Tom Sietsema’s most vivid memories growing up in the 1950s in Minnesota have to do with food. Specifically, his mother Dorothy’s cooking: homemade baked chicken with Tater Tots, bright red Jell-O parfait, and boiled carrots and pork chops. Dinner was served at 5:30 on the dot. Much of the time, they ate in front of the TV.
“My mom worked hard on every meal and meals were important to us,” Sietsema recently told City Paper over a three-course Italian meal at Claudio’s Table in Palisades. “We were so lucky.”
Sietsema has been eating food and writing about it for most of his adult life. And his reviews have been published for the past quarter century in the Washington Post. His longevity is perhaps due in part to his deft balancing of his Midwest-nice sensibility with harsh but fair criticism.
His 25-year tenure has eclipsed even his mentor and predecessor Phyllis Richman, who wrote food reviews for 23 years. But now, the man who is perhaps the Post’s most recognized local byline, is in uncharted territory.
The universe of unbiased food writers is steadily dwindling, and Sietsema stands atop the mountain alongside Craig LaBan, who advises diners for the Philadelphia Inquirer and is the only food critic in America at a big city daily who has been on the job longer than Sietsema.
Pete Wells, who had worked as the restaurant critic for the New York Times for the past 12 years, announced this week that he will be leaving the role soon, in part, for health reasons
“There are very few of us doing this job, and there will be even fewer still in the future,” LaBan says. “Tom really cares about this format and it shows.”
It certainly does. The question is whether enough readers will care in 20 years—hell, in five.
The rise of food influencers in the past decade presents an existential threat to Sietsema’s craft. His reviews are now up against millennials and Gen Zers who typically get comped meals, or if they have enough followers, are actually paid by the restaurant to post mouthwatering photos and glowing reviews.
The trade-off, then, is Sietsema’s careful, practiced, and honest approach in exchange for some pretty pictures on TikTok from some bro named Bruce.
Mia Svirsky, the spark behind @districteats is a popular local Instagrammer. She went to George Washington University and dabbled in marketing and public relations before turning her account into a successful and imitated social media powerhouse.
The 27-year-old Brookline, Massachusetts, native lives in Dupont Circle and gets much of her feedback from young people in the region who come to her as an authority on food experiences. She currently has 77,000 followers on Instagram; Sietsema has 14,000.
“Young restaurant goers are not looking at Tom’s reviews,” Svirsky says. “I bet you a majority of people 30 and under have no idea who Tom even is. I wish I read him more. … I open up TikTok every morning, but I don’t really read the Post.”
Svirsky says that she often gets DMs from marketers or new restaurants that will buy her a meal if she pays them a visit. It’s a trade-off: She gets a free meal, and the restaurant expects her to share a positive experience with her followers.
Sietsema is the opposite. He remains stubbornly anonymous, he never accepts a single bite or drink for free, and only he decides which restaurants to review. He’s also equally focused not just on big name chefs but modest places to eat in the suburbs where families might go to celebrate a birthday.
While Sietsema takes some photos of his plate, his focus is on the newspaper, not social media. (Most of his food photos in his reviews are taken by photographers who visit the restaurant separately.)
“Nothing against those people but that’s not my approach,” says Sietsema. “I am open to change and doing things in a different way. Meeting readers wherever they are. It will always be about food.”
“I think these platforms are going to have to bend to the audience,” Svirsky says.
The Post does not like to give out data on specific clicks or the popularity of an individual writer, and has declined to do so for Sietsema’s reviews. So it’s hard to gauge his readership and impact and how it might compare to an influencer. But his regular online chats with readers are often the most clicked items on those days, according to the Post’s website.
For his part, because of his anonymity, Sietsema avoids chasing anything that resembles fame. (He initially resisted talking with City Paper for this story.)
Sietsema says his ambition is “to be a trusted friend who happens to eat out a hell of a lot more than you do and is happy to share his opinion.”
Sietsema also reads a lot. He schedules his work weeks or months in advance, and he writes all of his activities down in a spiral bound notebook (his collection goes back decades), carefully taking note of what he plans to do and what he actually did.
He approaches each review with a strong sense of what’s right and wrong in dining: Is it too noisy? Was the waitstaff intrusive? Can you get a table? How much will it cost you? And he is constantly reassessing. He will dine out 10 or more times a week, and typically makes multiple visits to a single restaurant before writing a review. He often will take one or two bites of food and push the plate out of the way so as not to fill up.
