It’s the end of an era, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells announced yesterday in an article titled “After 12 Years of Restaurant Review, I’m Retiring.”
“Earlier this year, I had my first medical checkup in longer than I’d like to admit,” Wells wrote, noting that he was “halfway through my list of some 140 restaurants I plan to visit before writing my 2024 edition of New York’s 100 Best Restaurants.” The article then goes on to discuss Wells’ “scores,” which he deemed “all-around poor,” listing his cholesterol, blood sugar, high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and the fact that he is “technically obese.” “After I finished eating,” Wells wrote, he realized he “wasn’t hungry.”
As Wells nears the end of his 12 years as the storied magazine’s restaurant critic, he has made it clear that he plans to stay on at the editorial desk: “I have decided to step back as gracefully as my state of technological obesity will permit,” he wrote.
Interestingly, Wells says that while the job may seem like a great opportunity, in reality it’s “almost [brought] “Looking up… is our health,” he writes, though he acknowledges the politeness of it all, “and yet most of the time we are standing on the edge of an endless pit, knowing that if we look down we might fall in.”
“It’s probably the unhealthiest job in America,” Adam Platt, who served as New York magazine’s critic for nearly 25 years until his retirement in 2022, told Wells. Wells also cited A.A. Gill, Jonathan Gold, and A.J. Liebling as some of the men who died young on the job. (He also noted that female critics, such as Gael Greene and Mimi Sheraton, have outlived their betters.)
He concluded: “It’s time to return the tuxedo. The trousers have been lengthened a few centimetres, but I can get the tailor to shrink them again. The stains on the jacket are from pork fat. I think that’s what gives it its character.”