Editor’s Note: Wig Out

We interrupt this regularly scheduled avalanche of summer travel and staycation content to bring you some bittersweet news: After 42 years as a food journalist in Greater Phoenix, a record-setting feat of longevity that encompassed more than 3,000 individual restaurant reviews, plus mountains of profiles, news items and food features, PHOENIX dining critic Nikki Buchanan is hanging up her trademark wig disguise for good.

Plainly stated, she’s retiring. And all of us at the magazine are feeling pretty gutted about it.

I remember meeting Nikki for the first time. It was 1999. I was the wide-eyed, laughably underqualified movie critic for the East Valley Tribune, starting a plum new freelance gig at 3TV’s Good Morning Arizona as the show’s resident movie reviewer. She was the big-shot food critic for PHOENIX, whose segment aired right before mine on Friday mornings. In those days, she delivered her reviews back-to-the-camera, wearing a femme fatale auburn wig to preserve her anonymity. (In the days when anonymity was feasible for critics.)

We were comrades and instant friends – a pair of freaks from the salt mines of print journalism, made a little starry-eyed by the bright lights of TV glamour.

In my mind, her reviews were the gold standard. Learned and edifying, but with an exciting streak of irreverence. When I joined PHOENIX and accepted the editor position, bringing Nikki back to the magazine (she parted ways with PHOENIX in the late 2000s, for reasons that may or may not have had something to do with using the phrase “Lux sucks” in print) was my highest priority.

That was more than a decade ago. The world has changed a lot since then. The industry has changed. Where once there were no fewer than four old-school, professional dining critics in the Valley, free to share unvarnished criticisms and maintain at least a performative level of anonymity in the job, there’s now just one: Nikki Buchanan. Was just one.  

Life can be demanding, and Nikki’s life is demanding her intermittent presence in a different state over the coming year, which she says will be too hard to square with the regular demands of restaurant reviewing. You’ll almost certainly find her byline in our Best of the Valley issue and other special features – her institutional knowledge of Phoenix dining is too vast to waste! – but the magazine will be exploring some other options for our Eat Beat food reviews. Maybe a bullpen-style arrangement in the short term. Testing out some prospects.

In any case, Nikki’s departure will not mean a diminished focus on restaurants at PHOENIX. But Valley restaurateurs will have one less wig haunting their waking moments.