San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Just the check, please: Why your food critic is moving on
Four years later, restaurant critic Soleil Ho is taking on a new role at The Chronicle
After four years of serving as your friendly neighborhood restaurant critic, I’m moving on. While long tenures are more typical for food critics, who are like the Supreme Court justices of the journalism world, I think four years is the perfect length of time. (I lean more toward the presidential way of doing things, I guess.)
I’m thrilled to pass the torch to someone who will surely bring a fresh perspective to the role and blow our collective minds with their writing. This is one of the best jobs ever, and I’m so glad to share it with someone new.
Four years doesn’t seem like a lot, but these particular years have been quite a ride.
Just a few months after I marked my one-year anniversary as The Chronicle’s restaurant critic, I found myself slumping over the coffee table in my tiny apartment, frantically calling as many restaurant folks as I could to ask, “Are you still open?” and, perhaps futilely, “Are you OK?” It was the day after San Francisco became the first city in California to issue stay-at-home orders for its residents, and I was tasked with putting together a directory of all the restaurants in the Bay Area that were staying open for takeout and delivery.
While listening to restaurant owners and workers spill their hearts out to me over the phone, I wondered if restaurants themselves would still exist in a few months. Was this enough to completely obliterate an industry typified by its tight profit margins? Are people ever going out to eat again? And oh god, I had just finished writing the Top 100 list two weeks before lockdown and nothing in it made sense anymore!
The moment marked an abrupt transition in what I thought, to be honest, was going to be a pretty straightforward job of eating stuff and writing fun things about it. All of a sudden, dining out became literally a matter of life and death.
And yet, I’m so grateful for whatever contrivance of fate put me in that position at that specific time. There was a boom in pop-ups, which had me zipping around the Bay Area picking up all kinds of limited-edition pastry boxes and Michelin-starred meal kits. Dining out became pretty janky; and then, after COVID restrictions were pulled back, it took on a refreshed and uncanny grandiosity, like the guttural, ecstatic scream you might unleash after a week of silence. Members of the dining public started to reach out to me, asking for me to decide if they were bad (or good?) people for wanting to visit restaurants again. And there were so many challenging and urgent conversations to be had — not just about public health but racial justice, inequality and the precarious circumstances of those who perform the “unskilled” labor that brings food to our tables.
I always found myself eager to go deep on these topics, and I’ll continue that work in my new role in The Chronicle’s opinion section, where I’ll be serving as a columnist and cultural critic. I’ll still find the time to expound upon whatever especially crunchy food stories land at my desk, but I’ll expand my scope from solely food to popular culture, especially how we talk about work, the internet, art, politics and what we owe to each other.
If you’ve subscribed to the Bite Curious newsletter, stick around! The Chronicle’s food team will continue to keep the newsletter running until the next restaurant critic is hired, so it’ll be nice and warm for whoever that might be.
Finally, for your viewing pleasure, here are some of the highlights (and lowlights) of my time as The Chronicle’s restaurant critic.
I won’t soon forget the first time I bit into the shaobing sandwich at S&M Vegan, the Singaporean-Italian pop-up that would eventually become Oakland’s Lion Dance Cafe. It was one of the moments that really captured the food writer’s dream of stumbling upon something gorgeous, transcendent and stubbornly original, and rushing to tell the world all about it.
One of my favorite finds as a critic is Lou’s Takeaway, a tiny, diner-ish counter spot in a parking lot in San Rafael. Amid all the social alienation of the early pandemic years, the humanity and cheer exhibited by Anthony “Lou” Rizzi and his team gave me hope in people again.
By contrast, sometimes trying random stuff doesn’t work out. The worst specimen I came across was a bowl of gumbo ramen, which sounded like a fun and silly time on paper but ended up being an awkward gathering of salty and dry meat, wilty microgreens and undercooked pho noodles in a bowl of lukewarm, watery gumbo broth.
Another lowlight, but this one’s on me: There have been a few instances when I’ve rolled up to a restaurant and completely forgotten what name I had used on my reservation. I was constantly changing them to stay one step ahead of savvy hosts, but fell into the occasional identity crisis because of that. Am I Grace? Yonah? Alex? At times like those, I’d blame a coterie of “personal assistants” who might have reserved the table under their own names, though I suspect that the staff caught on quickly. After all this time, getting my actual name back is such a relief.