440: New York Times Cooking and Restaurant Reviewing with Sam Sifton

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0:31it's not a job that it's easy to complain about right i mean what is it's like death by massage you know yeah like foie gras again like nobody's nobody's gonna cry me a river on that but it is it is a punishing gig to eat out that much to consume that many calories This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbar.

1:19biggest financial successes in decades. On this episode, Sam and I talk about the world of food media, his appetite for news and culture, and his prolific newsletter output. I'm sure you're all subscribers as well. We also talk about his most memorable reviews when he was working as a critic for years. Sam is a true one of one, and it was so much fun having him into the studio for a conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

1:55Sam Sifton, welcome to This Is Taste. How are you? I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me. Really, really long time coming. I've wanted to have you on. We've had so many of your colleagues on, but I want to have this conversation. I want to talk about your Times as the Times critic, inventing NYT Cooking, the app that is now used when you're doing your quarterly reports and your Times financials. It is an amazing accomplishment. We refer to it almost every week. But first, Sam, where are you eating right now? Oh, boy. Well, one of the great things about not being the critic, right, is that I'm allowed to be a regular places.

2:31And so I really relish being a regular in restaurants. And I've been going to Houseman a lot around the corner from the year end where Ned Baldwin is just performing some witchcraft. Really, really good eating. I love being a regular at Mineta. Yeah. Quite frankly, just like having that Taylor Swift table sit down. You got that table. And, you know, I got to ask about first about Ned. I mean, he is an incredible writer. I love that book. So you probably connect to him on that level as well. And he's a fisherman. So we have plenty to talk about. McNally. Let's talk about him. I mean, the memoir is coming out soon.

3:10He's just going, he's spraying and praying on Instagram. Do you have a relationship with Keith? Over the years, a journalistic one. And I've loved watching him go gorillas on Instagram. I think it promises for a really interesting and revealing memoir. A memoir that I don't think he necessarily would have written had he not had the stroke. Yeah. I think the stroke opened up a kind of creative vein for him that found, can I go from vein to purchase? I think I'm ruining these metaphors, but I think it allowed him to explore language in a new and different way. And that led, I'm guessing, to the book.

3:51No one's read the book, too. I mean, your desk would probably be the first to have it and no one's really read it. Yeah, I want it badly. I want it badly. Everyone does. And back to Houseman, I feel what a great restaurant. I'm so happy you said that. I was going to ask you about that. I feel like it's one of those few, like, one chef, one restaurant kind of operations in New York. Mm-hmm. It's like a workshop that's also an atelier. He's practicing a craft. He's delivering an art. It's a neighborhood place. They're busier now that they did so well on that Times list of 100 best restaurants. But even busy, it's still a neighborhood place.

4:31Yeah. Yeah, maybe that is Nas, but it's a neighborhood place. I mean, for Hudson, Tribeca, you know, and if you're, you know, working down there, you end up down there. And the Ear Inn, of course. Yes, of course the Ear Inn. I love it. I love that it's still around. So you're a Red Hook dude, long time. If you read your newsletter, you're very personal. We'll get into that a bit. Now, let me ask you, what's your ideal night out in Red Hook? My ideal night out in Red Hook is probably a night in. You know, I love the small town nature of the neighborhood. I love coming. I work in Times Square. It's called Times Square for a reason.

5:06And I leave that mad house and come to this quiet little neighborhood, ill-served by public transport. And I just want to eat at home. But sometimes you also want to go out. And I guess my perfect night out in Red Hook, it would be, we're in summertime, sweltery summertime right now, but it would be midwinter. It's snowing. And I'm inside the Red Hook Tavern. Yeah. And drinking a nice glass of wine, splitting a burger and the roast chicken with my wife and life's pretty good. It's a great spot. Billy Durney, right? That's Billy Durney's place. Yeah. Billy Durney's place. I feel they have probably a Taylor Swift booth now.

