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.

What did you consider your main responsibilities as the restaurant critic for the New York Times?

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.

What was your typical process for reviewing a restaurant?

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.

You're very candid in your essay that one of the reasons you're leaving is the job's taken a physical toll on you and that issues around health are a little taboo among restaurant critics. Why do you think they felt taboo?

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.

You write in your farewell essay, "When in the line of duty, you have spent enough hours loading up your tray with mashed potatoes, rolls, biscuits, and an extra slice of pie, you eventually have to ask yourself whether you were standing in the buffet line for the audience or for yourself." Did you answer the question?

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.

I'm going to read a paragraph because it's beautiful. "Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked Alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane? Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?" That’s from your 2012 review of Guy Fieri's restaurant , Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar. How frank do you decide to be in your reviews?

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.

Let's talk about internet and TikTok culture. There are so many food influencers telling people where to eat in the city. How do you think the advent of TikTok has changed the landscape of food criticism and the restaurant world in general?

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.

There seems to be this interest in fine dining, from dark comedies like “The Menu” to “The Bear.” Why do you think stories about fine dining are so fascinating?

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.

What’s next for you?

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.

In 20 seconds, what advice would you give the next food critic? [Note: the New York Times announced this week that Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna will serve as interim critics.]

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.

Pete, we're going to miss your restaurant reviews. We can't wait to see what you write next. Thank you so much for being with us and for all of your work.

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