‘I’ll always be a foodie.’ News & Observer restaurant critic Greg Cox retires after 25 years
For more than two decades, News & Observer dining critic Greg Cox has sought answers to the most vital and basic question there could be about a place: What’s good to eat around here?
Quite a bit, Cox found, as his 25-plus years of weekly restaurant reviews and columns chronicled the Triangle coming into its own as a restaurant region.
With a global pandemic halting dining as we once knew it, and having turned 65, Cox has decided to retire as the N&O’s food critic, leaving a legacy of wit and taste and a broad portrait of the Triangle’s rich restaurant community. In hundreds of reviews and columns, Cox wrote more as a diner’s friend than a kingmaker.
“When I sit down for a meal, I’ve always wanted them to succeed,” Cox said. “If you’re not excited about it, I don’t know why you’d be a restaurant critic.”
Since his first review June 9, 1995, he has spent his career searching for new restaurants to love and stories worth telling.
“He is someone who is everything that is good about someone who loves food, without any of the snobbery or pomp or pretension that people sometimes identify with food critics or the food world,” said Andrea Reusing, the acclaimed chef and owner of Lantern and The Durham restaurant.
“To him, mom-and-pop places are as exciting as any fine dining,” Reusing said. “He was an early and influential advocate for the idea that the food that people make can have an incredible impact in an emotional way, whether it’s a taco or a multi-coursed tweezered experience.”
Though his name is known, as well as his preference for shellfish towers and French food, much of Cox remains a mystery, particularly his face. Cox retires as one of the dwindling few anonymous restaurant critics left in the country.
The myth and the man
Cox grew up in Asheboro, eating most meals from the family’s garden, with the occasional trip to town for barbecue or an all-the-way hamburger. He first collided with the larger food world through old issues of Gourmet magazine, captivated, he said, by restaurant reviews in New York or Los Angeles or far flung towns in Europe.
“I found a kind of vicarious experience in reading those things,” Cox said. “Where I grew up, there was none of that. That got me into food.”
After graduating from Duke, he traveled to Europe, discovering the food of the world wasn’t so far from home. He connected French offal and steak and kidney pies to the joy of hogs brains and scrambled eggs and livermush sandwiches after school.
“I loved all that; it was never weird to me,” Cox said. “Then in France, all you wanted was world-class cheese, a baguette and a bottle of wine. Even as a student I could afford it and I was struck by this incredible, good, simple thing: the way butter tastes.”
The critic
Cox came to the News & Observer in 1995, hired as an every-other-week restaurant critic, a job that escalated into weekly reviews, columns, news stories and coveted best-of guides. He said he set out to talk about restaurants the way diners do with their friends.
“I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid,” Cox said. “Not just throw out the facts, but tell a story. I was always fascinated with people and the stories behind their restaurants and felt like other people would be interested in those stories too.”
Food critics can sometimes revel in snark and takedowns, but Cox found the bashing review a waste of one of his 52 reviews a year, he said. That doesn’t mean he loves every restaurant, just that readers don’t usually hear about the ones to avoid.
“The first thing people have to understand is that Greg is a very nice guy,” said Andrea Weigl, the longtime N&O food writer who currently works as a producer on Vivian Howard’s PBS series “Somewhere South.”
“Unlike in larger markets, where critics might revel in being scathing, that’s not Greg’s style,” Weigl said. “But if you were a longtime reader, you knew when he didn’t like a place.”
Cox’s voice is distinctively Southern, deep and warm, a voice made for radio, perhaps, though he chose a life behind a pen.
That voice was often the only way chefs could connect the name and the man, as Cox would always call the restaurant while working on a review, asking questions about certain dishes and culinary decisions. Sometimes for smaller, lesser-known restaurants — the hidden gems he reveled in highlighting — Cox would call with a warning ahead of a gushing review, letting owners know they were about to be busy.
“You would look forward to and fear, in equal parts, that phone call from Greg,” said Reusing, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2011.
Cox honored both of Reusing’s restaurants as Restaurants of the Year — Lantern in Chapel Hill in 2009 and The Durham in 2017.
