Gina Mallet

Career The work began in criticism, first at The Toronto Star in Toronto, then at Time Magazine, before moving into restaurant criticism at the National Post in Toronto. Gina Mallet’s path through stage, newsroom, and dining room trained the same habits a food critic needs: attention to performance, pressure for precision, and the discipline to describe what is actually there. By the time she turned to food writing, those tools had become a method for reading culture through taste, appetite, and memory.

The Climb

Born in the United Kingdom in 1938, Gina Mallet built her career in criticism before food became the subject that gave it its widest reach. Theatre criticism at The Toronto Star in Toronto required close reading of timing, tone, and live response; later work at Time Magazine broadened the frame; restaurant criticism at the National Post in Toronto brought that same eye to the table. The through-line is control of language and an insistence on specifics, with food eventually becoming the field where those skills could carry more weight.

Today

At the National Post in Toronto, restaurant criticism is the form that best fits Gina Mallet’s trained eye, where judgment is not separated from memory or context. Her writing treats the meal as more than a rating exercise: it tracks how standards shift, how taste is made and remade, and how dining can hold cultural memory without sentimentality. *Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World* widened that work into book form and brought it to a broader audience.

In Their Words “All food is memory and eating as a job aroused dormant feelings of loss over the way the taste of food had changed from the days when her family’s corner store was Harrods Food Hall in London.”

Recognition

Gina's honors include James Beard Award, Writing on Food (2005).