An Interview With Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao

Food|Meet Our New Restaurant Critics

This morning, The Times announced that Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan are our new chief restaurant critics. It’s the first time the job is being shared by two people and the first time we’re not trying to hide their faces. Also, they will be filing full-length, starred reviews from around the country, not just New York City.

You can read more about how it will all work here. Tejal lives in Los Angeles, and joined The Times in 2016 after working as a restaurant critic at The Village Voice and Bloomberg News. Ligaya, who wrote our Hungry City restaurant column from 2012 to 2020 and has been an Eat columnist at the Times Magazine and a writer at large for T Magazine, is in Manhattan. I asked them about their early restaurant memories, how they read menus, what they eat at home and what scares them about the gig.

First of all, congratulations! This is both a dream job and very daunting. How’s it feel? What are you most looking forward to — and what are you most worried about?

Tejal Rao: It’s exactly that: dreamy and daunting. I have a running list of all the things I’m worried about, and my therapist is on vacation this week — I’ll save it for her!

Ligaya Mishan: What I’ve always loved most in writing about restaurants is how much I learn. It’s an entry point not only to a particular cuisine, but to a part of New York — and, now, of America — I might not otherwise have a chance to know.

As for worries: I want to do justice to every place I visit, and I hope I will. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been a writer for years — the blank page is always slightly terrifying. I’ll try to keep in mind what the head of my daughter’s school once told me: “I don’t worry. I do the work.”