Cox guarded his anonymity using pseudonyms to make reservations or pay by credit card. He said the ability to hide in plain sight made it more likely his meal could represent the average diner.
Once while reviewing an Italian restaurant in Durham, Greg Cox feared the owner might recognize his face. So he made a reservation for Halloween night, and he and his dining companions showed up in costume, dressed for dinner as a clown, a witch and a skeleton.
In the days before Instagram and Yelp, Cox was the only encyclopedic collection of the last few decades of Triangle dining.
“There was no better-educated diner,” Weigl said. “I loved calling him up, because he had notes that went back decades on restaurant owners and chefs and locations. ... He used to chat up construction workers like a beat reporter.”
Cox’s impact
Often, Cox would uncover something new, something he thought not enough people knew about. In 2009, Cox drove outside the immediate Triangle area to visit chef Vivian Howard’s Kinston restaurant Chef & The Farmer. The result was one of the restaurant’s first major reviews, with Cox bestowing it 4 1/2 stars (out of 5) and calling it an “urbane jewel.”
“I realize there’s no way a mere paragraph or two can do the restaurant justice,” he wrote then. “Chef & the Farmer is much more than just a stopover. It’s a worthy destination in its own right, well worth the hour and a half drive from the Triangle.”
Without it, she has said, there may not have been enough interest in rebuilding after the restaurant’s devastating fire, or for the award-winning PBS show, “A Chef’s Life” that chronicled Howard, her restaurant and the ingredients that define North Carolina cooking.
The next year, Cox may have contributed to kicking off the current bounty of great pizza shops in the Triangle.
In 2010, Cox wrote as loving a review for a pizza joint as you’re likely to find, giving Cary pizzeria Bella Mia a four-star review. Before the review came out, the restaurant was dead most nights, said Anthony Guerra, who made the pizzas with his brother, Louis, at the restaurant owned by his father, Rick Guerra.
Anthony Guerra said it was so dead some nights, they would send a bartender to a nearby Bonefish Grill, where they’d talk up the great pizza shop around the corner. It didn’t work.
Cox didn’t set out to play the role of savior; he just wanted coal-fired pizza. At the time, he wrote, the closest oven of that sort, the kind needed to reach 900 degrees and blister a dough in a couple minutes, was New York or Connecticut. He liked what he found, declaring Bella Mia not only the best pizzeria in the Triangle, but he later named it Restaurant of the Year in 2011.
“He truly saved the restaurant,” Guerra said. “We were dying when he wrote that review, and it changed the entire restaurant. It went from nobody came in to people waiting an hour-and-a-half.”
Bella Mia has since closed, and Guerra now owns and operates Oakwood Pizza Box on Person Street in Raleigh. (Cox gave Oakwood “4 pepperonis” in an exploration of new downtown pizzerias.)
“What Greg does, he comes in and gives you a fair shake,” Guerra said. “He’s not Pete the Punisher (Pete Wells of the New York Times), but he’s not too easy. He made a comment about the way we do our onions that stuck with me. I figured it out and changed them and that’s because of him.”
An evolving dining scene
The Triangle is a better, more diverse place to eat these days than when Cox first started writing about it in 1995. Where once there were just a couple of Indian restaurants, Cox said, there’s a restaurant or at least a dish from every region in India. There are now at least a half-dozen pizzerias turning out pies as good as those he loved at Bella Mia, Cox said.
“The variety of different cuisines has exploded in the last 25 years,” Cox said. “The Triangle punches above its weight. We have such an international population. The education is higher, the travel and dining experience of people is higher….No wonder this place is a magnet for really talented chefs.”
Though his byline will appear less regularly, Cox expects little else will change in his relationship with restaurants. Once the pandemic subsides and dining rooms return to their bustling selves, Cox said he’ll be out there, as hungry as ever.
“I was a foodie before I was a critic,” Cox said. “I’ll always be a foodie.”
This story was originally published November 2, 2020 at 5:54 AM with the headline "‘I’ll always be a foodie.’ News & Observer restaurant critic Greg Cox retires after 25 years."
