Consider: The New York Times’ Pete Wells may be the “first viral restaurant critic,” as Slate’s Isaac Chotiner suggested. Wells is certainly the most viral critic at the Times, showing food criticism’s status versus, say, movie criticism. The Scylla to Wells’s Charybdis is Gold, who in a 2016 documentary can be seen cruising strip malls in his green Dodge truck looking for his next great Southern Thai meal. In Los Angeles, Gold is less a food critic than a civic hero. In the film, one admirer compares his literary vision of Los Angeles to Raymond Chandler’s. The New Yorker, which began publishing a food issue annually in 2007, now overflows with food writing. Adam Gopnik, Dana Goodyear, and Bill Buford have collected the smudged napkins discarded …show more content…
By the mid-2000s, “you have a confluence of a coherent food blogosphere coming into being,” said David Kamp, author of The United States of Arugula, “plus you have more and more young chefs and restaurateurs being a little more enterprising.” Mitchell Davis, the executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, said the rises of food culture and food media are almost always linked. In 19th-century France, the new middle-class cooking was documented by L’Almanach des Gourmands, which Davis called a “proto-blog” — the Eater of its day. “Otherwise, there’s no sharing of the art form,” Davis said. “You can perform a concert in the town square and the whole city can hear it. You can’t do that with food.” The second reason for the rise of food writing is the democratization of restaurants. In 1975, when Jane and Michael Stern pitched their first Roadfood guide to cheap, regional restaurants, they were met with bewilderment. “The editor had a hard time convincing the publisher that there were enough interesting restaurants in the United States of America to fill a guidebook,” Michael Stern told me. The Sterns will publish the 10th edition of Roadfood this