5:44So many celebrities end up there. I love it. So, but how has Red Hook changed in the past, like two decades? I believe you've been around. Yeah, it's changed. It's changed a lot. That said, there's still no subway. The bus is still terrible. The traffic getting out is quite hard. So you're kind of, it's a bike community. It's a ferry community. So it hasn't gotten crazy and it's all landfill. So there are no high rises. It's never going to, I used to live in Greenpoint. Before that, I lived in Williamsburg. I've seen Brooklyn born and raised and I've seen these towers go up and destroy these once empty magical neighborhoods.

6:24And that's not going to happen to Red Hook. And it may we may get flooded out by the next Superstorm Sandy or what have you. But it's not going to be fundamentally altered. There's still going to be there going to be people. There are a lot of people with authority issues in Red Hook. Right. And that's good. And that's a good thing. That's a good thing, right? I totally hear you. But, you know, we've got a good supermarket. We've got good restaurants and bars. Could use a bank. You're getting like a lot of green space too. It sounds like the Columbia waterfront and maybe even down to Red Hook.

6:59We're going to have to see what happens there. Good. There's not much of a plan that I've seen, but the promise of it is pretty great. Yeah, you're right. It is a little bit of a political plan and nothing else. I love running around there. Okay, let's go back to your days as a critic. You know, you go from editorial, you're an editor, you're working in many desks, and then you become the restaurant critic. That must have been a big change for your, like, lifestyle, for your life. Take us back to that time. What was that like for you as a journalist? It was a huge change. I came to the New York Times 22 years ago, 23 years ago, and I was told when I got there by one of the managing editors, John Geddes, a hero of mine, that roughly speaking, I could be a writer, a reporter, or I could be an editor, but there was no doing both.

7:51And for the first couple of months at the times, I accepted that. And then I decided I can do both. And I started writing a little bit for the food section, which was the section I came on to first and eventually for the magazine where I wrote a column for, for many years. And then many years later became the critic now in the critic. And I'm definitely not an editor anymore. And that took a little while. It took a little while for me to realize a, I'm not an editor any longer. B I don't work in the office. C I work at night. I have a night job. Um, And that, you know, I had two young kids at the time.

8:38And so I'm the dad in sunglasses, 8 a.m., prom and Advil and making cereal for the kids. It was a little and who went off to work at six or seven or eight or nine or 10 o 'clock at night. And that was that was an adjustment. It's not a job that it's easy to complain about. Right. I mean, what is it's like death by massage? You know, like Bill Edison, Pete Wells, all the greats have said that exact same thing. You can't complain about this job. It's impossible. No. Foie gras again. Like nobody's nobody's going to cry me a river on that. But it is it is a punishing gig to eat out that much to consume that many calories.

9:17The way I see it, too, is and it's not said enough is it's the deadline is also punishing for you as a weekly columnist. That's the job. I don't, I don't, sports writers, they've got a deadline, which is the end of the game. They got to punch it. They got to punch it at the end of the game. Like I think let's not be precious about this. Yeah. I think I'm a pretty good writer. I do it for money. I've done it my whole career. It's all I know how to do. So I'm not complaining. No, absolutely. And you're a high metabolism guy. If you like check out your, your, your, your newsletter, which is a column essentially, in addition to all your other like management jobs.

9:55Right. You know, I want to get to that, but I still want to stick with reviewing. I have a couple questions. First, you know, I'm going to link in the show notes. I want you to give me a review that you still think about, that you feel like you did a good job, that you feel like this is a piece of writing that you're quite proud of. Oh, huh. That's a good question. Reviews that I'm quite proud of. I slammed Nello on the Upper East Side. And there are a couple of paragraphs in there that I'm really quite proud of. But I managed, I think I did a good job with Teresi when they first opened and no one knew what they would become.

10:39Elizabeth Street, like the little spot. Yeah, Teresi Italian Specialties. And I think I was like, this is the first chapter. Like, I feel proud. Like, I knew those guys were going someplace. I love that. I still think about that polio mozzarella. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just the whole notion that they were going to cook Italian-American food with only American ingredients and then do it, execute it at the level that they were executing. It was just, was really good. And then, of course, oh, one more, M. Wells, when they were in the diner, before they became the steakhouse. And it was just so, that was just a purely joyous thing to be able to write.

