Won't You Help the New York Times' New Food Critic Come Up with a Disguise?
Despite a careful scrubbing of the New York Times' website, photos of the paper's new restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, are all over the Internet. The man needs a way to visit restaurants undetected, stat.
Before the Internet, the Times sought to keep their food critics anonymous, so that they could get an unbiased sampling of the food and service they were reviewing. This led to one of those silly-but-fun media games where Xeroxed photos of the major food critics would be passed among restauranteurs and posted discretely at the front, forcing Sifton's predecessors like Ruth Reichl to don wigs and hats.
Sifton had been the editor in charge of the Times culture department before he decided to take the food critic job so he had a couple official NYT headshots taken that were posted, according to Google Image search, here and here. Even though they're now gone, pretty much every blog that cares who the New York Times food critic is has reposted them. So even before he reviewed one measly restaurant, Sifton's cover has been utterly blown.
I asked Richard Blakeley to come up with some possible disguises for him. He came up with Harry Potter, former NYT critic Frank Bruni and that partying dude from Australia. Surely you can do better. Please leave your suggestions in comments, where we have a fun and easy tool to upload images.
P.S. Anyone got a better, bigger image of Sifton? That's the biggest one we have. Email me and I'll post it here so as to make your Photoshopping that much easier.