I raced into adulthood intent on fame. I was a vocal performance major at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and halfway through my sophomore year I transferred to nearby Emerson College to earn a BFA in acting. My modest goals: Make it as a pop star, and then break into film.
Instead, in the great tradition of creative types with little idea how to make their outsized dreams a reality, I turned to work in restaurants. A decade whizzed by. Staring down 30 with little progress toward superstardom, I pivoted my ambitions to a different seemingly impossible career path — one with tenets that demanded the exact opposite of celebrity. A tribe for which inconspicuousness was the ultimate accomplishment.
I became a restaurant critic.
Anonymity remains braided into any conversation about food criticism, a lingering mystique in the collective consciousness that conjures wigs and spycraft and debate about how long one can pull off the masquerade. It was the original North Star precept for reviewers aiming to have everyman dining experiences, part of a job conceived in the 1960s when tiny cameras were fantastical Bond gadgets.
For nearly a quarter-century, through critic positions at six publications, I’ve known my photo finds its way onto collages of food writer pics that chefs hang on their kitchen walls, but thankfully no one was ever vindictive enough to splatter my face across the internet.
Facelessness has a shelf life in this niche line of work, and I’ve reached mine. After seven years as restaurant critic for The Times, I’m voluntarily dropping any pretext of anonymity. It’s time, for lots of reasons.
To begin, video is inescapably a part of how journalists reach our audience. As someone striving to be low-profile, I always loved being on podcasts. Now those are videos too. Refusing to participate, no matter how much I’d prefer to let my written words do all the talking, has begun to feel professionally isolating.
In food media circles, a critic revealing their face can feel anticlimactic in 2025. The lucky few newly finding their way to the strange, meaningful and vanishing vocation of professional eater are young enough to have shared their lives online for years. Attempting to scrub one’s images from the digital sphere is futile.
As outlets for journalism continue to shrink, restaurant criticism can sometimes feel on the verge of extinction in America. This year at least brought reassuring signs of life. The New York Times announced four positions led by chief critics Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao, both longtime writers for the paper. Former Bon Appétit restaurant editor Elazar Sontag recently took the role at the Washington Post, after Tom Sietsema’s remarkable 26-year run.
None of them hide their faces. They’re introducing themselves on visual social media platforms and talk shows, discussing the steps they take (reserving tables under different names, observing other diners, making multiple visits) to fairly assess even when they may be recognized.
I’m clocked in dining rooms all over Los Angeles, as happens to anyone who does this for a living long enough. My younger counterparts often make the point that forgoing anonymity is equalizing — that it gives a fair opportunity to any chef and owner invested in looking out for critics, rather than privileging those with the budget to hire a PR person whose fees include providing critic photos.
I agree. And yet the decision to unmask is more unnerving for me than I imagine it is for them. “American Idol” and “The Wire” both debuted the month that Creative Loafing, the major alt newsweekly in Atlanta, published my very first review in June 2002. Facebook wouldn’t begin remaking American culture for another four years.
I’ve spent more than two decades navigating the schism between public byline and private persona. Anonymity, even the idea of it, was a kind of armor. Removing it feels lighter, but far more vulnerable. Outside I’m showing my aging 50-something features, but inside I’m having gawky, first-day-of-middle-school flashbacks.
Even as a teenager, food was my thing, a then-oddball obsession for a latchkey kid in the 1980s. In college, cookbooks on loan from the library sat in stacks around my tiny studio apartment. When I wasn’t practicing scales or memorizing lines, I was following Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe for chicken biryani or coaxing my friends to try the northern Italian steakhouse none of us could really afford.
I graduated and moved to New York, where I waited tables, and then moved into making desserts. Cooking paid less but I was far happier thinking through spice combinations that best complemented strawberries. I should have been saving for acting classes and headshots. Mostly I blew any spare money on the more affordable restaurants that Ruth Reichl was reviewing then in the New York Times.
After giving up on Manhattan (arguably vice versa) and working odd jobs kicking around the country with my traveling-musician best friend, I landed in Atlanta. What was I going to do with myself? Dining and cooking were more important than ever — not only to me, but to devotees of the Food Network, launched in 1993, and the growing collective of voices on forums like Chowhound and eGullet. I studied writing with author and teacher Natalie Goldberg. Follow your obsessions, she said. At night I’d pore over a binder full of restaurant reviews, printed from online, written by critics all over the country. I wanted to be one of them.
