Ishwar Bridgelal

Williston Park, N.Y.

Pete Wells, dining editor: Our dining critics and editors make a serious effort to cover the kinds of restaurants where you can eat for less than the cost of a parking ticket. Last week, for instance, our $25 and Under review featured a food court in a Manhattan hotel where no main dish cost more than $11. I could point to plenty of similar reviews. But I’m sure that many readers share your desire for more of them.

A fair number of readers also probably share your opinion that we lavish too much ink on expensive restaurants. Here I have to disagree. Yes, a good restaurant critic is a consumer advocate, and part of the job is looking for restaurants where a lot of people can afford to have a lot of fun. But another part of the job is to evaluate the exceptional places, the ones that try to stand out from the rest. Very often, that kind of effort costs money — higher payroll, food costs and rent, just for starters. Those costs get passed on to customers who enjoy and can pay for that kind of experience.

Some of those restaurants turn out to be pretentious and awful, and a good critic will warn readers to stay far away. At a handful of very good ones, the food and the room and the wine and the hospitality come together in ways that express something universal about our culture, or something particular about the creative minds in the kitchen, or both, and such a place is a perfectly appropriate subject for a restaurant critic. But a critic who gave the impression that such an experience is "common and normative" would suffer from an insidious form of tunnel vision. I don’t think The Times’s critics have ever had that shortcoming.

Arthur Brisbane: Alas, while The Times may be more democratic than Architectural Digest, it clearly isn’t aimed at Everyman. My suggestion: Balance reviews of high-end establishments more evenly with reviews of cheaper “finds” and that way accommodate both ends of the audience that gravitates to The Times — smart people with money and smart people without it.