The Washington Post’s new food critic Elazar Sontag has been on the job nearly a month now, following the departure of Tom Sietsema, who held the position for more than 25 years. Already, Sontag—who was previously restaurant editor at Bon Appétit—is making some notable changes. For starters, he’s dropped any attempt at anonymity. He also announced today that he’ll be bringing back the star rating system that was abandoned during the pandemic. What else can readers and restaurants expect? We chatted with Sontag about his early impressions of DC’s dining scene, how he’s rethinking reviews, and becoming he youngest full-time print critic in America.
How familiar were you with the DC dining scene before moving here?
Not really. I would say I was familiar with the DC dining scene in the way that I was with most dining scenes—other than the city that I lived in, New York, and the cities that I have lived in, Oakland and San Francisco. [In my previous role at Bon Appétit,] I was only really eating in new restaurants. So in a way, I felt like I had started to understand DC, and I really liked visiting, but there was a massive part of the city that I really didn’t know much about. Really understanding the scaffolding, the infrastructure of this city’s dining scene and the OGs and the legends who make it what it is, that’s all really work that I started doing right before I came here and then since moving.
What are your early impressions of DC’s restaurant scene, especially coming from New York?
Interesting and lovely. As a diner, the first thing I noticed is that it is much easier to feel like a regular. So many New York restaurants—a certain vibe of New York restaurant—are impossible to get into. And I think a lot of that’s just because of like population density. But it also has to do with the way that New Yorkers eat. People really descend on a few restaurants at a time. And I felt less of that here. It feels a little bit more diffuse. People are really eating across the city. I’m just having the experience of being really interested in a new restaurant or wanting to try something a little more longstanding and not having to fight for my life to get a table.
The Post has long had this tension of how much is it a local paper and how much is it a national paper. Given your more national background, will you focus on restaurants around the country or are you going to be focused squarely on the DC area?
My focus is on the DC area. I took this job because I wanted to be part of something local and to feel more rooted in my surroundings. The challenge of my last job was you’re always just sort of stopping in. You’re never spending that much time in a city, and part of that is you don’t get to know one dining scene really intimately. But the other part is that you don’t get to know diners and your readers that well because they are so spread out.
I’m excited to be bringing a national perspective to the role, and I very much so plan to incorporate that into my reviews and how I’m thinking about restaurants to help contextualize their place in broader trends in dining playing out across the country. And yeah, sometimes [I may] even compare them to restaurants outside of DC, if I think that might be helpful to a diner. But my focus is very much on this region and the readers who are loyal to this section, many of whom are here.
When will your first review run? Hopefully, you’re getting some time to just eat around town first too.
The last month has definitely been lots of educating, because I didn’t want to come out of the gate without having a foundational understanding of not just whatever one restaurant I was reviewing, but how it fits into the landscape right now. But the first review will come this week.
Bringing back stars is big news. Tell me why you wanted to do that.
There’s been a movement of critics dropping stars, which I completely understand. But as a reader, I missed the stars. I think that they are fundamentally useful. And as I came into this role—at a time when a lot of people don’t necessarily have the resources to dine out all the time, and restaurants are very expensive—I want to be able to tell people without any ambiguity how I feel about a restaurant. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be nuance and complexity to my thoughts in the reviews. But I think that just the legibility and sort of decisiveness of the stars is really valuable, especially at a moment when there are so, so, so many ways for people to get dining recommendations.
So much of the issue around stars has been that they really flattened restaurants, that the scale was kind of implicitly tied to price and ambience and the style of service. Four stars really meant a white tablecloth and an amuse bouche, and I’m not interested in that scale. I’m treating the scale as a way to measure whether a restaurant is the absolute best version of itself. I will be considering all restaurants for all tiers of stars. It’s certainly possible that a fine dining restaurant and a counter-service place will end up in the same tier if they’re both doing the highest version of their trade.
How should readers think about one star? Most people are going to see that and think ‘this restaurant is bad.’ But under your rubric, that’s not necessarily the case.
That’s definitely not the case. One star is good. And I know that that’s an adjustment from how people are using some of the more crowdsourced platforms—Yelp, Google Maps, Amazon, all of the services that have now programmed us to think of one as atrocious and five as perfect. But the scale is relatively in line with the scales used by other publications [like the New York Times under its new food critics]. I want people to think of this as part of a larger conversation.
One star, no, maybe I don’t think it is the special occasion restaurant that you should drive across the state for. But I am telling you that if you go to this restaurant, I think that maybe with some small caveats that I will outline in the review, you will have a good time. For people who are dining out a ton, and they’re trying to hit as many restaurants as possible, these are places that I think are worthy of their time. And then that sort of worthiness jumps up with each star.