11:19Like there was a fire on the roof one of the nights we were there and we muscled through it and had a great meal. They're serving horse like regularly too. Yeah, exactly. Those guys, I love that that restaurant existed in that form. Back to Teresa, have you been to the big flagship? Yes, I have. Sam, what do you think about that place? Well, you know, it's kind of, I mean, one thing you could say is which flagship? You know, those guys have a lot of very big properties. The Teresa flagship. Yes, but the Teresi flagship in the Puck building amuses me because I started my career in the Puck building at New York Press, and there was no way something like that was going to be there.

12:03I quite like the flagship Teresi, as we're calling it. There's that ragu that they have, the lamb ragu, which tastes, to me, a New Yorker, tastes exactly like a beef patty. Yeah. like from the pizza shop yeah um is just very sly yeah a very sly thing to do it's a really new york restaurant very over the top i agree and and i've had rich on the show and we've talked about this restaurant and i feel it's almost like a return to form the way spice market back 20 years ago was that big deep cut deep doing deep cuts here i i want to celebrate spice because that was like an event restaurant right and i think teresi is kind of because like before For Teresi, we were like in small little cutesy spots, I felt.

12:53We weren't doing the big. Yeah. It's like we're done with the big, big boys. Yeah. Wow. You've really taken me back to Spice Market, which was really was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I think John George, that's the one he that's one he like sold off. And, you know, he regrets that, I believe. OK, so back to your criticism. Now, you know, all great critics definitely have times they missed in retrospect. You have such a body of work and celebrated output. But, Sam, I have to ask, were there moments that you got wrong that you want to, like, just for the record, be like, maybe I got that wrong? I atone for my sins.

13:28I'm not going that. I'm not asking for that. That's a lot to ask. Yeah. But I think it's more like, upon reflection, this was maybe not the best take. You know, I'm not known for a lack of self-confidence. uh your rep i i um i mean i i felt very comfortable with the reviews that you know can we debate was veritas a three-star restaurant you know maybe maybe maybe we can but i felt i felt pretty comfortable um with what i did i'm sure i got stuff wrong yeah but in the moment And today there's nothing that haunts me. There's nothing where I'm like, I missed that. You know, I could have like if I had blown it with Eddie Huang, you know, if Zhao Zhe was turned out to be a great restaurant and I just missed it because I'm like old man yelling at cloud.

14:28Then we'd be talking about that. But I was right about that. And he knew it. I love that example. I actually reviewed that restaurant when I was reviewing as well. And I shared thoughts with you and he celebrated you for that. I think that was a really nice recognition from a chef who recognized the best critic, the biggest critic got it right. And it wasn't on the right side of the coin. Right, right. Yeah. I love that his mom brought it to his attention. I know. That's a good story. I want to have Eddie back on the show. He's tremendous. Okay. I've had Eric, him, Pete, Melissa Clark. I've had a lot of your colleagues on.

15:02And Emily Weinstein is running the desk now. I've asked them all a similar question. I have to ask you this one. And, you know, how do you know when a story idea for the food desk is right to publish? Oh, that's a that's a great question. I think when it answers a reader need, either a need for information, is this a good restaurant or not? Is this the proper way to to cook a turkey or, you know, steam an egg? Is it in the public interest? Is it something that's of import? Is it something that will resonate with a large audience? The Times started out as a local broadsheet. And then it became a metropolitan paper and a national one and an international one.

15:52And we're now an international news gathering organization with 10 million paying subscribers. We want to make that number be significantly larger. And in order to do that, we have to widen the aperture of what we cover. And so that's going to lead to more yeses. Yeah. Yes, let's publish it. That's great. But it's also going to lead to more no's. That's too narrow. That's too niche. That's too wrapped up in some identity thing. We want to go wide. We want to be as ambitious as possible. Yeah. That's why I think you open up the Wednesday print paper you're reading throughout the week that you're getting these stories that they feel like they're sometimes making news.

