...a piece in Time "In Praise of the Endangered Restaurant Critic."

Some middle-aged guy isn't writing reviews for the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper few knew even had a restaurant critic. So what?...

When you like a critic, you trust his judgment not because he has a Doctor of Food Letters, although such things do apparently exist. He's proved himself over a long period. You know what he (or she [hey, thanks, Time!]) likes or dislikes... For that, the user reviews on Citysearch or Yelp are beyond useless—faceless and contradictory; and the same goes for the blogs. (The blogs at least sometimes take pictures.) So there, in that whirlwind of trends and fad ingredients and hype and backlash, are a few immense ancient trees, with sturdy roots and massive trunks to hew to...

I disagree about Citysearch and Yelp and Stranger reader-reviews: When you know how to read them carefully (sorting out the obvious shilling by owners/friends of owners, finding the meaningful writeups among the heaps of b.s., getting an overall impression), they can be useful to a degree. And with blogs, you can form an opinion of the food blogger and thus trust or mistrust them accordingly (though Seattle does not suffer from a superabundance of great ones).

And calling restaurant reviewers "immense ancient trees" to be clung to in a "whirlwind" isn't doing them any favors.

Here at The Stranger, food writing doesn't have giant budgets or delusions of grandeur. We're just trying to send you to good places to eat—cheap ones, pricier ones, all kinds of ones—and give you something good to read along the way. God help us.