August 10, 2018

Tejal Rao Named First California Restaurant Critic

Tejal Rao, our food reporter and Eat columnist, will be our first California restaurant critic. Read more in this note from Sam Sifton:

I am delighted to announce the appointment of Tejal Rao as The Times’s first California restaurant critic. Tejal will review restaurants and write about food and food culture in every corner of the nation’s most populous state, at places both fancy and not, wherever people gather to exchange money for food.

It is a perfect beat for Tejal, whose deep curiosity, beautiful prose and passion for the delicious have informed her work as a food reporter for The Times and as an Eat columnist for The Times Magazine these last two years. (She’ll continue with her column and the occasional feature and profile. Look at this one on the case for canned tuna. Look at this one on the restaurant King. We’d miss those too much!) But Tejal knows from criticism. She was, before coming to The Times, the restaurant critic at Bloomberg News and before that at the Village Voice, postings that brought her two James Beard Awards for restaurant criticism.

And now she heads west with good reason. The Times now has more regular readers in California than it does in any other state save New York, along with more restaurants to serve them — roughly 72,000, give or take a few In-N-Outs. These establishments represent an incredible diversity of cultures and cuisines. That is an irresistible combination platter for a news organization like ours, one devoted to helping readers understand the world in which they live. Close and critical coverage of restaurants can after all be a way to explore how we live and what matters to us wherever we stand on the socioeconomic ladder, across cultures and into their delicious commingling. It can also tell us where to find what we like to eat, or to find what we will like to eat, once we’ve eaten it.

This is a service, yes. It is also a high form of journalism. In Tejal we have one of the nation’s best practitioners of both.

Pete Wells will continue to be chief restaurant critic of The Times, and will review restaurants in New York and further afield, including occasionally in California. Ligaya Mishan and Besha Rodell will continue to write restaurant reviews in New York and Australia, respectively. Tejal will start as the dedicated California critic in the fall, after moving west to Los Angeles. Please join me in congratulating her.

Sam

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