On the surface, the job of a restaurant critic seems like heaven. You get paid to eat at restaurants. You may have the power to make or break a business. You get to express yourself. Great job, huh? Sure, but there's a lot more to it than most of us realize. Eater talked with critics Julia Kramer and Ryan Sutton about the details of their jobs. One of the drawbacks could be a punishing schedule that affects one's body.
When she’s on the road scouting new places, Kramer eats at least two lunches and two dinners every day, and often visits bars, coffee shops and bakeries between those stops to maximize her time in each city. “The back-to-back tasting menu is rough,” she explained. “I did it multiple times this year, and I do not recommend. It’s hard to enjoy the first meal because you’re so anxious about how much you’re going to have to eat at the second meal. And then it’s hard to enjoy the second because you’re so full from the first.”
Sutton says his job has impacted his health. “I used to have a pretty athletic body in high school,” he said. “Athletics are still a huge part of my life. I love skiing and cycling and what have you, but I’m not going to be a pure climber as a cyclist because I have a little bit of a gut and that’s simply the fact of the job impacting me.”
If a restaurant critic writes about two eateries, you can be bet that they've dined at a dozen or more that they didn't write about. Learn some of the the nuts and bolts of a restaurant critic's work at Eater. -via Digg
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