For nearly three decades, Yolanda Wright shared her views on the Central New York restaurant scene with readers of The Herald-Journal and The Post-Standard and, later, syracuse.com. She also welcomed those readers into her own kitchen to see what she could cook up on her own.
Wright died Friday in Syracuse after a long illness. She was 95.
Her 27-year career as the chief food writer and critic for The Post-Standard made her name, if not her face, well-known around the community. (Like many traditional restaurant reviewers, she avoided having her photo made public and did her best to keep her identity under wraps, even going so far as to make reservations for reviews under an assumed name).
She also taught journalism at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communication. She received the Career Achievement Award from the Syracuse Press Club in 2011, the year after she retired from writing for The Post-Standard.
In her reviews, Wright didn’t hold back if she thought something was amiss, and lavished praise where it was due.
When she retired in 2010, she began her farewell column this way:
“ ‘You have the best job in the world, getting paid to eat out.’ I couldn’t count the number of times people have said that to me. But I have to agree. It is a terrific job. But when your job requires you to be a close observer of what’s going on in a restaurant, you learn what a tough business it is, and I genuinely feel bad when a kitchen or waitstaff fails to deliver, and owners deserve sympathy. But so do customers spending hard-earned money on a night out.”
She earned the respect of those in the restaurant community. Chuck Pascale, who operated several local places over the years with his brother Neal, once observed that Wright made diners realize it was OK to send poor food back to the kitchen.
“Restaurants are not perfect institutions — there is always the human element,” Pascale said today. “What I admired about Yolanda is that she knew when a restaurant made a mistake but was always willing to go back and give it a second try. She really knew food, how it was cooked and had good culinary skills of her own.”
Her first review, of Nikki’s Restaurant in Mattydale, appeared on Feb. 6, 1983, in The Herald-Journal. She said Nikki’s was “nifty.” Her final review was of the Inn Between in Camillus, on Oct, 28, 2010.
“If you’ve never been here, imagine Oysters Rockefeller and Beef Wellington meeting knotty pine walls and a view out the window directly into a barn with horses and chickens,” she wrote of the Inn Between.
In all, she wrote 1,433 reviews.
Wright also put her cooking skills to to work in a series of features in the Post-Standard called “Yolanda’s Kitchen,” which featured her recipes accompanied by photos showcasing her food-styling abilities. They often appeared as big layouts in the newspaper’s food section.
She also filed occasional features for The Post-Standard on culinary travel, to places like Italy and Ireland.
In her farewell column, she noted some her favorite restaurants were already out of business at that time. They included Caroma, Walter White’s on Genesee Street in DeWitt, Barbuto’s, Grimaldi’s on Erie Boulevard, Kopp’s Canteen in Chittenango and the Poseidon on James Street. Three of her other favorites have disappeared since then, including Aunt Josie’s on North Salina Street, Hullar’s in Fayetteville and Pascale in the Hawley-Green neighborhood.
“Over the years, my mission never changed,” Wright once wrote. “To tell readers the truth about a dining experience we had.”
Services will be private, according to her husband, Jay Wright, who also taught at the Newhouse school.
Don Cazentre writes for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook.
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