Dear Pete Wells, post-critic life can be amazing
From one former restaurant critic to another, commiseration and a little advice
Last Tuesday, my phone buzzed, and buzzed again, then buzzed some more.
I was driving north from St. Louis on I-55, through the parts of Southern Illinois that look like corn. It was day 16 of our annual Big Summer Road Trip, and I was too absorbed by the current murder podcast to pay my incoming text messages any mind.
We stopped for gas and calories in a place called Litchfield. The first text I read screamed: “You should apply!!!” followed by a New York Times link. The headline involved the words “reviewing restaurants” and “leaving the table.” I surmised that the NYT’s longtime food critic Pete Wells was stepping down. I laughed at the notion I’d be fit to replace him — me, a half-Filipina Nobody from Fort Myers, Florida who happily reviewed restaurants under a French dude’s name for 15 years, lolollll.
I Ha-Ha’d the friend’s text, unwrapped my vegan protein bar (more on that later), passed bacon-egg-and-cheese biscuits back to my kids and hopped back on the interstate bound for Chicago.
It wasn’t until earlier this week, after pit stops in Nashville and Atlanta, that I finally read Pete Wells’s departure column in full (here’s a gift link). I never expected to nod along so vigorously and continuously.
Mr. Wells didn’t reminisce about the osetra caviar at Le Bernardin or the vichyssoise with lumps of Hokkaido crab (and yet more caviar) from Yoshino. He wrote about his health. And how, after eating at hundreds of restaurants a year for more than a decade, said health was failing him.
“My scores were bad across the board,” Wells noted. “The terms pre-diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome were thrown around. I was technically obese.”
In my 17 years reviewing restaurants for The Fort Myers News-Press, 15 of them under the pen name Jean Le Boeuf, I had more than a few health scares of my own. In 2011, when I became the food writer/critic full time, I’d just had my first child. I gained a significant amount of weight during pregnancy, upwards of 60 pounds (I stopped counting when the scale hit 200), and I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t losing it now that the baby had been born. When discussing this with my OBGYN, she asked if I ate out a lot. I laughed and laughed.
Eating out was my job, and I was determined to take it seriously.
Before the Le Boeuf title became mine, The News-Press’s critics took what I have come to see as a far more sensible approach to reviews. At any given time, two or three people could share the Jean Le Boeuf role. One dined out one week, the next went the following week, and so on down the line. And then I came along, hellbent on making this a solo mission, on taking The News-Press’s dining coverage to a new level, on doing things the way the pros did and eating out like my life depended on it.
Prior to me, a News-Press critic would only visit a restaurant once before issuing a review. I insisted on going twice, at least — three times or more if the first two visits were wildly varied. Before me, 1 meal equaled 1 review. After me, 1 meal could = 0 reviews if the restaurant just wasn’t fit for reviewing. Or 2+ meals, minimum, would = 1 review. This, I now understand, is a lot of eating.
While The News-Press reimbursed me for these meals, I paid with my health. I learned, after my heart to heart with my OBGYN, that I had to move my body in order to get anywhere close to my pre-baby jeans. I joined a CrossFit gym in 2012 and felt better, vastly better, almost immediately. I figured the gym would balance my job; that if I worked out enough, I could eat whatever I wanted. For a while, that was true. My jeans fit. I felt good. I even finished a triathlon.
And then came the listicles.
Sometime in the mid 2010s, our food content came to be directed by SEO terms: “Best Burger Estero”; “Best Pizza Cape Coral”; “Best Deep-Fried, Custard-Filled, Cotton-Candy-Coated Cupcake Sanibel.” I went from dining out two or three times a week to dining out almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes picking my way from cheesy baleadas on Fowler Street to fried gizzards on Edison Avenue to rib sandwiches on Cranford Ave., washing it all down with horchata and a paleta or two at the Ortiz Flea Market — “Best Hidden Gems Fort Myers.”
In his farewell column, Wells talked about the competitiveness that takes over certain critics, my past self included. If Jonathan Gold, the legendary critic for the Los Angeles Times, may he rest in peace, had eaten every taco along the 15 mile stretch of Pico Boulevard, then, Wells figured, why shouldn’t he do the NYC equivalent? If Wells had tried 100 burgers to pick the best in Manhattan, why shouldn’t I do the Southwest Florida equivalent?
Despite three to five days a week of CrossFit, my weight could balloon by 15 or 20 pounds (the Best Doughnuts lists were particularly unkind to me). I had acid reflux, indigestion and chronic IBS (D not C), which is as unsexy to write about as it is to experience at a 24-hour Walgreens on the way home from a 16-course tasting dinner in Naples.
It took the pandemic for me to start to figure out the problem. As the world shut down, as people stress-ate chocolate and stress-drank, well, everything, I was that asshole.
I lost weight.
Five pounds. Then 10. Then 15. Restaurants were closed, or at least restricted. And, for the first time in a long time, so was my eating.
When the world reached its new normal — in Florida, that took about 45 minutes — I tried to stay slowed-down. I kept working out but started eating less. Instead of full dishes, I had only bites and brought leftovers to colleagues, neighbors, family. Instead of four desserts, I’d split one or two with my tablemates. Instead of revisiting every slice of pizza on last year’s Best Of list, I’d ask trusted friends who lived near certain places how they were faring, cross checking their takes with those from Yelp and Google. I thought I had it figured out, but I still gained back all the pandemic weight I’d lost.
Three years later, in summer 2023, six months after retiring from restaurant criticism, and journalism in general, I learned I was pre-diabetic. When I finally got in to see an endocrinologist, we discussed my eating habits. I told her about my past life as Jean Le Boeuf. She told me about the havoc starchy, sugary, fatty meals can wreak on one’s systems, especially someone like me whose family has struggled with Type 2 diabetes since my mom left the Philippines and migrated to the U.S. in 1978. She said CrossFit was helping, and that I could help more by limiting my intake of sugars and highly processed carbohydrates.
That full story is one for another time, but almost two years after leaving my post as JLB, and a little more than a year after cutting most sugar from my life (words that still make me sad to type), I feel amazing.
I, for many reasons, don’t think I’ll follow in Pete Wells’s footsteps. But, if he follows in mine, I hope he feels amazing, too.
In book news …
I got off on a tangent this week, and I’ve been on vacation for much of July, but “The Mango Tree” continues to astound me. A few quickies!
If you’re free the evening of August 10, then please join me and some incredible memoirists and CNF authors for “A Night of Nonfiction,” a virtual event hosted by Hippocampus magazine. It is free, though donations to this great literary hub are encouraged. Details here.
If you’re anywhere near D.C. on August 24, then you can find me at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival (!!!). I’ll be discussing food, family and community with the inimitable Crystal Wilkinson, former poet laureate of Kentucky, as well as NYT bestelling author Aimee Nezhukumatathil (I am in actual disbelief that I get to share space with these folks). Learn more here.