Pete Wells on his 12 years as the NYT's restaurant critic

After 12 years, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells is moving on. In his time in that role, 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 city. A great Pete Wells review can elevate a restaurant, while a bad one can spell trouble.

In an essay published in the Times this week, Pete got candid about the health concerns that accompanied the job. He shared that reviewing a single restaurant can mean eating up to 36 different dishes.

While eating dozens of different smash burgers, cheesecakes and tacos around the city can be fun, it's not exactly good for you. As he wrote, having a job like that at The New York Times is like renting a tuxedo; he's ready to return it.

"At some point, it occurred to me that I am not my job," he wrote in the essay.

Wells joined WNYC’s Alison Stewart on a recent episode of “All of It” to discuss how food in New York has changed in the last 12 years and reflect on his time as a restaurant critic. An edited version of their conversation is below.

Wells: 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.

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 industry. I often get letters from people saying, “Thank you for what you've done for the industry,” or cursing you for the terrible things you've done to the industry.

The job is not to help 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.

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, OK, I will never, 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.

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.

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.

At a basic level, you 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. You strain credulity. That's the case with probably all of my really well-known negative reviews. I held back a little bit.

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 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.

Well, it encapsulates so many things going on in our culture. There's the pursuit of pleasure that is always part of American culture. Taken to these real extremes, there's the class stratification that everyone feels and everyone senses and a lot of people have this growing resentment about.

In “The Menu,” all the customers are 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 … 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.

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.

Try to make the job bite-sized. 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.

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