quest for anonymity.
This change opens up bigger possibilities for how we cover restaurants in The Times. Rao and Mishan will appear in videos on our site, talking about criticism, the restaurants that excite them and how they do their work. Audiences want to know who’s making their recommendations, to put faces to names, to get a sense of their tastes and who they are. We hope these videos will do so, and help bring a new level of transparency and immediacy to our criticism.
But Won’t Restaurants Spot the Critics and Give Them Special Treatment?
The critics can still do a great deal to eat at restaurants undetected, using aliases when they make reservations and pay the bill. (The Times pays for every meal the critics eat. The critics do not accept invitations to dine from publicists or restaurants. They book reservations the way everyone else does.)
It is true that there are things restaurant staff members can do once they realize a critic is in their restaurant. Service can be more attentive (though that’s not always a good thing); the critic can be seated at a great table; the kitchen can cook each dish twice (at least) and send out the best versions in generous portions. These are reasons Times critics visit restaurants many times when they’re awarding stars — to get a sense of how dishes and service fluctuate from meal to meal.
Ultimately, good restaurant criticism derives from the taste, expertise and point of view of the person doing it. Our critics’ job is to eat and describe the food as they experience it, and to contextualize each restaurant in a broader landscape. They seek the delicious, and help people understand the meals and restaurants that delivered it.
