Gender & Restaurant Reviewing

I loved this response published yesterday to a sexist 1961 letter from an university administrator.

It was written by journalist and novelist Phyllis Richman. She was the longtime food critic at the Washington Post.

This was the part that caught my eye, as she wrote about the mid-1970s: “I co-authored Washingtonian magazine’s restaurant guidebook on the promise that I’d replace the magazine’s critic when he retired. Instead, the editor chose a man who had written nary a restaurant review. I wasn’t really surprised. Besides, in the next year The Post hired me as its restaurant critic. I was the first woman to hold that job at the newspaper, and one of only a handful in newspapers and magazines around the country.”

What is so fascinating is that food – including restaurant reviews – was pretty much exclusively women’s news for decades – running in the women’s pages.

That changed most visibly when Craig Claiborne was hired as the food editor at the New York Times in 1957. It was quite newsworthy as a “male first.”

It made think about food writer Mimi Sheraton’s memoir, Eating My Words. She wrote that when Claiborne (who took over from Jane Nickerson) left the newspaper in 1972, she and other female New York food writers were not considered as replacements: “Neither I nor any other female food writer I knew was given an interview for his job, no matter her credentials. (If any were interviewed, I still would like to hear about it.)”

Sheraton was eventually hired for the position but it is telling that after so much that women in food journalism were accomplishing, gender could still stand in the way in 1972.

To add to that story that Richman felt a first at her newspaper shows that in two decades, a female-dominated profession had flipped. I wonder if this is because a critic is expressing her/his opinion and that was what made it suddenly a more masculine field.

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