Jeff Weinstein

Jeff Weinstein (born September 8, 1947)^[1] is an American critic, editor, fiction writer and union activist, best known as a former restaurant critic for the Village Voice, where he was also on staff from 1981 to 1995.^[1][2] In 1982, he helped negotiate a Voice union contract that extended health insurance and other benefits, which the newspaper already provided to married couples and, as a matter of practice, to unmarried heterosexual couples, to same-sex couples.^[3][4] The agreement was the second union contract in the United States, the first by a private company, and the first to be widely reported on, to offer same-sex couples these protections.^[5][6]

Weinstein was born and raised in New York City.^[7] A type 1 diabetic since age 8,^[8][7] he studied biology at Brandeis University, and did graduate work at the University of California, Riverside and the University of California, San Diego.^[1][6] At UCSD, Weinstein was a member of the Radical Coalition, where he participated in the United Farm Workers lettuce boycott against Safeway.^[6] He was also the first out gay student on campus.^[9]

Weinstein was hired to write restaurant reviews for the San Diego Reader when he was 25 years old, in 1972.^[6] He quit in early 1973, because of articles the Reader published that he considered to be “sexist and racist crap.”^[6] While primarily a nonfiction writer, Weinstein also wrote fiction in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, including the short story “A Jean-Marie Cookbook,” which won a 1979-80 Pushcart Prize,^[6][10] and the novella Life in San Diego, which was published by Sun & Moon Press in 1983,^[11] with illustrations by the artist Ira Joel Haber.^[11]

After he moved back to New York, Weinstein worked as a restaurant critic for the SoHo Weekly News and later joined the Village Voice as both a restaurant critic and as Senior Editor, overseeing pieces about visual art and architecture.^[12][13] As a food critic, Weinstein is known for his uncommon prose style and perspective,^[14] his interest in covering a variety of restaurants in their own particular cultural and socioeconomic contexts,^[6][7] and his “roving intellectual appetite.”^[14] In 1983, Weinstein helped found the National Writers Union, for which he served as East Coast representative to the Union's executive board.^[1][15]

Weinstein collected his Village Voice restaurant column, “Eating Around,” into a book, Learning to Eat,^[16] which Sun & Moon Press published in 1988.^[16] During his tenure at the Voice, Weinstein also wrote a column about consumerism, entitled “Consumerismo.”^[6][17]

From 1997 to 2006,^[18] he was columnist and fine arts editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer.^[19][20] He subsequently served as arts and culture editor for Bloomberg News,^[18] and currently writes the LGBTQIA-related blog “Out There” on ArtsJournal.com.^[1][21]

Weinstein was partnered with the writer, critic and artist John Perreault from 1976^[22][3] until Perreault's death in 2015.^[23] The couple married in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 2008.^[3] Since 2017,^[24] Weinstein has been partnered with the writer and critic Daniel Felsenthal,^[25] with whom he lives in New York City^[25] and in Bellport, Long Island.^[26]

• Life in San Diego (Sun & Moon Press, 1983)
• Learning to Eat (Sun & Moon Press 1988)