September 2011
15 posts
Who should be the next NY Times food critic?
Spot on tips to the NY Times from Gail Simmons and Dana Cowin
Gail Simmons
Judge on Top Chef (Bravo); Special Projects Director, Food & Wine
“[A]ny critic needs to have a sense of wonder and fun in their style to make it approachable and interesting to readers. It’s important that the new critic is somewhat at a distance from the world of restaurants for obvious reasons, but also so they can speak as an average diner in a language that appeals to the wide range of readers of the New York Times Dining section, in real, practical terms. New Yorkers need a critic who has a palate just as discerning and adventurous as they are, with an appreciation and understanding that ambiance and service can make or break a restaurant. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, it also has to be someone who can easily go undetected and not allow their own ego or bias to get in the way of the service they are providing to their readers.”
Dana Cowin
Editor-in-Chief, Food & Wine
“The most important thing for the next Times’ restaurant critic is to eat everywhere, and to eat from sunup to after sundown. The food scene has changed so much. There are amazing restaurants that are only doing breakfast and lunch. There are amazing places that are doing dinner and late night. There’s a whole range of restaurant experiences that a New York Times restaurant critic should tell the reader about. There’s a danger of somebody who comes in who is of the food scene, of this moment in time, which means they would have an enormous appreciation of the hipster food world, which feels like it’s taken over New York, but it isn’t the whole food world here. Which is why I feel like it’s so important to have somebody who eats everywhere and tastes everything.”
This is out of the October Vanity Fair. Classic quote from Jay-Z. “I’m not a business man,” says the former president of Def Jam Recordings and the current C.E.O. of Roc Nation Entertainment. “I’m a business, man.”
