Restaurant Critics

S. Irene Virbila has been named The Times' restaurant critic. Virbila has written extensively about food, wine and restaurants and was a contributing editor and columnist at San Francisco Focus magazine. She was also a regular contributor to the Wine Spectator and other publications. In addition, she has written or co-written several books, including "Cook's Marketplace, San Francisco."

Michael Winner, a British film director who specialized in thrillers and action movies, including three "Death Wish" movies, died Monday. He was 77. A bon vivant who became a restaurant critic after his film career wound down, Winner died at his London home after an illness, said his wife, Geraldine. Winner directed a few dozen films but was best known for "Death Wish," which starred Charles Bronson as a law-abiding citizen who turns vigilante when his wife and daughter are attacked.

GRAB the November issue of Esquire magazine and you'll find critic John Mariani's annual list of the nation's "20 Best New Restaurants," including local hot spots Providence and Ortolan. What you won't see is a disclaimer about which meals Mariani ate for free, and at the personal invitation of the chefs -- omissions that have exposed a deep divide in food writing circles over the ethics of restaurant reviewing. The line is sharply drawn.

It's an axiom of food writing that the only restaurant critics chefs like are the ones who've just retired. Apparently, that's not quite true. In fact, The Times has two exceptions on its staff. Jonathan Gold and S. Irene Virbila are both in the Top 10 of the nation's restaurant critics, according to a poll of chefs and restaurateurs conducted by the Daily Meal website . In fact, Gold is No. 1 over all, earning the site's only three-star ranking. Virbila is No. 10, with 2½ stars.

Circling Valley Boulevard in Alhambra, lost in suffocating, 100-degree heat, I'm wondering: What could possibly justify leaving my air-conditioned office to stumble around this too-familiar Southern California bleakscape of tire outlets, big box stores, nail parlors and fast-food joints? A few minutes later, I've finally limped into 101 Noodle Express, and the answer is at hand. It's the restaurant's beef roll, something like a crispy Chinese pancake, rolled around thin layers of savory beef and topped with a homemade bean sauce.

Craig Claiborne, the retired New York Times food editor and restaurant critic who died Saturday, was certainly a man who had been in the right place at the right time. But he was also the right person for the job. Claiborne took the helm of the New York Times' food coverage in 1957, just as Americans were becoming curious about cuisine. Rapidly expanding air travel had made trips to Europe affordable for even the middle class.

The Southern Arizona Restaurant Assn. has warned member establishments to watch out for phony restaurant critics--disreputable types who have been showing up at local eating places and announcing that they're there to review the joint for some publication or other, hoping to get a free meal or maybe a cash payoff for their trouble.

Gertrude Bell Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations Georgina Howell Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 512 pp., $27.50 SHE was outspoken, self-confident, smart, brave. She took a first at Oxford in modern history, began mountain climbing in her 30s, spoke six languages, loved and lived in the world's deserts and helped create an autonomous Iraq.

Question: What qualifications does one need to become a food critic other than the desire to be paid to eat at fancy restaurants? Tom Gibson Redondo Beach Virbila: I think you have to have a curiosity about all kinds of foods. It would be hard to be a restaurant critic if you were a vegetarian, say, or someone who didn't like organ meats or anything spicy. You have to find restaurants endlessly interesting and entertaining. You have to be able to write. And in L.A.

I have a few hundred comments on Ruth Reichl's article on the death of fine dining in Los Angeles ("Dinosaur Under Glass," Jan. 4). First and foremost, elegant dining is not endangered in L.A. We never had it. To be fair, very few cities have it; perhaps two or three places in Paris, one or two in New York. The problem is in one's definition of elegant. For me, at $125 or more per head, "elegant has to be perfect." That precludes an owner at Le Dome saying "Don't ruin my evening" to a client seeking the seat he requested.

