--:-- [Sound of voicemail message]
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Hey, Natalie here. You've reached The Daily's voicemail line. Leave us a message, please, with your questions for the Times New restaurant critics, Tejal Rao and Ligaya Michon. Thanks for calling.
--:-- [Sound of voicemail messages from various callers]
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Today, I talked to Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan and tried to get you some answers. This is The Daily.
--:-- Tejal Rao: Thanks for having us.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: Yeah, thanks for having us.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: So we did this call out on the show where we asked people to send in questions for you guys, to call a number that we gave them and to ask whatever they wanted to ask of our new restaurant critics. And the response was honestly overwhelming. Like, we could be here for hours. There were hundreds of questions that we received. And so I want to start the conversation by asking you guys one of the things that I think a lot of people are very eager to understand, which is how does one become a restaurant critic? What was your path to this work? Ligaya, let's start with you.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: Wow. So I am a bit of an accidental food writer in that when I was growing up, I don't think that we even talked about there being such things as food writers. I grew up in Honolulu and my mother is from the Philippines. My father is from England. And so my mother, she actually came, when she came to the United States, she famously says that she didn't even know how to make a pot of rice. And so my dad did all the cooking and being from England, of course, his dish was curry. And the classic English dish, I have to say, did not resemble any curry that is actually really an Indian curry, but I thought it was delicious. In my household, I think I thought of food as mostly something for survival. So I definitely didn't grow up as a gourmet. And it was really only when I moved to New York that I started to become more interested in food. And I was working at the New Yorker magazine and writing lots of short book reviews. And then one day I had a shot at writing the restaurant review. And I guess the rest is history from there.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Tejal, what about you? How did you arrive at this career?
--:-- Tejal Rao: I grew up in a family really obsessed with food. So my mom was born in Uganda. She's South Asian. My dad was born in India. And I was born in London and grew up moving around a lot. So we lived in England and also Kuwait and Khartoum. We moved to France when I was about nine years old. And I would go over to my neighbor's house and cook with her. and I would collect recipe cards, kind of like other kids might collect baseball cards or something. I would get these, I would get recipe cards for chocolate mousse and French pear tarts. And I would study the recipes and I would make them sometimes. And I was really a little lonely maybe and really interested in food and cooking.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: You're both coming to this job at a moment where the position of restaurant critic is changing. There are two kind of aspects of that change, right? First of all, you guys are not going to be hiding your identities. That's a big piece of this. And the other part is that you're not just going to be in New York City. Tejal, you're based in the West Coast, and you're going to be kind of reviewing restaurants all over the country. So I want to take those changes one by one. Let's start with the anonymity question. Tell me about that. Why be open about who you are, not disguise that right now?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: I think that the idea of the anonymous critic was always a bit of an agreed-upon fiction. A certain restaurant that was expecting to be reviewed would always have photos of all the restaurant critics in New York in the kitchen. So even though the critic, you know, we make reservations under fake names and we do everything in our power to sort of slip in unnoticed, But often critics were recognized. So it seemed that moving forward, especially at this time when it's so difficult to maintain anonymity without literally being a member of the CIA, why don't we turn this around and turn it into a strength where by showing our faces, we can build relationships with our readers.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Ligaya, do you have any worry that doing so is going to potentially skew the experience that you get at a restaurant?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: No, not really. We're still making an effort when we go to restaurants to slip in anonymously. So we're not making reservations under our own names. We're not announcing ourselves.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Tejal, why expand the footprint of the job? And, you know, in that question, I think, is another one, which is why should this job cover the whole country? Does that make the job more difficult? What are the benefits of that?
--:-- Tejal Rao: I think it does make the job more difficult, but I think it's really worth doing. You know, there's so much happening in the restaurant scene all over the country. If we focus on one city or if we think of New York as the whole scene, we're just missing out on so much.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Okay, let's get to the most fun stuff. Just how do you do it? How do you pick a restaurant? What time of day do they go out to restaurants for these reviews? I want to know how you plan your whole day and have enough room in your stomach.
--:-- Tejal Rao: I will say breakfast is not my favorite meal, and I prefer to sort of work up an appetite and then start with lunch. But I will occasionally do an early dinner and a late dinner. A bang bang. That's really intense. or just maybe a drink at the bar and try one or two small things to see, do I want to come back here and, you know, let me get a sense of the place and see if it's worth coming back for a full meal, which doesn't really count as a dinner in my opinion.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Can I ask, sorry to get really specific here, but like how many hours do you have to put in between an early dinner and a late dinner in order to consume the amount you need to consume to be able to rate the food?
