Pete Wells Gets Real About the Role of Restaurant Critics, His Time as a High School Cheerleader, and How He Invented Ghosting

On this episode

Outgoing New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells gets personal with his longtime friend about his path from high school cheerleader to college dropout to the pages of Sassy magazine — all the way to the most prestigious critic's seat in the country. Plus, he's got a little challenge for Thomas Keller.

Meet our guest

Since 2012, Pete Wells has been the restaurant critic for The New York Times, and won the James Beard Foundation's Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award in 2020 for his reviews of Peter Luger Steak House, Mercado Little Spain, and Benno. For the six years prior to that, he was the editor of the Dining section and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. Wells was an articles editor for Details magazine from 2001 to 2006, and senior editor at Food & Wine from 1999 to 2001, during which he won five James Beard Awards for features including Single-Minded, Captain Bacon, A Chef at Peace, Mixing It Up With a Cocktail Purist, and Raising a Baby with a Four-Star Palate. Wells announced in July 2024 that he will be stepping down from his role as critic but remain on staff at The Times.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine's podcast, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On becoming a Sassy magazine antihero and inventing ghosting

So, this magazine came to feature me pretty heavily in this one issue because I had ghosted one of the staffers. I'd met her at a party and I was very, you know, nodding and smiling a lot. But then she tried to get me to see her afterwards. I just ghosted. I mean, I'm proud that I invented ghosting because I think it needed to exist, but I'm not proud of how I behaved.

On how working in PR taught him how to edit

I started fact checking at The New Yorker, and from there, I worked in PR for a while, which was an incredible experience. In a way, it was the best training because what I used to do in the PR department was write these one-page synopses of New Yorker articles. That is the most unbelievable training for an editor or a writer. New Yorker pieces typically weren't under 3,000 words and there were a lot that were longer. To distill that down and get the essence of it, you get very good at finding the nut graph and pulling it out and then just turning it into a much shorter version of itself. You just build all these great skills of understanding the structure of a magazine story and then understanding how much of that structure you can get rid of and still have something that makes sense. I almost think sometimes I want to start an editing school and have people do this all day. Like, give me the 250-word version of this article.

On young hubris

I thought I was better than all of the New Yorker writers. Not put together, but individually. I was like, "I can take him." You can have that kind of hubris when you're not actually doing the thing, right? It's like watching Major League Baseball, and the batter strikes out, and you're, like, "What? That pitch was so easy to hit. Why did he not hit that?" You can have that total confidence when you are not the one standing at the plate.

On other people's feelings about his role at The New York Times

It is definitely part of the job that you can't be prepared for. Almost everybody at The Times gets some of this. People have really strong feelings about The New York Times. I always say it's the amount of, in the psychoanalytic sense, transference that goes on with my job. People just project all their feelings about authority onto me. People in the food business who project all their feelings about authority, the principal that they hated, or the coach they wanted to impress, or dad or mom. You just find yourself receiving all this emotional radiation that goes way back to people's childhoods. Like, the desire to impress a total stranger. It's weird. It's an intense thing.

On who he thinks his audience is

I always wanted to be relatively direct and cut through the thickness and try to directly address the reader. That's the signal that I'm always trying to remind myself of, even if I do go off and do some weird experiment. This is actually about telling the reader what you think, that the reader might want to know. That really hasn't changed ever — this sense that that I'm writing for one person. I don't know how to write for a crowd, but I can write for one person sitting in a chair somewhere. I always imagine a made-up reader. My ideal reader is somebody who's just as interested in the hot wiener in Rhode Island as the $500 omakase.

On what qualifies him to be a critic

What qualifies somebody to walk into a restaurant and pay $600 and decide they didn't enjoy it? Anybody in a restaurant is there at some level to test out, "How do I like this place? Do I want to come back?" That goes on all the time, every night. I just focus on it sometimes to a ridiculous length, but I focus on a thing that almost everybody in every restaurant is doing every night. I'm just doing a more sustained and systematic version. I think when people say, "What gives you the right?" I think what they sometimes mean is, "Why you and not me?"

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you'll hear from icons and innovators like Daniel Boulud, Rodney Scott, Asma Khan, Emeril and E.J. Lagasse, Claudia Fleming, Dave Beran and Will Poulter, Dan Giusti, Priya Krishna, Lee Anne Wong, Cody Rigsby, Kevin Gillespie, Pete Wells, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what's on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that'll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.