Pete Wells on Food Writing, Loud Restaurants and the Bizarre Magic of Señor Frog’s

The mere mention of a restaurant critic is enough to send shivers down the spines of budding and established restaurateurs alike. One bad review can be the kiss of death for any restaurant on the rise. In the food world, critics are revered and feared members of the ecosystem, and can act as the ultimate decider of an establishment’s fate...and their bottom line.

Everyone fancies themself a critic these days, but that doesn’t mean reviewing a restaurant is easy. There’s an art to it. Pete Wells, former longtime food critic for The New York Times, could write the textbook.

On a recent episode of Milk Street Radio, Wells sat down with Christopher Kimball to discuss what it means to be a food critic, his infamous takedown of Guy Fieri’s Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar and why food writing is just...writing.

Listen to the full episode here, and check out excerpts of the interview below.

On what a food critic sees with their trained eye

It took me a really long time to notice everything going on in the average restaurant. My first impressions were usually just as basic as, like, “Boy, this place is loud,” or, “Oh gosh, it's empty, I wonder why no one else is here.” And so the thing that I would do over the course of the meal, and typically for a Times review, over the course of three meals or more, was just try to take it all in and take my time in doing that sort of, just notice, look around the room, feel the vibrations. Try to pay attention to how the room seemed to be affecting other people, how the food seemed to be affecting other people. Were they relaxed? Were they happy? Were they anxious? Did they seem like they'd been abandoned and forgotten by the waiter an hour ago, and no nobody had been to their table?

All these little things that go into making a restaurant. They are many, and a restaurant is a very, very complex organism. There are so many parts to it and so many things required to make it run really, really well. And if some of those things are off, the whole experience can go off. You know, you want a good waiter, but you also need a good manager overseeing the place. What goes on in the kitchen, I don't usually see, but that's a very complex, fraught operation too. There's just so many moving pieces, and that's one of the reasons I think restaurants are just endlessly fascinating, because if it all goes well, it all comes together in one seamless experience. But there are so many strands that are woven into that experience.

On why fine dining doesn't define the New York restaurant scene

The city attracts those chefs and restaurateurs who really want to perform on a national, international stage. They want to be compared to the greatest restaurants in Paris and Tokyo and any other city. And then we have chefs and restaurateurs who aren't thinking about that at all. We have neighborhood places, and we have restaurateurs and chefs who are just cooking really for their communities; often a community of immigrants who share a common cuisine and have been cut off from it because they left home and they're living in this strange place called New York City. But that's their food, and they want it.

So, there are restaurants that their highest aim really is to conjure up a cuisine that they've all left behind. And those places, to me, are just as interesting as the very high-end places. And they maybe say more about New York City. They maybe tell you more about this place that we live, than the restaurants that are very self-consciously trying to be noticed by people around the world.

Food writing is just writing

I'm sort of covertly, quietly opposed to food writing classes and even the notion of food writing as a separate practice in writing. And if it were up to me, food writers, your aspiring food writers in college, would not study food writing. They would study nonfiction writing generally. They would study literature. They would study sports writing and reporting, but God, no food writing. It just seems to sort of devolve into a codified series of adjectives that everyone feels they need.

I mean, listen, I've used every one of them, I’m found guilty on all counts, right? Sometimes you just can't reinvent the English language every time you sit down. But I think anybody writing about food, and especially critics and people who are trying to be very evocative and descriptive, you need to draw from any writer who uses the language creatively. You need to learn from them, figure out what they're doing, if not copy them. Copying is okay too, up to a point.

The difference between a good and bad restaurant experience can be shockingly simple

I think a lot of things that make up a good restaurant experience or a bad restaurant experience — you'll feel them, even if you don't notice them and single them out. I think a lot about whether somebody's managing the room, which is a funny thing that I don't think the average diner sits there and thinks about. But there are restaurants where I'll be sitting around, and I'll realize that nobody's really in charge. Nobody's minding the shop. Everybody's kind of off in their own world. And there's a table on the other side of the room that hasn't been cleared for 10 minutes. Why is that? Why hasn't somebody looked over there and said, “Hey, you, go over and clear that table”? Just that sort of entropy, when you start to notice it, you realize that the whole room is kind of spinning out of control slowly, and that's not something you would necessarily notice as a civilian. Until the entropy reaches your table and suddenly you're the one who's not getting noticed and not getting served. But that kind of like, Is there an orchestra conductor here? Is somebody actually making all of the instruments play at the right time? That is something I used to try to tune in to consciously.

In defense of (reasonably) loud restaurants

It's a nightmare when you just sit there and you can't hear one another, and eventually you give up and you just sit there grumpily waiting for the meal to end. I think most people feel that way, but I think there's a level of noise that can be sort of exhilarating. It's just that it has to be managed so that you hear the noise, but it's not getting in the way of your conversation. That's the ideal I think. Although, I also like very quiet restaurants. They can be kind of groovy. But a lively murmur in the background, as long as it's not blocking out what you're saying to me and what I'm saying to you, I think that's great and that's fun.

And I think, if you wanted to sit in complete silence, you could just sit at home and turn the stereo off. You don't need to go out. If you go out, you're kind of buying in to other people. Other people are going to mess up your peace and quiet just because they're there and they're having a good time. That's sort of the essence of being at a restaurant.

There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to reviewing restaurants

You know, I would say, if the food is cheap and it's really, really good, I almost don't care about anything else, right? I mean, there are certain places that are just so delicious, you don't care if the table is dirty. At least, I don't care if the table is dirty. I mean, I might mention that in the review, so that other people who are more fastidious than I am will be warned. But for me, it's not necessarily a demerit if the place is a little greasy, but great. That's a good experience.

