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Food|The Times Has Appointed Two Chief Restaurant Critics. Here’s How That Will Work.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/dining/tejal-rao-ligaya-mishan-restaurant-critics.html
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Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan will expand restaurant coverage nationally for The Times.
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Meet Our New Restaurant Critics
Ligaya Mishan and Tejal Rao are the new restaurant critics at The New York Times, succeeding Pete Wells. While the two new critics are still going to be discreet when dining out for The Times, they have decided to part with tradition and reveal their identities to readers.
“I’m Ligaya Mishan, and I’m your new chief restaurant critic at The New York Times. I’m Tejal Rao, and I’m also your new chief restaurant critic at The New York Times. This is the first time that The Times has national critics and this is the first time that we’re revealing ourselves. So when Pete Wells stepped down, I texted him and I said, I pity the poor writer who will follow in your footsteps. And it’s you. And it’s us. I think it is unrealistic in this day and age to maintain anonymity short of being a CIA agent. I really don’t know how we could do that. How do you feel about not being anonymous anymore? I’ve essentially been anonymous since 2012. I was anonymous for so long that I kind of have a weird relationship with photos of myself. Hey, I like that photo. Oh good. I’m so glad. What a nice feeling. I love the idea of not playing the game of anonymity. The thought of connecting with readers or readers knowing who we are and being able to see our faces and trust us like that feels really exciting to me. I mean, I’ll always make reservations under a different name. I’ll always kind of be discreet when I’m going into places. So fake name, fake credit card. Well, real credit card but- So we need to create entire fake identities sort of like the Russian sleeper cells. Yes, like Olive Palooza. It came from one of my favorite novels. I combined the names of two different characters, and I’ve used it for years. I used to think that part of the fun of being a restaurant critic was that you got to dress up and pretend to be someone else. I think that we have to somehow find a way to remain grounded, so that even if we are recognized, we have to know what the experience of an ordinary customer who isn’t a critic, what is that like? I love the idea of criticism being like a team project. It makes so much sense. America is big. This is a really big and ambitious shift for The Times to cover restaurants nationally, and it would be kind of an impossible task for one person. Part of the fun of there being two of us is that we can talk about everything that’s happening, not just in our respective cities, but in the country, even the world. All these trends in dining and what they say about this moment in time. Restaurant criticism can show readers something about a place and a people and a community and politics In piece after piece you’re building this portrait. We’ve got to learn the whole language of the city as well as this particular restaurant, because how can you understand a restaurant unless you understand the whole landscape it’s in. You’re telling a story about everything that surrounds it. Geography and price point and cuisine like that national diversity is so exciting to me right now.
June 11, 2025, 9:00 a.m. ET
On Wednesday, The Times announced that Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan are the new chief restaurant critics, filling — and expanding — the role Pete Wells left in 2024. This appointment is one of a few changes we’re making as our food criticism becomes more national, and as we bring it to life in new ways.
Who Are the Critics?
Both Rao and Mishan are longtime reporters and critics for The Times, though this is the first time either has been chief critic. Most recently, Rao has been a California-based critic at large, writing broadly about food culture. Mishan was an Eat columnist for the Times Magazine and a writer at large at T magazine. She also wrote the Hungry City restaurant column from 2012 to 2020.
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Why Does The Times Need Two Critics?
For decades, the restaurant critic for The Times focused almost exclusively on New York City, writing weekly reviews and notebooks and awarding star ratings to individual restaurants. But with subscribers in every state, and great restaurants in each of them, we’ll now use two critics to deliver starred reviews of restaurants all over the country. The idea is to expand upon the work we started with the Restaurant List, our annual national roundup of the 50 places our staff is most excited about, and our lists of the best restaurants in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Austin, Texas.
Who Does What?
Rao will be dedicated entirely to the national dining scene. Mishan will split her time between reviewing the best and most newsworthy restaurants in New York City and covering the rest of the country with Rao. The goal is to capture particular moments in American dining — the restaurants that are most interesting, exciting and emblematic of our times.
With All That Travel, Will There Be Fewer New York Reviews?
New York is one of the world’s great restaurant cities. It’s where The Times built its authority on the subject of where best to eat. We have no plans to back away from that, and in fact will offer even more New York restaurant coverage. In the coming months, we’ll start publishing brief, starred reviews from other Times critics. The Where to Eat newsletter will continue to send restaurant recommendations to subscribers’ inboxes every week. And, of course, we’ll keep producing The Times’s annual list of the 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.
