Elaine Tait, retired longtime Inquirer food writer, has died at 88

Elaine Tait, 88, formerly of Philadelphia, retired longtime Inquirer food writer and editor, restaurant critic, author, teacher, mentor, and volunteer, died Saturday, Dec. 21, of a myocardial infarction at her home in Hallieford, Va.

For 35 years, from 1963 to her retirement in 1998, Ms. Tait reached millions of Inquirer readers through more than 3,000 “Dining Out” columns, restaurant reviews, feature stories, and recipes. Her byline in the Food section became one of the paper’s most prominent, and former Inquirer colleague Sally Downey said: “She taught me and a whole generation about food, its varieties, and its preparation.”

From the start, Ms. Tait wrote about food and restaurants the way other reporters covered City Hall and the local sports teams. She wandered into kitchens, asked countless questions, examined the backgrounds and personalities of chefs and owners, and chronicled notable restaurant revivals in Center City and Old City.

In a 1997 column, she said: “A few years ago, I realized that I had already been writing restaurant criticism for longer than anyone else in the country. I’m convinced that could not have happened anywhere but in Philadelphia, where, from the very first, the restaurant community has accepted my criticisms with great grace and dignity.”

Craig LaBan, The Inquirer’s current restaurant critic, said: “She was a true pioneer in the world of restaurant criticism.”

Former colleagues called her “curious” and “generous” by nature with “a knack for clean unpretentious prose.” She refused to overlook sloppy presentation and lackadaisical service and said many times that readers deserved comprehensive evaluations of her entire dining experience, not just the food.

“She was always fair and always honest,” restaurateur Neil Stein told The Inquirer in 1998. “There was integrity in her writing.”

Gene Foreman, retired managing editor at The Inquirer, said Ms. Tait adroitly “identified the restaurants that were competing with the top fare in New York and San Francisco” but “did not neglect the best of the restaurants competing for the average diner.”

Restaurant owners who discovered she had paid them a visit, sometimes in disguise, frequently spent a sleepless night waiting for the next day’s Inquirer. If the review was positive, it was often framed and displayed by the front door. If it wasn’t, business usually sagged.

She was a fun read, too. She ended a 1997 story about a sorbet dessert recipe by saying: “Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart!” In a 1997 Sunday column, she said: “Oh, and I almost forgot. Mom wanted you to have her pickled beet recipe. The recipe for Mom’s Pickled Beets is in the Recipe Box on S2.”

Before The Inquirer, Ms. Tait was an award-winning fashion copy writer for Strawbridge & Clothier. She joined The Inquirer by answering a classified ad for a food writer and quickly became a mentor and role model to other women in the paper’s male-dominated newsroom. She served briefly as fashion editor in the early 1970s.

“I am glad that people appreciated what I did. But I just can’t see the fuss.”

“What made her special is how much care she took in everything that she wrote because she knew that our readers respected and depended on her to tell the truth,” said Arlene Notoro Morgan, a former Inquirer reporter and editor and current assistant dean of external affairs at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. “She was a true icon for the paper who made eating and preparing food a joyful experience.”

Ms. Tait wrote and edited two books, Best Restaurants, Philadelphia & Environs in 1979 and In a Hurry Cookbook, Meals to Make in Minutes in 1988. She taught classes for aspiring food writers at a cooking school and judged cooking contests of all sorts.

She served on boards at the former Art Institute of Philadelphia and the Society of Professional Journalists, as a judge for the Mummers Parade, and later as publicity chair for the Mathews Art Gallery in Virginia.

Not everyone was a fan. In 1978, the Daily News reported, an owner became irate after Ms. Tait awarded his restaurant a poor one-star rating. So he bought an ad in the Sunday Inquirer to rebut the review and called her “one falling star.”

Born April 17, 1936, Elaine Brazz was reared in Coaldale, Pa., 42 miles northwest of Allentown. She majored in fashion design, earned a bachelor’s degree in home economics at Drexel University in 1957, and married fellow student Charles Tait.

» READ MORE: Ms. Tait talks about teaching food writing at Bryn Mawr’s Yangming

After a divorce, she met Walt Gagajewski through a newspaper personal ad, and they married in 1991. She welcomed his three children — Walter, Tony, and Angelique — into her family, and they lived in Northampton Township, Bucks County, and in Ocean County before moving to Virginia in 2003. Her husband died in 2022.

Ms. Tait was an accomplished cook and made several culinary field trips to Europe and elsewhere. She played piano, and became a prolific painter in retirement, selling several pieces in Virginia.

She liked Scrabble, flea markets, and classical music. She and her husband adopted several rescue dogs, and she overcame MALT lymphoma in one eye.

The Inquirer published her final column on Sunday, Jan. 4, 1998. It was a Q&A piece, and she ended it with a personal note to readers: “What will you miss when you leave The Inquirer?” was the final question. Her answer was: “I’ll miss everything but the long hours and the endless deadlines.

“But, most of all, I’ll miss you.”

Ms. Tait is survived by her husband’s children and their families.

Services were held in Virginia on Monday, Jan. 6.

Donations in her name may be made to the Gloucester-Mathews Humane Society, Box 385, Gloucester, Va. 23061.