Tejal Rao
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| Born | 1982 or 1983 (age 40–41)
London, United Kingdom
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| Education | Emerson College (BA)[1] |
| Alma mater | Emerson College |
| Occupation(s) | Restaurant critic, recipe developer |
| Employer(s) | The Village Voice, New York Times, Bloomberg L.P. |
| Website | www |
Tejal Rao (born 1982 or 1983)[2] is a restaurant critic, recipe developer and writer based in Los Angeles.[3] In 2018, she was named the first California restaurant critic for The New York Times.[3] In 2021, she was named editor of the New York Times subscription cooking newsletter The Veggie.[4]
Rao was born in London, but spent time in Kuwait, Sudan, and France during her youth before settling in Cobb County, Georgia as a teenager.[5] Rao's mother was born in Uganda and her father was raised in India.[citation needed]
Rao attended Emerson College, where she earned a BA in literature.[5]
In 2012, Rao joined The Village Voice as a food critic.[6] In 2013, Rao won the James Beard Foundation’s Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award for her work for The Village Voice.[7]
In 2014, Rao joined Bloomberg as a food editor and restaurant critic.[8] In 2016, she won the James Beard Foundation’s Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award once again, this time for her work at Bloomberg.[9] In the same year, Rao joined the New York Times as a food department staff writer and monthly columnist for its magazine.[10] In 2018, she was named the New York Times' first California restaurant critic, to better serve the growing number of New York Times readers in the state.[3] In 2021, Rao was named the New York Times writer for the vegetarian recipe newsletter The Veggie.[4]
Rao has also contributed to a range of other publications, such as The Atlantic, Edible, and Gourmet, among others.[5]
In December 2020, she contracted COVID-19 and lost her sense of smell. She used smell therapy to regain it over the course of two months.[11][12] She lives in Los Angeles.[13]
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