Class Conflict And Fine Dining

“The Dining section is not a tip sheet or a guide to dining on a budget. There is certainly a service dimension to the coverage, but primarily it reports on the news, and the critics perform the same function as our drama, book, and music critics. Yet cost objections do not seem to hound those folks the way they do the restaurant critics. The Met is very expensive, yet we cover all Met productions without any sense of guilt. Yankees tickets are expensive, but we do not balance out the coverage by reporting on fewer Yankees games and more Cyclones games. We follow the news.”
 — Former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes defends the paper from a reader who has “grown dismayed by the reviews of restaurants that the vast majority of New Yorkers cannot afford to patronize.”