16:38I mean, Julia Moss can great example. She just creates news all the time. She's a scoop master, but she's also just creating, just like writing about Publix, you know, like writing stories that I never knew existed. And I'm in this world too with at Taste, we're editing. But then you get like Eric Kim, who's writing also these creative stories, but he's writing with this voice and tone that can't be repeated. I mean, it's like - Yeah, we need both, right? We need to be scoopy and we need to be enterprising and we need to be ambitious, but we also need to have personality and voice. And we got to bring the delicious every day.

17:15It's come a long way, man. And it's a real pleasure to read. I want to ask you, you know, your job is bigger than food. And I don't know if many of our listeners realize that because many identify you as the guy who writes the newsletter every week. Right. Used to be the critic, but, you know, you've been promoted to this masthead position. And so how do you dip into food, but also you're running the culture desk, right? And you're working with many different areas of the paper. Yeah. At the start of the pandemic, I was promoted onto the masthead as an assistant managing editor responsible for the coverage of culture and lifestyle.

17:53And that includes food. That includes cooking. But it also includes the culture desk, the arts desk. It includes real estate and style and personal health and wellness and travel and the book review. And it's a lot. And it's a job that I've been advocating for for a long time. Not necessarily advocating for it for myself, although happy to serve. But I just felt that it would be helpful to the New York Times to have someone on the masthead who's thinking every day about culture and lifestyle coverage and how to make people's lives fuller and more considered while they are also taking in the news of the day from Ukraine or the political hustings or wherever.

18:39Yeah. Yeah. So what that means in practice is Emily Weinstein does a fabulous job running the day to day of New York Times cooking, which is amazing and is turning 10 this year. And I can't believe that. And I'm and I'm talking with her virtually every day. But I'm also talking with the editors of the arts desk of the book review of style of real estate. But food is like your favorite child. I mean, you can't have a favorite child, but I do still write two newsletters a week. So I got it. I keep my hand. You're part of the output, so to speak. I have to say, just I didn't know you handled the review, the book review, and we're at Penguin Random House.

19:21So I have to mention terrific work. I really like the way that it's developed over the past six months. I love your new editor. And I love this new list of the top, you know, 100 books of the 21st century. Oh, isn't it amazing? So good. So good. So this is 100 % Gilbert Cruz, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and his staff. I'm beyond privileged to help support them and to help bring their work to fruition. But it's their, make no mistake, it's their work. And it's just been great. And the rollout of this canonical list of the 100 best books of the century has just been a joy. Absolutely.

19:57It's just giving me such pleasure to read and, you know, I'm hitting the library. I'm hitting the bookstores. I love it. So it's cool to know that you've got your hands in all these different pots. But let's go back to your newsletter. You know, it's arriving like two, three days a week. It's kind of, I want to ask first that it's nothing to do with part of the newsletter. I feel I find myself skipping to that. I don't know if my opinion is shared, but I feel like you landed on something great because you're giving great service at the top and then it's like Sam at the bottom. How did that style develop?

20:31I wanted to make it perfectly clear. I've been doing that thing for 10 years. It's insane to say that, but it makes it. It really is. And I used to do it four days a week. Now I do it two days a week. But that's a lot of newsletters that I've written. And I've included some version of the it's nothing to do with capons or cherries section from the very start. and very, very intentionally. And the intention was this. Food is not made or consumed in a vacuum. We listen to music while we eat. We listen to music while we cook. We talk about the books that we're reading while we're eating. We talk about the films that we're seeing, the art shows that we've seen.

21:14And it seemed important to me to, you know, display, I'm not just sucking up to the name of the show, taste, you know, To say, like, we're cultured people here. This is a cultured operation. And it's not simply going to be me talking about, like, here's a cool frittata. Yeah. I don't do that in my real life. Or if I do, I'm then turning to talk about something else. And so I want to talk about something else. Have you ever thought about flipping the format and just doing more pics? Because, like, some more sand pics and a little, like, a few recipes at the end? Yeah, that'd be funny. That'd be funny.