On the other hand, a very simple place can be very well run. There are very tight ships that aren't charging more than $20 for lunch. I went to a really well-run diner in New Jersey yesterday where every single person working there was smiling and attentive, and they were all on it, and everything was prompt, which is what you want from a diner, right? You want to walk in and be greeted right away and seated, and the menu and your coffee comes within a minute, you know, all of that stuff. And that's the difference between a good and bad diner, right? A bad diner, they're surly, you never get your coffee. You never get the check. And if you were going to review a diner, those things would matter; how well they they run the business, how much they seem to care.

About that Guy Fieri review...

That restaurant really did make me feel like I was losing my mind, because there were so many things wrong, more than I'd ever, ever seen in any other restaurant. It was a laundry list of things that shouldn't happen in a restaurant. Things were missing from the plate, [and] the marshmallows shouldn't taste like fish. The service was off. The cooking sounded sort of delicious, but It would be really undelicious, and just on and on and on.

It was meant to be kind of an over-the-top experience anyway, because it was Guy Fieri, right? It's all sort of amped up on nitroglycerin. So, when you're trying for something that's over the top and you miss, you have a truly psychedelic experience. And so the review is trying to capture a bit of that complete bafflement that I felt sitting there. The format, which was just a series of questions, came directly out of my notes, because I was just sitting there when I got home from the meal with, Boy, I have so many questions about this place, what is going on here? And after I had written this whole series of notes, there were questions I thought, Well, this could actually become the review, this could do it. Because I don't have answers to any of these questions, but boy, do I have questions.

On the evolution of reading restaurant reviews

I think the way people read restaurant reviews has changed. I mean, if you go back to Craig Claiborne, writing in the 60s and early 70s, his audience really was in New York. It was people who picked up or had a copy of The New York Times delivered to their door in Manhattan, [and] some of the suburbs. But really, they were New Yorkers, and he was writing for people who lived here and wanted a place to eat. Now, the reviews are being read all over the world by people who might be planning a trip to New York at some point, and a lot of them aren't planning a trip to New York ever, and many will never come here, but they're interested in restaurants. They're interested in the city. There's something that intrigues them, and they want to read about it, sitting in their armchair, or reading on their phone on their commute. So it's put pressure on the reviews, I think, to be interesting to people who have no conceivable use in practical terms for a review. They're not reading it to be told where to eat. They're reading it to learn something new about these crazy New Yorkers and their strange feeding habits, or to like, keep up with developments in high-end cuisine, or to just be entertained. So all of these things have all these new expectations. I think [they] have shaped the way I and other people wrote restaurant criticism. There was an awareness that it wasn't enough anymore to say, “Well, if you live around West 74th Street, you might want to try this new diner.”

On restaurants being built for the one-time experience

It's especially common in the tasting venue style of restaurant where every single thing is plated with tweezers and sort of looks perfect, and you feel like you have to document it with a photograph before you taste it. But it's also become prevalent in all kinds of places that are not quite as ambitious as that, [but] where they've kind of given themselves over to social media as the best way to get the word out. And it can get the word out to a lot of people very quickly.

But then the game is for everybody who sees a place on Instagram or TikTok to go there and say, “Okay, I was here,” and that's the whole game. There's not a follow-through. The follow-through with a successful restaurant, and a restaurant that's built to last, is to get you back and keep you coming back. And a lot of places just don't seem to be designed for that anymore. It's a strange thing, and it's a little bit hard to write about because I sometimes have this feeling like, Okay, I got the experience, it was interesting, and I will never come back in my life. Or if I had to review it, Ah, I have to come back. I have to go through this two more times so I can write about it. And that's just not what I want out of restaurants. I think it's a fundamentally different way of going about the business.

Do neighborhood restaurants still exist?

They do still exist. If a neighborhood restaurant is one that people won't travel more than, let's say in New York, 20 blocks for, we've got tons of them. I mean, there [are] restaurants on the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side that nobody from downtown will ever go to. They exist to serve those neighborhoods. And when you get out to most of Brooklyn, most of Queens, that's most of what the restaurant business is. But Manhattan and a lot of city centers across the country have become these very concentrated little hives of super self-conscious destination restaurants.

On the magic of Señor Frog’s

Señor Frog’s is sort of a “spring break” restaurant. I think the original was in Cancun, or started in some center of spring break-dom, and spread from there to Florida. And then they opened one in Times Square. And it was sort of all wrong. It just had no business being in Times Square. And yet I loved it. I mean, I just thought it was so mindless that it was kind of brilliant. It was so single-minded in its pursuit of stupidity that [you] had to admire it. They had all these crazy things where the birthday cake that they would bring up—we lied and said it was somebody's birthday—the whole staff came over and did this conga line over to the table with this cake with a sparkler on it. All the people [who] worked there clearly [seemed] like nobody had ever worked in a real restaurant before. But they were all extremely cheerful and good-natured about it. I never thought I would be so won over by a place that just didn't have a single serious bone in its body. But that was Señor Frog's.

Quotes have been edited for clarity.

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Sydney Manning

Sydney Manning is the Managing Digital Editor at Milk Street. She holds a BS in Marketing Communication from Emerson College, and an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University. For the past five years at Milk Street, Sydney has worked as a social media editor, blogger, podcaster, project manager and book marketer. In her free time she enjoys cooking with friends, reading and antiquing. She lives in South Carolina with her family.