Revisit our 2016 Profile of Wells, the New York Times critic who can make or break a restaurant.
Tasting menus suit diners in a certain frame of mind, and they simplify life in the kitchen, especially one whose star chef lives in another time zone. But such a menu makes a long meal almost unavoidable, Wells said, “and it doesn’t leave room for the messiness and chaos that is a lot of the fun of going out to eat”—the business of bartering across the table, and “stealing Jeff’s chicken leg.
Although skeptical about much of what has lately counted as restaurant excellence, Wells hasn’t quite drawn his own boundary line—one defined, perhaps, by affability and chaos. In his columns, where even his expressions of delight are often a little wistful, it’s perhaps possible to detect a critic’s regret that he’ll never report on the dining equivalent of a perfect first album recorded in a garage over a weekend.
On October 26th, Wells went to Per Se with three companions, and paid a check for about three thousand dollars. He had eaten there several times in the past, happily; he had enjoyed such dishes as Oysters and Pearls—oysters and caviar, on top of tapioca—which, he told me, “is amazing when it’s done right.” But this experience was different. On the cab ride home, he said to himself, “I have a loaded gun, and I’m going to have to fire it, and I don’t want to.
He delayed returning. During the next few weeks, the unwritten review “weighed on Pete a lot,” Kat Kinsman, the Extra Crispy editor, recalled. When, one evening, Wells texted her a photograph taken outside Señor Frog’s, in Times Square—part of a chain of restaurants designed to evoke the experience of spring break in Cancún—she asked him if it was a cry for help.
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