"Instead, in the great tradition of creative types with little idea how to make their outsized dreams a reality, I turned to work in restaurants. A decade whizzed by. Staring down 30 with little progress toward superstardom, I pivoted my ambitions to a different seemingly impossible career path - one with tenets that demanded the exact opposite of celebrity. A tribe for which inconspicuousness was the ultimate accomplishment."
"Anonymity remains braided into any conversation about food criticism, a lingering mystique in the collective consciousness that conjures wigs and spycraft and debate about how long one can pull off the masquerade. It was the original North Star precept for reviewers aiming to have everyman dining experiences, part of a job conceived in the 1960s when tiny cameras were fantastical Bond gadgets."
"After seven years as restaurant critic for The Times, I'm voluntarily dropping any pretext of anonymity. It's time, for lots of reasons. To begin, video is inescapably a part of how journalists reach our audience. As someone striving to be low-profile, I always loved being on podcasts. Now those are videos too. Refusing to participate, no matter how much I'd prefer to let my written words do all the talking, has begun to feel professionally isolating."
Early ambitions for fame in music and acting gave way to years working in restaurants and then a long career as a restaurant critic across multiple publications. Anonymity functioned as a core principle of food criticism to ensure ordinary dining experiences and originated in midcentury practices when hidden observation mattered. That concealment has limits, and after years at a major paper the critic chooses to abandon anonymity. The prevalence of video and the conversion of podcasts into visual formats have made remaining unseen professionally isolating, prompting acceptance of public visibility for broader engagement.
Read at Los Angeles Times
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