The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat Thomas McNamee Free Press, 339 pp., $27 Ask your average Food Network viewer or Yelp poster about Craig Claiborne and you're likely to be met with a blank look and a "Who?" How fleeting is fame in the food world. Claiborne is one of the giants of this modern age, even if today - less than 20 years after his passing - he is largely forgotten. People remember James Beard because of the foundation that keeps his name alive. Julia Child lives on in television reruns (even if some fans now believe she looked just like Meryl Streep)

Well, that was interesting. A couple of days before Christmas, one of the owners of the new Beverly Hills restaurant Red Medicine created a firestorm by confronting Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila while she was waiting for a table, snapping her picture, kicking her and her party out of the restaurant and then posting the picture on the Internet for all to see. By the next morning, more than 15 years of working to remain anonymous were...

When I first got my iPhone, I was thrilled to discover Convertbot, which made it fun and easy to convert ingredient quantities or temperatures from my British cookbooks. That app, it turned out, was just a taste of the onslaught of food and wine apps to come - so many, you'd have to be a full-time app tester to try them all out. (Unfortunately, I have another job.) But I do try a lot. Here are apps for the iPhone that I've found most useful. Several are also available on the Android platform.

When it comes to my kitchen, I'm not strictly practical. If I were, I'd have stainless steel cupboards instead of painted wood glazed with beeswax, or a concrete floor instead of wood. And I certainly wouldn't have a copper sink that threatens to turn furry and green every other day. The way things look matters to me. And that instinct for the beautiful follows me into the kitchen too. Before I begin to cook, I lay out all my ingredients in bowls and baskets. I'll pull out the shallots and garlic I keep in glazed ocher bowls that I carried back from Provence, or the bouquet of red peppers and Sicilian dried oregano that are stored in a basket a friend brought me from South Africa.

Circling Valley Boulevard in Alhambra, lost in suffocating, 100-degree heat, I'm wondering: What could possibly justify leaving my air-conditioned office to stumble around this too-familiar Southern California bleakscape of tire outlets, big box stores, nail parlors and fast-food joints? A few minutes later, I've finally limped into 101 Noodle Express, and the answer is at hand. It's the restaurant's beef roll, something like a crispy Chinese pancake, rolled around thin layers of savory beef and topped with a homemade bean sauce.

reporting from napa valley Every couple of years I feel that siren call to go up and spend some time in Napa Valley. For most of us, this was our first wine country experience, as exotic as anything discovered later in Burgundy or Piedmont. Who can forget the smudged violet of the hills, the rows of vines with mustard blooming bright yellow at their feet? The cool dark of the cellars or the view from Auberge du Soleil or Domaine Chandon?

It wasn't just Mike Kalina's suicide that shocked his many friends in Pittsburgh last week. It also was the news that Kalina--a successful cookbook author, the host of a nationally syndicated Public Broadcasting Service cooking show and a newspaper and TV dining critic in the city since 1978--had been under investigation by a federal grand jury in connection with the selling of favorable reviews to restaurant owners.

"I do not resent criticism, even when, for the sake of emphasis, it parts for the time with reality," wrote Winston Churchill in 1941. We couldn't agree more. Criticism is healthy when properly directed. If we thought La Serre were perfect, we wouldn't strive to improve it daily. We expect restaurant critics to be tough and professional--and to be fair. And to do their homework.

Elmer Dills, 82, a longtime restaurant and travel critic known for his popular radio and television reports, died Monday at Pasadena's Huntington Memorial Hospital, according to KABC-TV Channel 7, where he dished out his reports on Southern California dining. The cause of death was not specified. Dills, a longtime Pasadena resident, said he developed his knowledge of food and wine while working with the State Department.

Gertrude Bell Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations Georgina Howell Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 512 pp., $27.50 SHE was outspoken, self-confident, smart, brave. She took a first at Oxford in modern history, began mountain climbing in her 30s, spoke six languages, loved and lived in the world's deserts and helped create an autonomous Iraq.