“I used to salt deserts to avoid eating too much, but now I just move it away and take down my notes,” he says.
Sietsema is careful to avoid cameras and always books reservations using an alias. But after 25 years in this town, his identity isn’t exactly a secret.
“Some of the people in the restaurant business know him. They have photos of him in the kitchen,” says former Post Style writer Jura Koncius, who has frequently joined Sietsema for meals while he works.
Koncius, his closest friend at the Post until she took a buyout last winter, wrote about design and interiors for 47 years and says Sietsema’s stylish dress reminds her of formal Eastern European men from a generation ago. “He’s just a consummate gentleman. Maybe it’s his Midwestern roots but he is unfailingly polite,” Koncius says.
A middle child who grew up in Worthington, Minnesota, Sietsema was in thrall of his mother’s ability to host and entertain in a modest home on Lake Okabena.
His father, a Marine who fought in World War II, was awarded a Purple Heart but was much less emotive. “He was of that time,” Sietsema says, adding that his father still had a creative side. Elwin Sietsema worked as a studio photographer in their town when he returned from Japan. He died in 2007; Sietsema remains close to his mother, Dorothy, who still lives in Minnesota and has cooked meals with her son for Post stories. Sietsema also has an older sister and younger brother.
Sietsema went to Georgetown University and graduated in 1983 from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He landed an entry-level job as a copy aide at the Post where he sorted mail and answered the phone.
From there, he worked at a variety of media outlets—first at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He even worked briefly at Microsoft (writing for Sidewalk.com) before returning to the Post in 2000.
Since then, Sietsema has ventured far and wide. “I wanted to be a food critic, not just a restaurant critic,” he says. So in the heady days after Jeff Bezos bought the paper, and journalists were encouraged to “think big,” Sietsema had the notion, around 2015, of traveling the entire country to taste and write about food.
“My editor encouraged me to spend a year traveling the country and writing about food. I did this deep dive across the country,” Sietsema says. “At the time Portland, Oregon, was number one. So much variety and fresh ingredients. They have hundreds of different types of mushrooms.”
Over the years, Sietsema has eaten all over the world, from Cambodia to Peru, memorably wrote about the eating habits of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and documented life as a dishwasher.
Sietsema’s introduction to Bezos was memorable, as he was invited to a private party for senior Post editors and writers at Barmini (Bezos rented it out for the night). José Andrés himself brought out each course, and Sietsema found himself sitting next to Bezos, who, despite his high-end tastes, was happy to chat about Arby’s, milkshakes, and pizza parties for his children.
Shortly after, Sietsema was approached by Bezos with a request for the right places to dine in Paris. Sietsema obliged and sent a few recommendations via email.
Bezos and other Post executives and editors are not the only ones who check what Sietsema has to say about restaurants. Andrés also loves reading Sietsema’s reviews.
“When Tom started, Jaleo was still one of the few restaurants in Penn Quarter, when I was a much younger man. So much was different in D.C.,” Andrés says. “In many ways, his journey is like that of D.C. dining, changing and evolving year to year. What I love most about Tom is not just how he celebrates the restaurants of today but how deliberate he is in recognizing those of the past as well.”
Sietsema acknowledges that readers are changing, and he won’t do this forever. At some point, he says, might write a book about childrens’ recipes.
“One thing that’s hard is you can’t ever attach an asterisk to the column that says, ‘Sorry, I’ve had a bad week,’” Sietsema says.
One tidbit for the road:
Worker-led, But Will It Work?
A group of six journalists who were laid off when WAMU killed DCist has banded together to form a nonprofit news website that will cover the District with original reporting and tidbits about events and community resources.
“We believe journalism is a public good and everyone should have access to it,” says Abigail Higgins, one of six co-founders of the site. The other co-founders are: Colleen Grablick, Eric Falquero, Maddie Poore, Natalie Delgadillo, and Teresa Frontado.
The 51st aims to begin publishing after Labor Day if they can raise $250,000 by Aug. 16; an online fundraiser had surpassed $160,000 in donations by publication. The co-founders say they’re looking to raise another $250,000 via philanthropic contributions to sustain the venture for the first year.
The 51st will exist in three places: a website, a weekly newsletter, and periodic public meetings, where reporters will hunt for news tips and look to establish credibility with communities; the first two events take place this weekend in Congress Heights and Dupont Circle.