Public Biography
Dina Harwell is the food critic and dining correspondent for The New York Time5. She has reviewed restaurants, covered food industry trends, and written about the cultural politics of eating since joining the paper in 2018.
Ms. Harwell holds a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology from Barnard College and studied at the French Culinary Institute (now the International Culinary Center) for one semester before concluding that she “preferred to write about the performance of cooking rather than to perform it.” She previously wrote for Bon Appétit and Eater, where she gained attention for a series of reviews that were nominally about restaurants but were, by her own admission, “really about America.”
Her restaurant reviews are distinctive for their tendency to begin with a meditation on a broader theme — class, mortality, the nature of comfort — before arriving at the food, usually in the fourth or fifth paragraph. She has been criticized for this approach and has responded by noting that “a restaurant is a room where people go to enact their relationship with pleasure, and if you think that can be captured by describing the risotto, I cannot help you.”
Ms. Harwell lives in the West Village and dines out six nights a week, a schedule she describes as “fieldwork.”
Selected Reviews and Features
- A review of a Michelin-starred tasting menu that did not mention any specific dish until paragraph seven
- A 4,000-word feature on gas station coffee as “the last democratic food experience in America”
- A review of a fast-casual salad chain that became a widely shared essay on loneliness