“My scores were bad across the board; my cholesterol, blood sugar and hypertension were worse than I’d expected even in my doomiest moments. The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese,” Wells wrote in his farewell column Tuesday.
“OK, not just technically,” he added. “I knew I needed to change my life.”
Wells basically stepped away from the job in May, he told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday, when he went in for umbilical hernia surgery. He took a two-week medical leave after the procedure, and when he returned, he made a life-altering decision during a chat with his boss.
“I just found myself telling her that I had to stop doing it, we had to wind this down,” Wells said. “It was not fully premeditated. It was not as carefully orchestrated as it might have been. I mean, on my part. Rather than sort of saying, ‘Let’s start talking about what comes next,’ I just said, ‘Let me off.’” Wells, who was dining editor for six years before becoming food critic, will remain at the Times in a writing position that has yet to be defined.
Wells’s announcement immediately led to the standard whiplash of compliments and condemnation among readers and restaurant industry professionals, not surprising for a man whose opinions have been said to make or break businesses. A quick one-two sample from the Times’s Instagram post on the departure: “Congrats on a great run,” wrote Adam Platt, the former New York Magazine restaurant critic who left the job in 2022. “Yay!! Good riddance! Now can the NYT actually have someone write would CARES about the food?” wrote another commenter.
The announcement also led to instant speculation on who would replace Wells in a job widely viewed as the most influential food critic post in the country. In a note Tuesday on the Times’s company website, Sam Sifton and Emily Weinstein — the founding editor of NYT Cooking, and the editor in chief of Cooking and Food, respectively — said the search for a new critic would begin “soon.”
“In the meantime, Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna will step in as interim critics in New York, alternating as they file both restaurant reviews and critic’s notebooks,” the editors wrote. “Because Priya and Melissa are well known from their videos and public appearances, maintaining our longstanding tradition of visiting restaurants anonymously won’t be easy. But they’ll try to uphold it when they dine at restaurants, and they’ll adhere to all of The Times’s ethical standards for criticism, including our policy of not accepting free meals.”
Tejal Rao, the editors added, will continue to write about restaurants as a food critic at large in California.
Wells’s sudden retirement as restaurant critic may not have come as a complete shock to people who have followed his career. In a 2019 interview with Dan Pashman on the “Sporkful” podcast, Wells talked about how the job had affected his appetite. Here’s a brief, but illuminating, excerpt:
Pashman: Pete usually practices his own very attentive style of eating five nights a week. He’s always checking out possible places to review. I wondered how going out that often affects your relationship with food.
Wells: Well, I’ll tell you, if you, like, regularly consume 6,000 or 7,000 calories at a single meal, like I do, you’ll find that, the next day, your appetite is kind of moderate. You know? … I’m very often not hungry at all until I sit down, and even then, I’m not really hungry.
Pashman: That feels a little sad, Pete, I have to say.
Wells: That’s all right.
Wells: There are worse things. I mean, I still enjoy it now.
Wells wasn’t sure what kind of mark he left on the restaurant world after a dozen years of rendering opinions on it. He’s not even sure whether a restaurant critic should aspire to leave a mark. “When you work for any kind of big organization, like the Times, you have to know that it’s going to go on without you,” Wells said. “It’s going to go on after you go, and you quickly recede in the rearview mirror, and a new chapter gets written very, very quickly.”
Others, however, stepped into the void to assess Wells’s impact. “Pete is a fine stylist at the sentence level,” texted Hanna Raskin, the founder of the Food Section, a James Beard Award-winning site dedicated to the food and culture of the American South. “But what makes him a great critic is his rigorous reporting. As his best-known reviews demonstrate, when the fine-dining elite, more than a century of New York’s collective culinary memory or the whole of middle America say they love a place, his instinct is to check it out.”
Raskin is hinting at a few of Wells’s more memorable reviews, a number of which have taken down famous chefs and restaurants. The critic gave only a “satisfactory” rating to the historic Peter Luger Steak House. (“Diners who walk in the door eager to hand over literal piles of money aren’t greeted; they’re processed,” Wells wrote. The critic demoted Per Se, chef Thomas Keller’s tasting-menu destination on Columbus Circle, to two stars. (“I don’t know what could have saved limp, dispiriting yam dumplings, but it definitely wasn’t a lukewarm matsutake mushroom bouillon as murky and appealing as bong water,” Wells wrote.) Then there is the review that most remember Wells for: his savage, question-by-question beatdown of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square.
“Why is one of the few things on your menu that can be eaten without fear or regret — a lunch-only sandwich of chopped soy-glazed pork with coleslaw and cucumbers — called a Roasted Pork Bahn Mi, when it resembles that item about as much as you resemble Emily Dickinson?” Wells wondered.
The review created such a viral stir that Guy Fieri felt a need to respond to it. He went on the “Today” show and told Savannah Guthrie that the review was “ridiculous.” “There’s good and there’s bad in the restaurant business, but that, to me, went so overboard it really seemed like there was another agenda.”
The negative reviews may have garnered the most attention from readers, but Wells also championed many underdogs over the years, including a Puerto Rican lechonera in South Bronx and a New Jersey pizzeria that may serve the best New York pie. On the day Wells announced his departure, the Times published a list of his “most memorable” reviews.
Wells says his health has already improved since he stopped dining at restaurants multiple times a week. His blood pressure, he says, is now “normal to low.” His cholesterol is “better than it was.”
“A lot of other things are better. I’ve lost a good amount of weight. My knees are less creaky. I’m sleeping through the night,” he said.
But this fellow former restaurant critic wondered whether Wells’s blood pressure might rise, knowing the thing that he will be best remembered for is a takedown of a Times Square restaurant by a celebrity chef catering to tourists.
“I mean, what can you do?” Wells said. “If that’s all that somebody ever reads of me, I think that’s okay.”
Are there other reviews that you wish people would read instead?
“No,” he said, “people are busy.”