21:54I mean, you know, the tops can be pretty discursive too. I agree. You know, over the course of the pandemic, especially, there were moments when Emily and I would talk and say like, I don't know, I think we got to redo this top and really, you know, there are X number of people are dead or horrible things are happening in the world. And I wanted to acknowledge that as well. And I'm very proud of the fact that cooking has, over the course of the past decade, acknowledged the terrible things that happen in the world and resolved to cook anyway and resolved to bring joy and succor to those around us anyway.

22:39Yeah. It's a real talent to do that in not a pithy way or a virtuous way, but to do it in a real way. You got to own it. You got to own it. You got to own it, man. I appreciate that. And I got to ask you about writing these newsletters. I mean, like you're, are you dashing them off on your phone in the middle of a meeting? Is that what they read like? No, they don't. I'm not saying that. No, I think they read like you have eyes on them. You're not sub-stacking this, no offense to my guys in the sub-stack. I love those guys. But you definitely have an editorial workflow. But like, man, how the hell do you keep it up?

23:07Like, are you just, you're a fast writer, obviously. Yeah, after a while, you get to be pretty quick. And so I can do it pretty quickly. and I'm blessed to have a really great editor who helps line up recipes with me ahead of time, which is super, super helpful. Shout out your editor. Mia Lemkiller. All right. One of the best, child of Montreal. And it's just a great team, but it helps to be fast. Yeah, and have you ever written one while you're like standing in a stream with waiters on? No, I'm not even thinking about, I might think about a lead. I might think about, you know, see a bunch of birds and everything's content.

23:49On to the app. Ten years. Crazy. What's on the whiteboard in the first meeting when you're thinking about this needs to be an app and we need to make money from this app? Okay. Well, I'm not a business guy. Well. I didn't know how we were going to make money. And the person who I was working with on the product side at that time, Alex McCallum, was devoted to this notion, we're just going to get big. And if we get big, we can figure out the monetization. So what was on the whiteboard? I didn't even know what a whiteboard was back then. You probably despised it. You're like a cultural critic. You're like an editor's editor.

24:35You're not like, let's go to the conference room and do like some kind of iterate. Yeah, I can iterate, but I got a hard stop at four. You know, just like a hard stop. I don't even know what these words are. Anyway, here's the origin story of New York Times cooking. It's the New York Times cookbook, which one of my predecessors and one of Emily's predecessors, Craig Claiborne, published in the 1970s. that at a time when the New York Times was just not even a regional newspaper, but a metropolitan newspaper, became a national bestseller and remained a national bestseller for like a decade. And he had points on the job.

25:18Right. He owned it outright. That's so insane. So let's just be clear about this. The payment that I received for being involved in the birth of New York Times cooking was my salary, obviously, and I'm very happy to have it and I work hard for it. But I created a couple of guild jobs and they gave me a mug from the guild. Craig Claiborne, they were fine with him taking all of these recipes, hundreds and hundreds of recipes and putting them into a book called The New York Times Cookbook Copyright. Craig Claiborne. Man, I missed out. Yeah. Anyway. Great aside. Thanks for clarifying. I love that story so much.

25:55I had spent time when I was the national editor. I would go and visit our news bureaus around the country and often travel with correspondents during news events into people's homes. And I said, you know, we're nosy people, journalists. And I saw that cookbook all over the country, 30, 40, whatever years after its publication. And I thought, we can capture that on a phone. And I was not the first person to think this. There was a great editor and reporter at the Times, Rich Meislin, who died a couple years ago, who believed in this idea passionately. We just needed someone to say, yes, here's a bunch of money.

26:39Hire some freelancers. Take the recipes that exist in the morgue, which is what we call the archive of the print newspaper. and take those recipes, which were, I'll use more jargon, shirt-tailed on to the end of articles, and make them into standalone searchable assets. And that recipe card, what we call a recipe detail page, became the kind of building block for the app that we've done. It's a major project. I mean, you're thinking, are you retesting these recipes? Are you just putting them online? Are you thinking about subscription from like year two, having that audience and the people who are in the app and using it for free?