Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

i agree with Linda. I just tried Balthazar's baguette and it was NOT good.
Highly disappointing, in fact.

My favorite restaurant “critic” is the Zagat guide. While the consumer-based surveys are not sophisticated, they give me a sense of the restaurant’s food, service and atmosphere. I’ve consistently found their reviews to be on target and I like being able browse by ratings, top lists and location. Whenever I travel, I use the Zagat guides to orient me to the restaurant scene and give me ideas of places to try and places to avoid. Everything I want is accessible, easily read, easy to interpret, relatively trust worthy, and is contained in one very portable little red book.

I’d like to mention a food writer who has set higher standards for fearless honesty in the medium I work in, the internet. In Regina Schrambling I trust. She knows how to cook and it shows. She’s not afraid to call out a naked emperor when PR flacks are trying to sell us new clothes. She answers the simple question those of us who don’t have bottomless expense accounts ask: Will I go back? No florid sycophantism, no tenuous metaphors, just a sense of place, service, and taste in a pithy package.

Calvin Trillin’s writing on food, travel, culture and life make me feel a personal connection to him and his subject matter. His infectious enthusiasm is endearing, and his command of the language gives his writing authority and clarity.

Although Trillin’s accomplishments are enviable, he never condescends. He projects a warmth and trustworthiness that make him convincing and thought-provoking. And besides feeling that it would be a privilege to know him (his dedication to his late wife, Alice, and his three daughters is inspiring), the idea of going to a restaurant that he particularly liked is just plain exciting.

Jonathan Gold is:

Versatile. Reviewed art, music, and architecture in past critical incarnations.

Nuanced. Delves deeply into regional cuisines and discusses the impact of agriculture and economics on cooking.

Virtuosic. Reviews have visceral immediacy: blowfish like a “treacherous, iridescent flower,” a “seething, volcanic mass” of tofu, “garlic-reeking Alps" of short ribs.

Entertaining. You can read “Counter Intelligence,” his anthropology of L.A. foodways, like a book of short stories.

Intrepid. If the health department closes a restaurant, he’s probably eaten pig uterus, goose intestines, or crispy frog skin there.

Indefatigable. Who else would eat at every Pico Boulevard restaurant?

Jeff Steingarten, author of “The Man Who Ate Everything” and “It Must’ve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything” is a star among contemporary food writers. Jeff indulged his obsession with food by giving up a law career and becoming a food critic. He is the winner of numerous awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Jeff approaches food writing with discipline and gluttony, and his writing is entertaining, thought-provoking, authoritative and witty. Jeff has been called our most original investigative food writer and I could not agree more.

- Pam@erogers.net

There's one more criterion I'd like to add to your list: infallibility. In other words, if you follow the writer's advice, are you ever likely to have a bad meal?

By that measure, in my experience -- and I've followed his taste recommendations in both New York and San Francisco, in high-end restaurants as well as holes-in-the-wall -- the best food writer I know of is Ed Levine.

It isn't sucking up if it's true.

Self-proclaimed love child of James Beard and Julia Child, Jim Harrison brings a poet's voice to food writing filtered through the lens of a writer of screenplays. He describes his meals with an almost mysticism as he hunts game birds in the woods near his Michigan home and prepares them utilizing classic French technique or dining at the top restaurants in LA and NY on the movie studio's dime. Sharing the gourmand's disease with him , i.e. gout, he made me laugh and cry when he mourns about having "one foot in the grave" (technically one toe) after overindulging.

-Guttergourmet

I didn't grow up in a home with gormet cooking, nor did I grow up in a metropolis with an abundance of delicious resaurants to choose from. Alas, I grew up in the western Sierra Nevada, in a small mountain town, with my Mom who was a single mother, and worked two jobs. Her busy schedule kept her from long stints in the kitchen and lead her straight to the quick and easy meals. Perhaps that is what sent me nose first into a pluthera of cook books. I will never forget my first encounter with "The Silver Palate," it was not only a spiritual awakening but it was when I first found out that not everything is cooked in a crock pot. After that I have been on what some would call a pilgrimage to learn, see, experience, and taste everything that involves food. This is where I have come across Anthony Bourdain, Ruth Riechel, and Jeffery Steingarten, and I have to say, that I have been truely inspired by Mr. Steingarten. I promise I am not sucking up, I don't even want to win, I just wanted to put in my two cents. His honesty and sincereity are inspiring, and who knows more about single ingredients than he? His writings have sent me into numerous amounts hunger fits. My newest food fantasy involves a long Steingarten tour of Eurpoe, stopping at all the restaurants and B&B's he speaks so highly of, and then to come home with a waist wider than my smile. His hours spent perfecting recipies in the kitchen shows exactly how dedicated he is to his job. He always leaves me wanting more, and that is, after all, the job of any food critic, restaurant, and/or chef.

My favorite is Tom Fitzimmons of New Orleans

A.A. Gill - London restaurant critic. I despaired of finding any food critic who could write with style and didnt have a pretentious bone in their body. Someone who would be the Ebert of food writing. On a trip to London I discovered A.A. Gill. I used him to guide my dining choices on the trip and have kept up with his work as much as I can. I've never been misled. I know from the reviews if I want to go to the restaurant. All wrapped up in humor.

The nasty boy of critics, Anthony Bourdain, deserves a vote for his punk rock, balls to the wall approach to restaurant criticism. He has made me cringe while he describes eating a still beating cobra's heart in southeast Asia, made me envious as he poetically described his zen-like meal at Masa and cracked me up by being the first (after George Orwell) to bring his readers into the bowels of the restaurant kitchen.

-Guttergourmet