Restaurant criticism is at a crossroads. Over eight short days in July 2018, Jonathan Gold died, Michael Bauer stepped down from his position at The San Francisco Chronicle, and gastronomes officially closed the book on an era of food writing. Now a new chapter has begun. Within just six months, three politically savvy women of color were hired as restaurant critics at institutional newspapers. Soleil Ho at the Chronicle. Patricia Escárcega at The Los Angeles Times. And, perhaps the most perceptive in this critical triumvirate, Tejal Rao, who in August 2018 became the first-ever California restaurant critic at The New York Times.

Earning her stripes at The Village Voice and Bloomberg, Rao has imbued fresh style and purpose into the hidebound genre since arriving at the Times in 2016. Her prose melds a poet’s tongue and a populist’s spirit: she writes of French Laundry’s gaudy presentation, “In the Trump era, gold seems a bit too eager to assert its value.” Born in London to immigrants from Kenya and India, Rao expands the range of standard topics, frequently covering women and working-class cooks, who are often excluded by the field’s fine-dining bias. Her articles explore a hybrid style of food reportage—half investigative journalism, half human-interest—such as her James Beard Award­–winning column, in which she shadowed a halal cart owner for twelve hours. She has a novelist’s gift for observation, and small details from her writing stay with you—like the quiet but blistering fact that the halal vendor could have only one cup of coffee a day without risking a bathroom emergency.