Evident from the endless posts from self-proclaimed foodies on the Internet, the topic of food is a predominant one in the blogosphere.

Then there are others who are not self-proclaimed, but credible in their knowledge of food and dining. Sure, many turn to dining at Dean Fearing’s restaurant or watching Giada De Laurentiis’ cooking show, but many Dallasites go to the Guide section of the Dallas Morning News (DMN) to see the latest restaurant review.

Very few would recognize her walking on the street or even dining in a restaurant. Forget trying to find her on a reservation list—it’s a guarantee she doesn’t have her name on it.

Leslie Brenner, restaurant critic and dining editor at the DMN, spends at least five evenings dining out. Dining from restaurant to restaurant, Brenner keeps her identity unknown, using different names and carefully keeping her face off the Internet. Her seemingly clandestine life is necessary for her to review restaurants without owners or chefs giving her a privileged dining experience.

However, this life of dining and writing wasn’t what she always envisioned.

“I remember saying to my husband, ‘I will never ever ever ever ever be a restaurant critic,'” Brenner said.

The now restaurant critic originally went to Stanford. After working a few years in Hollywood on a TV show, she felt she didn’t love the town. New York was next on her list, as she pursued graduate school at Columbia for fiction writing.

However, her love for food had already been developing as she spent time in California and grew up with a mother who cooked.

“When I was at Stanford, it was the late ‘70s,” she said. “It was really kind of the heyday of California cuisine.”

Now, as an editor at the DMN, Brenner aims to provide reviews that are both informative and engaging.

“The most difficult thing about restaurant reviewing, if you have a restaurant review, is knocking one out every week that is going to be fun to read,” she said. “I think one of the main objectives of a restaurant review—or really, any kind of criticism—is that it needs to entertain the reader.”

Brenner portrays her opinion through both her restaurant reviews and her “Table Talk” column, which discusses food trends.

The food critic explained the necessity of giving the reader a vicarious experience through the writing, as many of the reviewed restaurants are expensive.

“There are a lot of readers who read them and say, ‘OK, I’m reading this review to decide whether to go and spend my hard-earned money at this restaurant,’ but there are a lot of other readers who just want to learn what it’s like,” she said.

Of course, through this vicarious experience comes the final decision of whether or not the restaurant is worth its price tag. For Brenner, the final opinion of the restaurant can play a significant role in her writing.

“It’s way easier to write an entertaining negative review than it is to write and entertaining positive review. Because when a restaurant is terrible, there are often really funny things that happen,” she said. “When something hilarious happens, it’s a gift. It’s a gift to the writer.”

While Brenner has heard that many consider her to be hyper critical of dining establishments, she is firm in her opinions.

“I think that I have high standards and I think that’s my job,” she said. “If somebody’s going to decide, ‘OK, I’m going to go out and spend $200 on this meal,’ that’s their hard-earned money.”

It’s because of this mentality that Brenner may come across as harsh in her critiques.

“I don’t see a point in giving a restaurant a pass when service is bad or the cooking is sloppy. There’s no point to that,” she said.

Brenner recently wrote on the physical effects of being a restaurant critic, and how she lost nearly 30 pounds while still savoring and reviewing.

“When you eat in a restaurant, how do they make the food taste good? Often, they put tons of butter in it, or tons of really fattening things,” she said.

For someone like Brenner who eats out at least five nights a week and numerous lunches out, it was almost easy for her to put on “quite a bit of weight” when she moved to Dallas. She bumped her daily workout from 30 minutes a day and pursued what she calls “the Restaurant Critics’ Diet”

“It’s extremely demanding on your body to eat like that, so that’s part of it. I don’t know if I could do it forever,” she said. “It’s demanding in a lot of ways, but it’s really fun.”

The critic, who is now fairly petite, does not have a favorite food of any kind. If you ask her this, she mulls it over before saying, “I just love food.”

She can, however, quickly answer the foods that she avoids: kidneys, hearts and bananas.

Brenner has traveled seemingly all over the world, acquiring the knowledge for various cuisines and the cultures surrounding them. Her “weak spot” in her food knowledge, as she puts it, is Korean food.

“The best critics I know have that really broad and deep knowledge—they call cook—and they all have experience with a lot of different cuisines.”

In 2010, Brenner received criticism for her “Best of DFW: Barbecue” list, which had a few overlapping locations of hole-in-the-wall barbecue joints with Daniel Vaughn’s list in D Magazine. According to a blog post on Side Dish from Nancy Nichols, local bloggers accused Brenner of taking the list, demanding that she apologize to Vaughn or list her sources. Nichols continues, saying that Vaughn did the “footwork” for the reporting, while Brenner has a list that “reads like a breezy, unranked rip-off of Vaughn’s work in D Magazine.”

Brenner’s report also includes an error that Bartley’s B-B-Q smokes its meat with oak wood, which is an error that D Magazine, and only D Magazine, published, according to Nichols.

Despite all of the publicity at the time, Brenner feels that the incident did not alter her reputation as a food critic.