Dining Days

“[Ruth] Reichl brought a dramatist’s sensibilities to the restaurant critique, reproducing snatches of dialogue and describing fellow diners as if she were a travel writer in a foreign capital. Reichl covered a broader range of restaurants than Bryan Miller, her immediate predecessor at the Times, conferring on Chinese restaurants, in particular, a status they’d never enjoyed before, and causing Miller to complain in a memo to his former boss at the paper, which was gleefully intercepted by the New York Post: ‘How do you think she comes off giving SoHo noodle shops 2 and 3 stars? . . . SHE HAS DESTROYED THE SYSTEM that Craig, Mimi, and I upheld.’”
-Village Voice restaurant critic Robert Sietsema writes a nice history of restaurant reviews for the Columbia Journalism Review.