After 12 Years of Reviewing Restaurants, I’m Leaving the Table

Early this year, I went for my first physical in longer than I’d care to admit. At the time, I was about halfway through a list of 140 or so restaurants I planned to visit before I wrote the 2024 edition of “The 100 Best Restaurants in New York City.” It was a fair bet that I wasn’t in the best shape of my life.

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.

OK, not just technically.

I knew I needed to change my life. I promised I’d start just as soon as I’d eaten in the other 70 restaurants on my spreadsheet.

But a funny thing happened when I got to the end of all that eating: I realized I wasn’t hungry. And I’m still not, at least not the way I used to be. And so, after 12 years as restaurant critic for The New York Times, I’ve decided to bow out as gracefully as my state of technical obesity will allow.

Not that I’m leaving the newsroom. I have a couple more restaurant reviews in my back pocket that will appear over the next few weeks, and I plan to stick around at The Times long after that. But I can’t hack the week-to-week reviewing life anymore.