The $250 pizza

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The editors in Food receive notes fairly often from readers asking why and how editors pick the restaurants they review. Karen Gray of Los Angeles County says she’s enjoyed the reviews but was prompted to write this to The Times after reading on Nov. 28 about a $250 pizza at a restaurant and lounge called Hidden:

‘I believe in celebrations, fine wine & spirits, luxury travel and more...to each their own. Somehow this pizza is so over the top that it just is offensive. Would you have ordered it if you were there on your own dime? I’d feel better if you simply noted the item on the menu and how you would NEVER order it. Please go back to reporting on things we might actually want to try!’

Food Editor Leslie Brenner responds:

We frequently get questions from readers asking why our restaurant critic would order an item that’s ridiculous-sounding and crazy expensive; it’s basically the same question as why we would choose to review a restaurant that seems, on the face of it, to be overpriced and silly. The answer, of course, is that we’re providing an important reader service: We go and pay and taste so the readers don’t have to, or can at least go armed with the knowledge of our critic’s experience, positive or negative. We prefer that before a reader spends his or her hard-earned money at a restaurant that costs $400 for dinner for two, we do our due diligence. That means our critic makes at least three (unannounced, anonymous) visits, and The Times picks up the tab -- even if our critic suspects that the place is probably not very good. That’s one of the important roles of the restaurant critic. (And it’s also why, if you ask S. Irene Virbila if she has the dreamiest job imaginable, she might chuckle: In the course of doing her job, eating in restaurants almost every night, she has to eat a lot of mediocre — or even awful — food.)

Of course we don’t cover only expensive restaurants and expensive items in those restaurants; Food’s reviews cover places at every price point. The main review, S. Irene Virbila’s “The Review,” which appears weekly on Wednesdays in Food, focuses on higher-end restaurants (typically with main courses from $16 to $40). About every other week we also run “The Find” column, which is our secondary review, written by either deputy Food editor Susan LaTempa (who is also the assigning editor of that column) or regular contributor Linda Burum. The restaurants covered in “The Find” have main courses typically in the $8 to $20 range. Virbila also writes ‘First Look’ columns for The Guide in the Thursday paper. This is not a review, but a first impression of a new restaurant, or something new happening in a place that’s been around a while. These restaurants are in the same price range as The Review.