So long, anonymity — it’s been swell. For nearly ten years now, I have done my job incognito. Now I am joining the ranks of no-longer-anonymous restaurant critics. Last Friday, I gave a lecture to the students and faculty of the Texas A&M Meat Science Center without the usual hat and sunglasses. I didn’t wear a disguise on Sunday when I appeared at the Texas Book Festival either. Soon you will be able to Google grainy photos of me to your heart’s content. I also have given my publishers an author’s photo to use for publicity.

So writes Robb Walsh, the no-longer-anonymous food critic for the Houston Press. He is the latest critic to shed his anonymity since the google-able Sam Sifton took over the job at the New York Times. Before that, professional food critics were expected to visit restaurants anonymously and indeed the presumption was that anonymity was required for a critic to provide a useful review. But there are arguments either way.

You might think that the job of a critic is to distinguish the great chefs from the merely good ones. A conspicuous critic would get special treatment and this biases the test. But as long as the critic (or the reader) accounts for this and can “invert the mapping,” essentially factoring out the extra effort, this is not really a problem.

We may only want a relative ranking of chefs and adding a constant to each chef’s baseline quality won’t change that.

Noise in the signal can complicate the inversion but this could go either way. One theory is that the effect of extra effort is to reduce variance in the quality of the dish. If so, a conspicuous chef gets a better signal. Alternatively it could be there is a uniform upper bound and any competent chef can hit that upper bound with enough effort. In this case, anonymity is required.

An anonymous critic generates other welfare gains. Every diner has a positive probability of being Ruth Reichl and so every diner gets a slightly better meal than otherwise. Once critics out themselves, we are all 100% nobodies again.

We may not care who is the most talented chef but instead we want to know where we (nobodies) are going to get the best meal. As long as these are sufficiently correlated, again not much is lost from going conspicuous. But in any event it is not clear that a single critic provides much more information about this than could be had from data on popularity alone. If we want critics to break herds, then they should be anonymous.

Maybe we want critics to start herds. Critics are most influential for tourists and locals prefer to avoid tourists. Conspicuous critics enable efficient market segmentation where restaurants wishing to cater to tourists give special treatment and get good reviews. A good review can destroy a restaurant that caters to locals so all parties benefit if the critic is conspicuous ensuring he is given a bad meal.

(Arising from conversations with Ron Siegel, Mike Whinston, Jeroen Swinkels, Eddie Dekel and Phil Reny.)