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We asked how they read menus, stay fit, eat at home and celebrate with their families.

By Jodi Rudoren

This morning, The Times announced that Tejal Rao and Ligaya Mishan are our new chief restaurant critics. It’s the first time the job is being shared by two people and the first time we’re not trying to hide their faces. Also, they will be filing full-length, starred reviews from around the country, not just New York City.

You can read more about how it will all work here. Tejal lives in Los Angeles, and joined The Times in 2016 after working as a restaurant critic at The Village Voice and Bloomberg News. Ligaya, who wrote our Hungry City restaurant column from 2012 to 2020 and has been an Eat columnist at the Times Magazine and a writer at large for T Magazine, is in Manhattan. I asked them about their early restaurant memories, how they read menus, what they eat at home and what scares them about the gig.