Tom Sietsema: Mysterious Cuisine Connoisseur, Yet Midwestern Everyman

Even after rarefied dining experiences, Hershey’s chocolate remains one of Tom Sietsema’s favorite foods.

There are no recognizable photographs of Tom Sietsema online.

“I’m always stepping out of family photos,” Sietsema, the Washington Post food critic, said, laughing. “No one’s gotten a picture with me for forty years.”

For the past twenty-two years, Sietsema has dined out for ten meals a week at an array of Washington restaurants. He has won an award for his ranking of the ten best food cities in America. He is so renowned in Washington that restaurants have figured out his aliases. 

When picturing a food critic, the image of Ratatouille’s Anton Ego immediately comes to mind – a black-clad figure with a snobbish trademark scowl. Sietsema defies this stereotype – he has laugh creases around his eyes and speaks with a hint of an affable Midwestern drawl. He wore a black cap over his head, perhaps to maintain his anonymity.

Sietsema hails from Worthington, Minnesota, a farming town with a population of less than ten thousand. There, he was exposed to his two future passions: food and journalism. 

Sietsema’s mother, a nurse, excelled at whipping up Minnesota staples like hot dish (“a can of mushroom soup, tater tots, and something else,” he recalled) 

“We didn’t have a lot of what we then called ethnic food,” he said. 

But Sietsema’s parents encouraged him to expand his taste buds by trying Minneapolis restaurants and eating dinner at a Vietnamese friend’s house. Another neighbor was the editor of the Worthington Daily Globe, where Sietsema worked as a janitor during his teenage years.

Sietsema studied international relations at Hamline University in St. Paul, but transferred to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service after falling in love with D.C. during an exchange program.

After college, he covered elections for the Chicago Sun Times. Sietsema remembered one pivotal spring day in 1981 where he delivered batteries to a reporter at the hospital where Ronald Reagan was treated after his assassination attempt. He left with a quote from Nancy Reagan’s press secretary.

“It was the coolest gig ever,” he said. “I got to witness history.”

After that, Sietsema tested recipes for the Washington Post’s food editor “to get out of answering phones.” He learned how to cook and broadened his palate to include gumbo and African peanut stew.

After stints at the San Francisco Chronicle and at Microsoft, Sietsema returned to the Post in 2000. His first food reviews were “naïve,” in his words, as he reviewed Thai cuisine for the first time but could only describe it as “good.”

Using authentic travel experiences as a guide, he perfected his four-star rating system“You develop a new set of standards for chicken at a French restaurant when you try chicken in France,” he said. 

Sietsema typically samples a wide range of a restaurant’s menu with a diverse group of friends. Later, he returns to check for consistency. Then he crafts his review with the goal of earning his readers’ trust in his opinions.

“I don’t want people to waste their money at a restaurant that’s not worth it,” he said, citing the popular Founding Farmers as an example of an overrated establishment.

A select few restaurants have earned a vaunted four-star review from Sietsema, but he reevaluates them every year to ensure they maintain quality.

“Some restaurants expect to get it over and over because they’re famous,” he said.

Even after dining at inventive and trendy restaurants, Sietsema admits to preferences for cheap food and childhood favorites like Hershey’s chocolate.

“I give four stars to mom-and-pop places too. It’s important to review the whole of what’s out there, not just French food,” he said.

“When you share a bit about yourself in your work, people appreciate it and see where you’re coming from. They relate to you instead of thinking you’re pretentious,” he added.

Even though he reveals this, Sietsema does not plan on unmasking himself when he retires.

“I want to remain mysterious,” he said.