Ask the Critic: S. Irene Virbila

Question: How do you decide which restaurants to review?

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Virbila: We cover such a wide area and such a broad spectrum of types of restaurants that it’s sometimes very tough to decide.

Our first order of business is to cover significant new restaurant openings, because that’s news. As soon as a new restaurant opens, I’ll write a first impression of it as a Critic’s Notebook in Calendar Weekend. Full reviews run in the Wednesday Food section. As much as we’d like to, we can’t do a full review of every new restaurant. We have only 52 slots a year.

What I review is based first of all on what’s new and then on what interests me for a variety of reasons. It could be because the chef has a track record, because the menu offers something we haven’t seen before or because the concept breaks new ground for L.A. From time to time, I’ll take a look at older restaurants, particularly if the chef or the format has changed, or if the quality of the food has gone up or down, in order to keep our reviews up to date as much as possible.

Other than that, I try to get in a mix of cuisines, styles and neighborhoods. But any restaurant I review outside metropolitan Los Angeles has to be something of a destination restaurant. I wouldn’t do a neighborhood restaurant in Simi Valley, for example, or an average pizza joint in West L.A. But I would do a great Lebanese restaurant or a terrific spot for dim sum.

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