Cliff Bostock, a longtime columnist for Creative Loafing whom I’d met in a coffee shop, helped me get my shot. The paper’s food editor sent me to an Italian restaurant called the Roasted Garlic in a far suburb. I remember my young, snark-fueled confidence, and rereading it now notice references from the first act of my life seep into the second: “The servers rattle off a similar spiel of specials like well-rehearsed audition monologues.” The piece was good enough to land me more assignments. This was it. After a decade of floundering, I would follow this newfound opportunity — this calling — wherever it took me.
Being a restaurant critic felt at first like winning a plum role. The anonymity part was a glamorous game: “Oh, if only you knew what I was really up to.” Dashing to the restroom to take notes on someone’s mispronunciation of quinoa, and how the overly acidic vinaigrette could burn holes in the tablecloth. My friends at first found the fake names I used hilarious: “Hey, PHILIP. Which noodle dish is your favorite here, PHIL?”
But I was serious about my newfound career, and soon anonymity felt less like a performance and more like a responsibility.
Non-detection, at its best, allows a seamless merging of experience and observation. The staff is absorbed in their job, I’m tasting the stronger-than-usual hit of star anise in the pho, I’m looking at tables noticing what other customers seem to be enjoying or not. At once a part of, and apart from, a specific moment.
When critics are made, they sense panic the way psychics see auras. Hands trembling as they tip water jugs, smiles that stretch to frozen grimaces, the entrees that take too long to arrive because the clued-in chef is freaking out over the rib-eye broiled two shades past medium-rare. It can all veer self-important and goofy. During my time at the Dallas Morning News in the late 2000s, I heard that industry pros would tell each other to keep an eye out for the guy who looked like a “gay George Clooney.” I mean — thanks? But also: as if.
I moved around plenty for jobs, and for nearly five years beginning in 2014 I traveled the country as Eater’s national critic. It was easy to keep a lower profile while popping up in a new city every week. Settling into L.A.? Not so much.
I made my debut in The Times in January 2019, reviewing now-closed Fiona on Fairfax Avenue. I was stunned to catch the owner, Nicole Rucker, pointing her iPhone in my direction during one lunch.
“How did you know?” I asked Rucker years later.
“You asked a lot of questions at the counter, and you ordered a lot of food for two people,” she said. “I had a hunch.”
No matter the attempts at disguises (mine: minimal, and only successful when orchestrated by costume designers who deservedly charge for their efforts), the burner phones and alt email addresses, the attempts at invisibility, a city critic rarely goes more than a couple years escaping notice.
Every fall, I’m consumed with researching and writing The Times’ annual 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles; my seventh one, co-authored with columnist Jenn Harris, goes live tonight. This year, as I raced for weeks from meal to meal, no less than 10 chefs or servers spotted me and asked, “Hey, it’s your busy season, right? How are you holding up doing all this eating?”
Their words registered as genuine kindness; they surprised me every time, though they shouldn’t have. I conflated anonymity (or magical thinking around anonymity) with the church-and-state stance I strive to maintain with restaurant professionals to most effectively do my job. They need not be mutually exclusive.
Unveiling my face won’t change how I go about the business of reviewing. The Times will continue to pay for meals as it always has; I do not accept comped food or drink. My aim remains to illuminate every facet of dining, built in so many ways on the beauty and tenacity of the city’s immigrant communities, that makes Los Angeles one of the world’s centers of food culture. No city has felt more like home to me than L.A.
Technology has rewired each of us uniquely. I never did join Facebook. I watched with a detached sense of alienation as people began sharing minute details of their lives while I mastered dodging photos. It was the New Yorker’s non-anonymous critic Helen Rosner, back when we were colleagues at Eater, who proclaimed that the images of meals we ceaselessly posted on Instagram were all really selfies. That satisfied the part of me that clung to anonymity for a long time.
But the AI era is something different. To be faceless, unconsciously or not, implies absence of humanity. When we can’t always know what’s real, or what will be real, nothing becomes more important than human connection. Machine intelligence can’t yet relay the lived taste of lemongrass, the laugh of a server or the buzz of a dining room you can feel between your shoulder blades.
So, here I am. Having photos taken felt out-of-body weird. But my 22-year-old self would be thrilled to know I finally have a decent headshot.
The post After two decades, I’m dropping my anonymity as a restaurant critic. Why now? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
