Bethany Jean Clement

Bethany Jean Clement is a food critic at The Seattle Times who focuses on how restaurants, dishes and cookbooks reveal the people and cultures behind them. Her coverage blends clear, candid judgment with detailed storytelling, moving from long-running neighborhood spots and city-hall bakeries to international travel and influential cookbooks. She has written about food, restaurants and the cultures intrinsic to them for The Seattle Times since 2014, after earlier roles writing about food at Seattle Weekly and serving as restaurant critic and managing editor at The Stranger.

Restaurant reviews and hidden gems

Clement’s core work is restaurant criticism that treats each place as both a dining destination and a lived-in setting, paying close attention to atmosphere, service and practical details alongside the food itself. In a review of The Harvest Vine, she presents it as one of the city’s best restaurants that has been “hiding in plain sight for years,” and she reports on everything from Basque and Spanish plates and wine to noise level, accessibility and the presence of gender-neutral restrooms. Her coverage regularly highlights restaurants that have quietly built devoted followings, positioning them as essential parts of the local dining landscape rather than fleeting trends.

She often structures pieces around a focused quest, such as seeking out the city’s best chicken by eating “lots of chicken, all around town,” which allows her to compare multiple kitchens and styles while still delivering a clear recommendation. In conversation on a podcast about a bakery tucked inside Seattle’s city hall, she zeroes in on specific pastries worth seeking out, reinforcing her interest in off-the-beaten-path finds that reward close attention. Video features introducing her as a food writer underscore that her job is to eat across a thriving restaurant scene and translate those meals into accessible, opinionated guidance for diners.

Best eats roundups

Alongside individual reviews, Clement produces annual and periodic roundups that distill a year’s worth of eating into focused “best of” lists. In “11 best eats of 2022 from Seattle Times restaurant critic Bethany Jean Clement,” she curates standout dishes and places, emphasizing not just where to go but exactly what to order. Her “13 best dishes of 2025 in Seattle and beyond from our food critic” extends that scope, mixing local finds with notable plates from farther afield, and describing them with enough sensory detail—such as rice and peas with caramelized plantains, tangy escovitch vegetables and multiple sauces—that readers can picture the experience before they go.

These lists are structured as service pieces, with addresses, price information and brief context about each restaurant or dish. The selections reflect a broad range of cuisines and settings, from beachy jerk joints to limited-edition sushi collaborations, showing that her sense of “best” encompasses both technical excellence and emotional impact. For communications teams, this pattern signals that she is receptive to stories where a particular dish, collaboration or chef narrative can stand out within a crowded field of options.

Life of a food critic

Clement writes directly about the craft of criticism, making her process and standards part of her beat. In “How to become a restaurant critic,” she recounts how she came to her role writing about food at The Seattle Times, explaining that she built it through restaurant reviews and a broader body of food writing rather than a single formal path. A behind-the-scenes piece titled “Life of a food critic” shows her and a colleague reviewing the city’s trendiest openings, underscoring the balance between discovering imaginative food and maintaining consistent critical criteria.

She also addresses the emotional and ethical dimensions of negative coverage in “What it takes — and how it feels — to write a negative restaurant review.” That article lays out the work involved in visiting, evaluating and ultimately deciding to publish a critical assessment, and it conveys the weight she feels when her judgments impact an independent business. Public profiles and event bios describe her simply as a food critic for The Seattle Times whose writing has appeared in food-writing anthologies, reinforcing that she sees criticism as a long-term craft with responsibilities to both readers and the people she covers.

Travel and global food stories

Although most of Clement’s work centers on local restaurants, she also writes travel and global food features that connect faraway eating to her home coverage. In “A food writer eats her way around Vietnam,” she shares stories from what she calls one of the best places to eat on Earth, moving through street food, noodles and regional specialties. She closes that piece with concrete recommendations for Vietnamese restaurants back home—including Ba Bar, Dong Thap Noodles and Vietnam House—so readers can find echoes of that trip in their own city.

Her coverage of the Italian “Joy of Cooking” and the book that Marcella Hazan relied on shows the same impulse applied to culinary history, tracing how a foundational Italian cookbook shaped a generation of home cooks and cooking teachers.[anchor] By pairing these international and historical pieces with local guides, Clement positions food as a continuum: dishes served in contemporary restaurants are linked to specific traditions, books and journeys, and understanding those links deepens the experience of eating them. Whether she is profiling a classic Spanish restaurant, a city-hall bakery or a noodle shop with roots in Vietnam, the through-line is her interest in how food carries people, place and story into the dining room.