The Momofuku Group, run by the thirty-nine-year-old chef David Chang, has in recent years expanded into fast food, overseas restaurants, and a quarterly magazine named Lucky Peach. But Momofuku Nishi was the company’s first full-scale, sit-down restaurant to open in New York in five years. A visit from Wells was a certainty. A copy of the one photograph of him that is widely available online, in which he looks like a character actor available to play sardonic police sergeants, was fixed to a wall in the restaurant’s back stairwell.
“Pete Wells Has His Knives Out” by Ian Parker, The New Yorker
This is one of the best profiles I’ve read in a long time. It’s so, so good and has so much to say about cultural criticism, about starred reviews in general, about gentrification and food.
(via hazelcills)