Learning To Eat Like A Food Critic

LIKE CRUISE-SHIP CAPTAINS and candy-makers, restaurant critics are often told they have the best job in the world, even if the darker side of the daily grind—the health issues, the struggles with finding a thousand different words for “delicious,” the Groundhog Day sense of monotony as one familiar baked-salmon entrée succeeds the next—makes many things about the job less glamorous than they seem.

- Adam Platt

This mantra becomes one of the quiet perks of the job, however, and it’s often followed by questions about how we got into the business and how one should train for, or even possibly obtain, such a dream occupation. A background in cooking is helpful, I always say, although since I’m not much of a cook, I add that your job as a critic is to sample all kinds of elaborate recipes, not to create them, so it’s more helpful to take pleasure in eating and to develop a sturdy constitution for the rigors of what one of my colleagues used to wearily call “tying on the old feed bag.” ¶ What food snobs used to delight in calling “a sophisticated palate” is probably helpful too, although in my experience, a delicious dish is not difficult to spot. A modest talent for writing and expression is something any critic needs, along with a distinctive point of view. There are different tricks for developing these skills, I suppose, but if you want to nurture that crucial constitution for sturdy eating at an early age, along with a curiosity and appreciation for the endless, uplifting pleasures of a good meal, it helps to grow up with a worthy role model.

For someone who occupied the staid world of international diplomacy for most of his working life, my father always had an impressive, wide-ranging, slightly eccentric appetite for a good meal. A native New Yorker born between the wars, like my mother was, at the old (now vanished) Doctors Hospital on East 88th Street, he instilled in his plump sons a love for the great foods of his own chubby youth—BLTs in the summertime, crunchy peanut butter, Yorkshire pudding, and always his beloved mayonnaise, which he purchased in great vats and spread with religious devotion on everything from summer tomatoes to canned sardines to bizarre mystery lunch meats of every imaginable kind. Hellmann’s was his mayonnaise of choice, but he also worshipped an obscure Swiss brand called Thomy, wh