Devotees will eschew Zagat in favor of Grimes’s guidance, and attentive readers will remember his more personal, lighthearted piece about a chicken that mysteriously turned up in his Queens backyard one morning and started laying eggs. He turned the experience into a 2002 book called “My Fine Feathered Friend”; he is also the author of 2001’s “Straight Up or on the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail” (both from North Point Press).

But after eating out on his employer four to five nights a week since April 1999, Grimes, 53, is hanging up his gold card. His final column will run Dec. 31, after which he will stay on in another capacity at the Times. But, sorry fans, he won’t be doing anything food related. Previously a reporter for the Style section, he says he’s in the middle of discussions with the paper’s features editor about his next beat. Grimes recently spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Brian Braiker about being a powerful player in one of the truly great restaurant scenes, what he loves about his job and why he won’t miss obscure root vegetables.

NEWSWEEK: You are leaving the coolest job on the planet.

William Grimes: Well, yes and no. That’s the realistic answer. You’re dining at the best places in New York and somebody else is paying for it, and you don’t have to do what normal people do, which is look at the price side of the menu. You have to think about it for the benefit of the reader as an information point, but it’s never anything I need worry about. The downside is that you have to do that again and again and again. It’s like “Groundhog Day.” You wake up the next day having eaten a four-star meal, you must go out and eat another four-star meal. And you get up the next day and you have to go out and eat another four-star meal.

You’re not going to find a lot of people feeling sorry for you.

[Laughs] And on top of it nobody feels sorry for you. It’s impossible to gain sympathy.

And probably impossible not to gain weight.

Not for me. I’m genetically thin. And it’s funny, the majority of critics have been on the thin side.

So, why are you changing your beat?

You’ve only got so many meals in you as a critic. I think that when it becomes more of a job than a joy, then you have to think about putting down your knife and fork. I think it’s the nature of the job–you can only do a finite number of reviews. You see people hanging in there forever, and I don’t think it’s really very good actually. Some of them keep plugging away at it for decades and it shows. You should pick a good time, leave ’em wanting more. And there are a lot of exciting things going on at the paper, so the timing’s good. And also there’s been a sort of lull in restaurants because of the recession and I think that’s changing. It would be nice to let whoever’s going to do it next tackle it.

Obligatory question: What’s your favorite New York dining experience?

Well, I’ve had a lot of them. There’s no one single experience that just leaps out. If one went through the reviews, you’d see huge excitement over restaurants that caught me by surprise a little bit. Ilo was a restaurant like that. Maybe L’Impero in Tudor City. The chef [Scott Conant] had been at a good, but struggling, restaurant on the Bowery and then suddenly came into full glory at L’Impero and it was a big thrill to see him working at full strength. Ilo was another one where the beast was unleashed when this guy, Rick Laakkonen, got his own show. Town was another restaurant, with Geoffrey Zakarian. A lot of chefs got a lot of showcases for a couple of years there when the really good restaurants were coming hot and heavy. It was great to go out because you could see some of these people getting their big shot and really rising to the occasion, and a lot of those restaurants are still with us. I like to think I did my bit to sort of push it all along.

Do you ever feel that you have a special onus as a critic at the Times, like you can make or break a restaurant?

Well you can. It’s like a baseball player getting a big salary contract. You shouldn’t change the way you swing at the plate. You should put the contract out of your mind, step up and swing the way you always do. I think that’s the way with restaurant criticism. If you sit there and start sweating the fact that you’re writing for The New York Times and what the possible effect might be on everybody employed at the restaurant, you’ll just seize up and not be able to write the way you should write. At the same time, built into the job is the idea that you don’t just cavalierly and maliciously go after a restaurant for the pleasure of it because you do have the power to ruin people’s careers and lives. Ultimately you’re writing for the reader, you’re not writing to make restaurant owners happy. This is a truth that’s just not understood at all in the industry.

Even at the four-star restaurants?

I just think people who run restaurants believe that the press is there to praise them and help them sell their product. When you don’t do that they’re mystified. Since most of the food press does do that–simply acts as a cheering section for them–I think they’re baffled when they run into genuine, tough criticism.

How about a favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant?

My recent hole-in-the-wall restaurant has been The Chipper, which is just a fish-and-chips place on Queens Boulevard that was closed for a while because there was a fire on the block. I kinda like bad British food.

Did food play a big role in your life growing up?

Again, yes and no. Yes because I thought about it all the time and no because I didn’t get enough of it in either quantity or quality. I was one of six kids, you had to fight for your food. I would say emphasis was simply getting food on the table, not on a haute cuisine experience. So almost as a defensive reaction, I became intensely interested in food from an early age. I tried to make things, and would always dream of going out to restaurants and envied friends of mine whose parents took them to restaurants, which mine never did. I didn’t have an impoverished childhood; it’s just that average, middle-class families didn’t take their kids to restaurants those days. Especially with six kids.

Do you still cook?

I will now. It was a big part of my week and my wife, who’s actually much more expert than I am at cooking, that was a huge focal point of the week: planning and executing an ambitious meal. At this point I’m highly self-critical and realize that I could stand a lot of improvement.

Who are your favorite food writers?