Some of the social media comments were basically saying one star looks like a participation trophy. What do you think of that? And how will you handle genuinely bad restaurants?
I’m not going to go out of my way to some small, family-run, independent restaurant that I think is not really worth people’s attention on a broad scale and trash it. But of course, if a restaurant is getting a lot of attention, it’s very high visibility for whatever reason, and the food or the service or some combination is really disappointing or uneven, it wouldn’t get a star. Some of Tom’s most iconically bad reviews were unstarred.
And it’s not a participation trophy. It’s very time and resource intensive to review restaurants, and I am taking it very seriously. I’m not going write a review that is effectively a participation trophy that would essentially direct readers to a restaurant that isn’t worth their time.
You’re the first lead food critic at the Post to not attempt anonymity. Why?
I will just say off the bat, I was not an anonymous presence. I have done a version of this job that’s been public and speaking to people and meeting people on social media, on YouTube, out in the world for years. There’s a certain level of anonymity that just was not going to be feasible for me.
It’s really an open secret that most restaurants that care to know are identifying anonymous critics as soon as they walk into a restaurant. Certainly you can wear disguises and sometimes that might work, but a certain kind of restaurant is still going to find you out, whereas another kind of restaurant that maybe doesn’t have the resourcing or the time is not. I just was really not interested in doing that dance.
I don’t think that a bad restaurant can just turn a switch and be really good for one night. I think the margin of change is relatively small, and it’s a non-anonymous critic’s job to try to spot those differences whenever possible and also share them transparently with readers.
The last thing I would say is that I’m excited to be able to be more visible to readers. There is a limit to how available you can be to people when we’re living in an extremely visual online world and you can’t share your face. We’re going to get to really experiment with how we’re sharing reviews on social media and beyond.
How old are you, by the way? Are you the youngest full-time print critic in America now?
I’m 27. So I think so.
Very impressive.
Well, some people will think it’s impressive. Some people will think it’s concerning.
What do you think?
I think it’s really an honor, and I’m thrilled, and I do think I have the experience. I’ve been the youngest to do a few of these jobs, which has been a privilege throughout and means that I’ve gotten a lot of experience.
To go back to the anonymity for just a second. I know it’s only been a few weeks, but how much have you been recognized so far?
It’s been an interesting mix. There have been really fabulous meals where I feel with 80 percent confidence, I was not recognized. And again, I don’t want to be naive, it’s hard to tell sometimes. And I’ve also had really uneven meals at restaurants where, not only was I recognized, but I was told by servers or chefs that they knew who I was. And the meals were imperfect and the service was off.
I’m really leaning into the idea that a great restaurant is a great restaurant and that it’s my job to figure out whether I’ve been recognized and understand what to do with that information. But I am getting recognized. Again, I’m booking exclusively with aliases. I’m employing a few other tricks that I’ll keep to myself to try to mostly prevent restaurants from anticipating my arrival.
I remember Tom Sietsema saying that he’d often eat out 10 meals a week. Are you keeping that pace?
You know, Tom is the legend of all legends, and also I have no idea how he did that. I think probably right now—and it sounds similar—I’m averaging eight. But eight is not ten. Ten is every night plus lunches. But these things will really fluctuate.
What’s the top piece of advice that Tom gave you?
He really impressed the importance of finding time outside of restaurants, that it makes the work stronger, not weaker if once a week you can save a quiet dinner at home to cook with a partner or just sort of reload.
He also told me the importance of a nap, which I’m already understanding because the hours are very quirky, and I feel like I’m in constant digestion mode.
Will you continue the online chat? When is that coming back?
More people asked about the chat than anything else. I have to be honest, I obviously knew about the chats, but I don’t think I understood just the intensity of the love and dedication to that forum. So that will be back, and it will be back very soon [Wednesday, December 10].
I’m sure there are a lot of chefs and restaurateurs around town who are trying to track down any morsel of information they can about your preferences. Can you share any particular likes and dislikes or maybe some dining pet peeves?
The job that I’ve been doing for the last four years was to just appreciate new restaurants and, among hundreds, to find the tiny handful that felt really, really deserving of a national spotlight. What that kind of trained me for is just being able to have a really, really wide appreciation of restaurants.
On a quiet night with my partner, I’m very often having Lao food. I love a sticky rice salad. That is something I will always, always order. Of course I have dishes and flavors that I’m drawn to. I love chewy. I’m sort of finding those moments on every menu more so than I’m really gravitating to a single cuisine.
I love Ethiopian and Eritrean food. I’ve been totally, totally just adoring the Eden Center, so I’ve been there two or three times just to check out all the different noodle soups. But I’m trying to eat it all. I’m not closing myself off to anything, because I don’t want to miss anything great.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind DC’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