--:-- Tejal Rao: I think it's really important to go to a place with some like excitement and appetite. And, you know, you're not really giving a place a fair shot if you don't get there wanting to eat.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: So because I'm based in New York and I do about three New York reviews for everyone out of town, so I'm not traveling as much as Tejal, but I am eating out a lot because I also have to look ahead to the top 100 New York City restaurants list, which will come out in June. And that means I have to go to all the restaurants that were on last year's list, but there's also restaurants that were on the list a couple years before, and then plus new restaurants.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Ligaya, how many meals can you cram into one day?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: I think probably eating four meals a week is pretty average.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: I want to ask about what you do when you have to write a negative review. We got a question or two about this where people were asking, how do you think about that? Because obviously, I'm sure you know that your take on this place, you know, it could make or break someone's business.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: I think with a negative review, it has to be worth writing. It has to be newsworthy in some way.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: On the flip side, have either of you been responsible for putting a restaurant on the map and kind of leading to lines out the door?
--:-- Tejal Rao: So when I was writing a Hungry City column, there were cases of places I wrote about where their rents went up after, you know, like a little taqueria and the rent went up and they had to close.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Tejal, do you feel like people have gotten mad because you've written about or exposed a place?
--:-- Tejal Rao: I don't know if people have gotten mad. I do think sometimes little places just can't keep up. They can't always keep up with being under a spotlight.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: This job comes with a lot of benefits, but there's also this one specific challenge that a lot of our listeners wanted to hear about. My question is, how do they do their job and not gain a lot of weight?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: Well, of course, this is part of why Pete Wells stepped down. Pete Wells, your predecessor, a legend, an icon.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Ligaya, you mentioned an eight-mile run, for example. Just talk to me about that, because I know this has been a really big issue for restaurant critics, right?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: I run regularly. I do push-ups every day. I'm up to, I think when I started the job, I was at 36. I'm now up to 48 a day.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: What is the most underrated, in your opinion, food city?
--:-- Tejal Rao: Honolulu.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Food trend that you hate?
--:-- Tejal Rao: Beef tallow everything.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Food trend you're in favor of?
--:-- Tejal Rao: Madeline's for dessert.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Best style of pizza?
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Your most controversial food take it can be one that you said publicly or one that you believe deeply in your heart that you're going to be confessing right now for the first time.
--:-- Tejal Rao: Spam is a great flavoring agent.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Ligaya, do you have one?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: I don't know which ones are controversial. Maybe it would be that the LA bagels are better than the New York City bagels.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Last time that you sent something back, and what was it? Do you remember?
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: I almost never, I can't imagine sending something back. I don't think I've ever done that.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Best recent meal, restaurant, and describe what you ate.
--:-- Tejal Rao: I can't believe I'm saying a tasting menu because I kind of have tasting menu fatigue at the moment. But the tasting menu at Emeril's in New Orleans was so beautifully done. You know, every course was delicious and there was just such a fun energy in the dining room.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: So it has to be Karai Kitchen in Jersey City where you're promised eight courses and you lose count of how many dishes are coming. And it's all beautiful. And it's run by a mother and daughter. And they talk about it as home-style food.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: For the final question, we're going to all timers. No time restriction. What is the restaurant that lives rent-free in your head, the one you think about all the time?
--:-- Tejal Rao: I've been thinking a lot about my grandmother died a couple of weeks ago, and I've been thinking about this restaurant that she used to take me in Nairobi that was essentially just a place you went for fried potatoes, sliced potatoes dipped in chickpea batter and then fried. It was called Maru Bajia.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: When I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, that was the one time in my life where I have been a regular at a restaurant. And I don't live anywhere near it now, so I never go. But it was Romans. My daughter had just been born, I think, maybe just six months before Romans opened. And so we would go with her. We would be the first people through the door at, you know, five o'clock. And we'd be out of there by six.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Thanks for having us. This was so fun.
--:-- Tejal Rao: Thanks for having us.
--:-- Ligaya Mishan: Thanks for having us.
--:-- Natalie Kitroeff: Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Rob Zipko. It was edited by Brendan Klinkenberg, contains music by Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to everyone who called in and left a voicemail. We couldn't include them all, but they were so much fun to listen to. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeff. See you on Monday.
