852: Washington Post Food Critic Elazar Sontag on His First Big Best Restaurants List

Elazar Sontag (0:08)

I think that a four-star restaurant has to be the best possible version of itself. When people see four stars on a review that I've written, I want them to understand that they are going to go to any number of different kinds of restaurants, but the experience they're going to have at that one is going to be flawless or near flawless.

Matt Rodbard (0:30)

This is TASTE. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

Elazar Sontag published a cookbook at 18, ran Bon Appétit's Best New Restaurants list in his mid-20s, and last fall succeeded Tom Sietsema as The Washington Post's food critic. No disguise required. On this episode, he joins us to talk about his inaugural best restaurant list, which is likely causing some debate in and around the district. We also talk about bringing back the star ratings, his many travels to Virginia and Maryland, and so much more with one of my favorite voices in modern food writing. It was a real treat to have Elazar in the studio. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.

Elazar Sontag, welcome to This Is TASTE. Long time coming. How are you?

Elazar Sontag (1:18)

I am so happy to be here. I am so good.

Matt Rodbard (1:21)

I'm a huge fan of your work.

Elazar Sontag (1:23)

I'm a huge fan of your work.

Matt Rodbard (1:24)

So kind to bring it back. I was looking back at my e-mails, and I remember Anna Heasel and I were sitting in an office here at Penguin Random House in 2017, going over the first year of stories for TASTE. And I remember receiving this pitch from a 19-year-old Bard student named Elazar Sontag.

And we didn't do the story, but I remember vividly saying to Anna, this guy is impressive.

Elazar Sontag (1:49)

Oh, thank you.

Matt Rodbard (1:49)

I loved the pitch. And I just loved the way you just thought about food as a 19-year-old. Amazing.

Elazar Sontag (1:54)

Well, I was already, it's funny. So you sent me that email, and I did. I had totally forgotten about kind of that whole period, but it sparked a memory of just really how my career started. And it's true that TASTE was one of the first places that was doing sort of exactly the thing that I wanted to embody, which was really food culture, like heavy on the culture. But that story that you didn't end up running with ended up changing my career because it ended in the Washington Post, where I now work. So I sort of like it was a best case scenario, but I love that you sent that to me. It was really sweet.

Matt Rodbard (2:29)

It was a great pitch and it's a full circle moment because before you were at the Washington Post, where you are today as a food critic, and we're going to talk all about your career there, your short career there, but also this amazing top restaurants in DC list that you just released, amazing work there. Really learned so much.

But you worked at BA, you worked at Eater, and you really have this amazing career. Did you set out as a 19-year-old that you like really you wanted to be a journalist specializing in food?

Elazar Sontag (2:57)

I, by the time I was in college, the answer is yes. Really the interest for me was always food. And so it was sort of a winding path until that point when I was around 1920, where it really solidified for me that what I was going to do was not cook, not open a restaurant, not open a cafe, but like that I was going to write about food. So by that point, like I was pretty clear on having a career in food journalism, but even however long that was ago, you know, eight years, food journalism was becoming a very hard to define field. Like it wasn't clear where I was going to go. You know, the jobs were relatively scarce.

It was sort of hard to look to the figures of the past, to figure out, you know, who the figures of the future would be. So yes and no, I knew I wanted to do it. I still didn't have a really clear vision of like how.

Matt Rodbard (3:54)

You said something very interesting there and I totally agree that at that period, looking back 20 years and trying to model yourself after somebody who was like maybe on staff at the Times in 2005, it was irrelevant.

Elazar Sontag (4:06)

Yeah.

Matt Rodbard (4:06)

To the job.

Elazar Sontag (4:08)

Totally. I mean, I grew up on, you know, Ruth Reichel and these figures who, thank God, are like still with us and we can still sort of see the trajectory that they took. But, you know, I can't say that I look at Ruth Reichel and I thought to myself, oh, I can do that. I mean, ironically, that is actually basically what I'm doing now and I feel incredibly lucky. But I had no sense, you know, eight, 10 years ago that like those pathways might still be open.