The Daily — "Our Restaurant Critics Dish"

Date: November 9, 2025
Host: Natalie Kitroeff
Guests: Tejal Rao and Legaya Michonne, Restaurant Critics for The New York Times

Episode Overview

This episode takes listeners behind the scenes with the New York Times' new restaurant critics, Tejal Rao and Legaya Michonne. Through an engaging Q&A—powered by listener questions—hosts and guests explore what it’s really like to critique restaurants in 2025. They discuss how their roles are evolving, the responsibilities (and the pressure) that come with their influential reviews, and what it takes to balance passionate eating with overall health and wellbeing. Personal anecdotes, food philosophies, and a rapid-fire lightning round offer an intimate and revealing glimpse into the critics’ lives, both on and off the plate.

How Does One Become a Restaurant Critic? (02:13–06:08)

Legaya Michonne’s Path

• Grew up in Honolulu, with family roots in the Philippines and England.
• Did not consider herself a gourmet—"In my house, we drank Tang and, you know, there was powdered milk, and I ate Spam, which I do think is an underrated meat product that you can use as a flavoring agent, like prosciutto." (03:24)
• Discovered her interest in food after moving to New York; restaurant reviewing began at The New Yorker before moving to the Times.

Tejal Rao’s Path

• Came from a food-obsessed family with origins in Uganda and India.
• Childhood involved collecting recipe cards: "I would get recipe cards for chocolate mousse and for French pear tarts, and I would study the recipes and I would make them sometimes." (04:51)
• Studied literature, worked in restaurant kitchens, freelanced for food publications before becoming a professional critic at The Village Voice.

The Changing Role of Restaurant Critics (06:08–09:57)

On Anonymity

• Restaurant critics are now more public: “The idea of the anonymous critic was always a bit of an agreed upon fiction.” (06:47, Legaya)
• Critics often recognized even when trying to go undercover; now, visibility is embraced to build trust and reader relationships.

Expanding the Scope

• Both critics are reviewing restaurants across the country, not just New York.
• Tejal: “If you want to kind of tell a complete story of restaurants in the U.S., you have to look everywhere.” (09:07)
• Legaya: “What we want to write about is restaurants, and what are they saying about this moment in time, this moment in America and who we are?” (09:31)

The Job: Behind the Scenes (10:02–14:52)

A Day (or Week) in the Life

• Tejal: Travels every other week, crams in as many meals as possible while on assignment, prefers to "work up an appetite" and skip breakfast.
  • "My appetite is the only thing limiting me. I would do more meals in the day if I could." (12:29)
• Legaya: Primarily New York-based, juggles visits to past and new restaurants in anticipation of the “Top 100 NYC Restaurants” list.
  • Finds back-to-back (“double”) dinners taxing and must invent polite excuses for unfinished plates: "I really don't want people to think I'm not eating something because I don't like it." (13:58)

Writing Negative Reviews & Their Impact (14:52–18:32)

Negative Reviews

• Tejal: Won’t write a negative review unless it’s newsworthy: “Punching down...doesn't really make sense.” (15:29)
• Reserves criticism for established places that aren’t delivering on their promise.

The Effects of Reviews

• Legaya: Reviews can make or break restaurants. Recalls a small taqueria that closed after a glowing piece drove up rent: “...there were cases of places I wrote about where their rents went up after…” (16:51)
• Tejal: Sometimes the resulting attention becomes overwhelming for smaller spots; "sometimes I want to tell people, you know, go here, but be cool. You know, can you just be chill?" (17:55)

Most Controversial Food Topics—Bagels, Cities & Trends (18:37–25:14)

New York vs. LA Food Scene

• Host admits: "The food in LA is better than the food in New York," sparking playful debate.
• Tejal stands by her article, “The best bagels are in California (Sorry, New York)”: “I stand behind every sentence in that story.... I was just having a lot of excellent bagels here.” (19:27)

Listener Q: Staying Healthy as a Critic

• Legaya: Runs, does daily push-ups (now up to 48), balances rich meals by eating clean on off days ("salad is so beautiful"). (22:19)
• Tejal: Emphasizes that not all restaurant eating is unhealthy: “There are a lot of restaurants where the food feels...really nourishing or feels really exactly like what I need in that moment.” (22:48)

Lightning Round (23:20–28:51)

• Most Underrated Food Cities:

  • Legaya: Honolulu (23:44)
  • Tejal: Minneapolis

• Food Trends They Dislike:

  • Tejal: “Beef tallow everything.”
  • Legaya: “Caviar and truffles and uni on everything.”

• Food Trends They Like:

  • Both: “Madeline’s for dessert.” (24:04–24:11)

• Pizza Preferences:

  • Tejal: Bar-style
  • Legaya: White pizzas

• Controversial Takes:

  • Legaya: “Spam is a great flavoring agent.” (24:47)
  • Tejal: LA/West Coast bagels are excellent

• Leave It/Marry It/Spend a Night with It (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner):

  • Tejal: Marry lunch, fling with dinner, leave breakfast (25:26)
  • Legaya: Marry breakfast, fling with dinner, leave lunch

• Sending Food Back: Both rarely (if ever) do it—even if inedible (26:01–26:14)

Standout Meals & Restaurant Memories (26:14–31:38)

• Latest Standout Meals:

  • Tejal: Emeril's in New Orleans—tasting menu with standout gumbo, smoked boudin, and banana cream pie (26:23–27:14)
  • Legaya: Karai Kitchen in Jersey City—homestyle multi-course feast: “Each ingredient has its own time zone, so everything is being cooked separately and then being cooked together...." (27:20–28:33)

• Restaurants That Live "Rent Free" in Their Heads:

  • Tejal: Maru Bajia in Nairobi, a place of community and fried potato comfort, tied to memories of her grandmother (29:16–30:26)
    • “It’s not just the food, which I remember would always be a little too hot to touch. It was so delicious. And it would come with green chutney. But it was also that sense of being a part of the restaurant, you know, the sense of it being like a real community.” (29:57)
  • Legaya: Romans in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where “whatever I ordered was exactly what I wanted. I just didn’t know it. So I think I’ve been chasing that feeling at a restaurant again all these years.” (31:10)

Notable Quotes & Moments

• “The idea of the anonymous critic was always a bit of an agreed upon fiction.” — Legaya Michonne (06:47)
• “My appetite is the only thing limiting me. I would do more meals in the day if I could.” — Tejal Rao (12:29)
• “Spam is a great flavoring agent.” — Legaya Michonne (24:47)
• “I want them to be busy. I hope that the people who come because they read the review are coming for all the right reasons because they think it'll be a beautiful experience. I guess you just never know what happens when you do that.” — Legaya Michonne (17:38)
• “It’s not just the food…it was also that sense of being a part of the restaurant, you know, the sense of it being like a real community.” — Tejal Rao (29:57)
• “Restaurants are so magic and so are you two.” — Host, Natalie Kitroeff (31:38)

Key Takeaways

• Today’s restaurant critics are more accessible and public with their identities to foster trust and build a conversational relationship with readers.
• Their influence is both a privilege and a responsibility—reviews spotlight, sometimes overwhelm, and can even inadvertently shutter restaurants.
• The job is logistically and emotionally demanding, involving constant eating, traveling, and balancing health, with both critics embracing exercise and moderation in their personal routines.
• Food opinions—sometimes delightfully divisive—show how personal and heated culinary discourse can be (e.g., bagels, longstanding city rivalries).
• At the heart of it all, food criticism is about culture, memory, and community as much as about the dishes themselves.