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Eating For A Living

So you want to be a food critic? The job specifications are, to say the least, pretty weird.

You must love disguises, phony names and be able to eat out 13-14 meals a week, CBS News correspondent Martha Teichner reports.

Restaurant critics didn't really exist before 1900, when the Michelin tire people in France, hoping to encourage driving and therefore sell more tires, started putting out little guidebooks telling people about good places to buy gas, eat and stay.

Michelin started the star system and is famously stingy about awarding them to restaurants. Earlier this month, when the first New York Michelin guide appeared, only four chefs received three stars, the top rating. All except one of them, surprise, surprise, were French.

Duncan Hines, yes, as in cake mix, put together the first American restaurant guide. He was a traveling salesman who began compiling a list of the good restaurants he discovered on the road.

And thanks to the late New York Times food editor, Craig Claiborne, virtually every big city newspaper has a restaurant critic.

As he readies his disguise, complete with glasses better suited for a 1970s reporter, restaurant reviewer Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post says he only goes undercover maybe three times per month.

"You don't want the disguise to get in the way of the story and the reporting and the review, Sietsema says, adding, "but, no. I know what it's like to go to a big deal restaurant and drop $200 and feel as if you didn't get your money's worth."

As chief food critic for The New York Times, Ruth Reichl managed to spend more than $150,000 a year of her newspaper's money, eating out.

"It's very hard if you're a restaurant critic for an important paper not to have the restaurateurs looking out for you and ya know trying to roll out the red carpet when you walk in," Reichl explains.

These days, as editor of Gourmet magazine, she dines as herself, but in the six years she reviewed restaurants for the Times, she turned the need to eat incognito into full-blown costume drama.

In "Garlic and Sapphires," she recalls the collection of characters she created to deceive restaurateurs.

For her very first Times review, she shamed one of New York's most famous restaurants by writing about the difference between eating there as an unknown and as a favored patron.

Reichl's rules, standard among top critics: eat in a restaurant at least three times anonymously and never take freebies.

And there's the restaurant owners.

Drew Nieporent owns or co-owns a dozen highly-rated restaurants in New York, San Francisco, London, and Martha's Vineyard.

"It's an elaborate cat and mouse game," Nieporent admits of the duel between owners and critics.

Asked if a bad review could put a restaurant out of business, Nieporent was clear: "Yes. Absolutely."

Yet Nieporent adds that "I'm the last person to complain because there's a moment in time in my career, in essence, was created because of an unbelievable New York Times review 20 years ago."

For restaurants, if professional food critics aren't enough of a worry, there are the self-appointed ones. The Zagat's surveys rate restaurants based on the shared wisdom of something like a quarter of a million actual diners.

And now if you're really into food democracy, there are all kinds of Web sites and blogs. The biggest, a whopper called chowhound.com that's got 800,000 people a month trading their food enthusiasms online; people who need not subject themselves to the occupational hazards of the pro.

"I spend 40 hours a week at a table -- that doesn't count writing, but 40 hours a week at a table, just sitting, eating. It's odd," Sietsema says.

And that's not all. It's fattening.

Lifting weights and doing cardio workouts are a must for Sietsema.

"I can sort of gauge, 'Oh, I've run the equivalent of a glass of wine or a piece of pie," he says laughing.

But Sietsema also thinks of it another way, as any dedicated restaurant critic would: by the time he's through on the treadmill, he'll be all set for his next meal.

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