The End of the Restaurant Critic Should Worry Anyone Who Likes To Eat
A city without one is like Star Wars without Darth Vader
When I started my career reviewing restaurants, my city of 3 million people had five full-time critics. Now there are none.
Following the recent retirement of Amy Pataki from the Toronto Star, the fourth largest city in North America has no weekly restaurant reviews.
This sad news was treated with the requisite hand-wringing that has become a biweekly event as media companies, both legacy and digital, lay off employees, offer buyouts, kill sections, or fold altogether. Twitter serves as a makeshift funeral home to elegize the latest death by a thousand cuts to journalism.
In recent years, all newspapers have been shifting to focus on a core competency, usually business, sports, or local reporting. So as a former restaurant critic and columnist for the Toronto Star, I’ve watched the paper constantly downsize and wondered when owners would eliminate restaurant reviews.
When I was a critic, I had an annual dining budget almost equivalent to my salary. That allowed me to visit each restaurant twice, to be as thorough and fair as possible, and to never accept any favors from the businesses I wrote about. That’s an expensive position…