Some of them happen to be dead. Elizabeth David–I had the pleasure, if you can say that, of writing her obit–has always been a favorite of mine. Marcella Hazan. Joseph Wechsberg, he was a guy who wrote back in the ’30s, a more cosmopolitan version of A. J. Liebling. You know who’s excellent on food who’s not normally thought of as a food writer? Peter Mayle, the guy who wrote those Provence books. I tend not to like foodie writers as much as I like writers who have a strong side interest in food. More the [New York Times’s] Johnny Apple type than the …

M.F.K. Fisher type?

Oh, M.F.K. Fisher I can’t abide. I find her a little precious.

What’s your biggest pet peeve at restaurants either on the wait-staff side or the customer side?

Oh, God–long list. I think on the wait-staff side, I would say the compulsive filling of the water glass whenever the level dips down by as much as a millimeter. Prolix explanations about the dish and its many, many, many ingredients is a little annoying. My pet peeve about fellow customers is that they dress horribly in restaurants where you should dress up a little bit. I hate the absolute collapse of dress code where you see complete nitwits walking into a four-star restaurant wearing a track suit and don’t have a clue that there’s anything wrong with that.

How many people do you take with you when you go out?

Four is the ideal size for me. I’ll take six. But I have to take a bite of everything and everybody has to order different dishes and I think it gets a little confused. And I find it hard to absorb that much information in the course of one evening. I’d rather make more visits with smaller parties.

If you’re trying to remain incognito then you must not be able to take notes at the table.

No. You can’t. Any waiter even mildly observant will see you doing it. You have to take the notes in your head and it helps if you’re talking aloud about the food because some of your own words will remain in your head and help you later on when you try to remember. It’s an aide memoire, as the French say.

Have you been recognized on the job?

Yeah, it happens. The more time goes on, the more likely it is you will be recognized because it’s a fluid labor market. The waiter who finally figured out who you were at the third visit to the previous restaurant suddenly shows up at the next restaurant you’re doing. Your cover is blown as soon as you walk through the door. If you can get away with one visit and they only figure out what’s what on the second visit, then you’re doing OK. A lot of restaurants, their head is not in that game. Particularly Italian restaurants, they seem to be the most oblivious of the playing field. Which is great.

So are we going to see what you look like now?

The [New York] Post already helped me out on that one when I first got the job by running an author photo of me from a book of mine that was out of print. They actually showed some journalistic hustle and went out and got the book. But, yeah, at the end of the year there’s no reason for going through the exercise of trying to hide and pretend I’m not who I am.

Do you ever go in disguises at all, then? Change your hair color?

At this late stage of the game I can say that I have done that and it’s effective. I hesitate to resort to it because if you go in and you’re recognized then you’re stuck sitting in your disguise feeling like a circus clown. It’s only in extreme circumstances. It’s a lot easier for women to work that line of things. I think people like the idea of that, but the reality is a little bit boring.

Do you ever run out of ways to describe food or tastes?

Yes. A fellow critic, Peter Marks, who is now at The Washington Post, said to me “the adjective is your best friend and your worst enemy.” Truer words were never spoken. The thing about taste, and this is a little technical, you can’t describe a taste directly. If I ask you to tell me what a cashew tastes like, the only thing you can really say to me is, “well, it tastes like a cashew.” For you to be able to communicate it, you have to start comparing it to other tastes that are known quantities. It all gets very repetitive because the storehouse of adjectives is fairly limited for describing tastes, so what you have to do is be fairly clever and figure out an end run around the problem. Usually metaphor is your savior.

Right. There are only so many ways to say something is “tangy.”

Yeah. And there are two words that I swore I would never use. These two cliches: One is “slathered” and the other is “studded.” I think I used studded once in a weak moment, but I kept to my campaign pledge; I didn’t use those two words. If you go through food writing, there’s these words that make you wince because you see them again and again and again.

Any food trends right now that you’re watching that you’re either excited about or make you cringe?

I’m excited about the increase of better Mexican restaurants and the opportunity to start specializing in specific regions of Mexico. There haven’t been enough Mexicans in New York to make that possible. That’s the No. 1 complaint of the L.A. people who come here: “Where is it? I can’t get it.” So they have to go back to Los Angeles to get good neighborhood Mexican restaurants. But immigration patterns have changed, and it’s really helping the cause. That’s one cuisine that New York has been lacking in.

There’s a trend a week as far as things that make you cringe. Like ever more obscure root vegetables or herbs. I’ve kind of gotten jaded about that; I can’t get angry about it each and every time. We went through a salsify phase. It was on every damn menu that you would see as the most wonderful root vegetable that was ever pulled out of the earth. There’s always going to be one because there’s a fashion aspect to food and you can’t blame chefs for wanting this season’s color.

Do you have any thoughts on the skyrocketing rates of obesity in this country?

Yeah, my thought is that you should eat less if you want to lose weight. I myself am thin, so I pay no attention whatsoever to diets. I try to eat as much as I can–every kind of food and all the time. I’m blessed by my genetic inheritance. If you look at the French, the French tend to be thin. I think the fact that you have these structured, regular meal times and you’re not stuffing your face 24 hours a day. If you think of the day as one unstructured mealtime, you’re going to be overweight.

Speaking of face-stuffing, what are your Thanksgiving plans?

I am going to eat with friends. It’ll be a home-cooked dinner. I don’t think Thanksgiving is really a good night to go out and have dinner. It’s kind of sacrilegious.