Word: sokolovic
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...original version of this article misstated that Raymond Sokolov had been the restaurant critic of the Wall Street Journal for 25 years. Though Sokolov did write often about food for the paper, he was only officially the regular restaurant critic since the fall...
Real foodies should be concerned that critics like Sokolov are an endangered species. Their habitat - big-ticket, fine-dining restaurants - shrinks every year, encroached upon by gourmet hamburger joints, taco stands and various other chic, no-frills eateries. Their food supply - the expense accounts of large newspapers and magazines - has withered. And their most invaluable asset - their towering authority - has been leached away by blogs and review websites, leaving them without a place in the new ecosystem. All of which is too bad, because critics like Sokolov ought to be at the very center of it. (See pictures of what...
...Sokolov is a rarity even among big-paper critics: though he was only officially the Journal's restaurant critic since the fall of 2005, he has written about food for decades, and brought a wealth of cumulative knowledge to the baffling array of weird foods, concepts and trends that a 21st century eater has to face. Critics, even at potent establishments like the New York Times, tend to be younger, and are often former reporters or freelancers who don't have much of a food background. Even those like Jonathan Gold at LA Weekly or Tom Sietsema of the Washington...
...offended, because he pretty much takes it for granted that the current crop of food writers, at least the online ones, are a cacophony of dazzled novices, opining confidently in an intellectual vacuum. And he's not wrong. There are no more authority figures anymore. Sokolov, for his part, regrets the passing of "thorough, objective, anonymous reviewing." That criticism, he tells TIME, is "increasingly relevant as the scale of glam cheffery [has] expanded along with the blogosphere...
...Sokolov, like many of the top critics from his generation, suffers from "back in the day"-itis. "Nobody [is] ever going to be as influential as the Times critics of the '60s and '70s," he says. (New York's Gael Greene can be counted upon to say the same thing whenever asked.) But the kind of influence the Times had in the '70s was hardly worth having. A few thousand urban mandarins depended on its reviews, and proceeded to agree or disagree. Restaurants didn't matter in the culture the way they do now. Ordinary Americans west of the Hudson...