Incognito and incomparable Oldest-school influencer and restaurant critic Marion Warhaft helped form and inform Winnipeg’s food scene Obituary
By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:55 PM CDT Tuesday, Mar. 11, 2025 Last Modified: 3:18 PM CDT Thursday, Mar. 13, 2025 Updates

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This article was published 11/03/2025 (528 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Marion Warhaft review could make or break a restaurant.

The famed (and sometimes feared) Free Press restaurant critic was known for her smart, pull-no-punches reviews, which she would do entirely incognito.

Every Friday for decades, Warhaft’s Dining Out column was a must-read by diners and restaurateurs alike. A pan from Warhaft could take a bite out of business. As for a rave? Well, you had better secure your reservations quickly.

Warhaft’s power was in her credibility. Readers trusted what she had to say because they could rely on her to tell the truth.

Warhaft died Feb. 28 after a six-week stay in the hospital. Her actual age was and remains a well-guarded secret.

“Even two days before she died, she said, ‘Don’t tell anyone how old I was!’” says her son, Mark Warhaft, with a laugh. Warhaft also chose her own obit photo. She is, as is befitting an incognito reviewer, wearing giant sunglasses.

Readers never got to see her face in the paper, but they got to know her through her discerning palate. As a mother, “she was a little gentler than in her columns,” Mark says.

Her only child remembers his mother as dutiful, caring and fiercely loyal, with a strong sense of justice. She was, despite her public career, a very private person. And she was a great cook.

Marion grew up in Winnipeg’s North End. As a young woman, she was a glam, raven-haired beauty who was often compared to actresses Ava Gardner or Hedy Lamarr.

In her 20s, she spent five years living in New York City. She had been dating Sidney Warhaft on and off in those years. He was headed to Paris to study at the Sorbonne via New York and, after a week, asked her to marry him. He wrote to her from Paris.

“She wrote back, ‘I don’t know if I’ll marry you, but I’ll come see you in Paris,’” Mark recalls.

“Dad wrote back again, ‘Don’t come to Paris if you aren’t going to marry me.'” Marion went to Paris.

Their time in Paris sparked a lifelong fondness for France. “When they travelled, they’d go to France — and Italy. Or France — and Belgium. Or France — and Spain. Or France — and England. Or France and then just stay in France,” Mark says.

Food was at the centre of their life together. When they travelled, they’d go to as many restaurants as they could. “They followed the Michelin Guide around France,” Mark says.

When Sidney took a job as an English professor at the University of Manitoba in 1966, Marion further developed her skills in the kitchen.

“I remember her doing huge dinners for my dad’s department; she would cater parties that were famous. She was very adept at a lot of French dishes, a lot of other European dishes, even some quite passable Asian food.”

His parents had a fairy-tale love, Mark says, until Sidney died suddenly of a heart attack in 1976 at age 54.

“That was the worst thing that ever happened to her,” Mark says.

But then, along came a dream opportunity that would prove to be a lifeline: the Free Press was looking for a restaurant critic.

“Someone said to my mom, ‘You’d probably be good at it — why don’t you write a couple of articles for them?’”

Mark recalls she wrote two spec pieces, one on asparagus, the other on the south of France. “The next week, she was the food critic.”

Warhaft almost instantly established herself as a knowledgeable, insightful — and, yes, critical — voice at the paper. She had a particularly vivid way with adjectives; she could not abide “gummy” gnocchi or “flannelly” mussels.

Hers is a voice you don’t encounter much anymore in the era of “I like everything” food influencers.

“She had a very nice writing style,” Mark says. “She was never a ‘professional writer’ but she had a very professional approach to her writing and it came off, I thought, as comfortably casual. Familiar. Like she was talking to you. She had a knack for that.”

The early days of Warhaft’s tenure at the paper overlapped with the rise in restaurant culture in Winnipeg.

“I think Winnipeg was ready for it. It was at the time we started getting a lot more authentic Asian food, we started getting a lot more variety of European restaurants, there was a lot more immigration. A lot of people were coming from all over the world at that time. Restaurants were opening and people were ready to experiment a bit.”

And Warhaft was not only there for that evolution, she was part of it.

“She really did shape the gastronomic direction of the city,” Mark says. “Her writing provided space for new types of restaurants. There might be a good Chinese restaurant, she’d write it up as authentic, and because of that, people would want more authentic Chinese food, and more Chinese restaurants would go, ‘Oh, OK, we can do that too.’”

Morley Walker was her editor at the Free Press from 1988 to 1997. “She was a very good reviewer,” he says. “I learned somewhat the hard way how good a reviewer she was.”

In the 1990s, Walker says, the paper was starting to get insecure about its place in the universe and worrying that it wasn’t attracting enough younger readers. And so, the Free Press drafted up a new entertainment section called Showtime that skewed younger and more populist, and part of that new plan was to feature restaurant reviews, in supplement to Warhaft’s, that reflected youth culture.

“We auditioned — and even printed — a number of things for a few years by a number of people,” Walker says. “And it was very evident that nobody we tried was even close to Marion.”

Warhaft had exacting standards for food quality — that, to her, is the foundation of a good restaurant — but she also had exacting standards for reviewing. She would visit a restaurant no fewer than two or three times. She would not review a restaurant that had been open for less than three months.

And, crucially, she knew who her reviews were for.

“She understood that her loyalty was to the reader of the paper, not to the dining industry,” Walker says.

Many Free Press colleagues have been dining companions of Warhaft’s over the years, including Brenlee Carrington-Trepel, who remembers her as brilliant.

“More than 40 years ago, Marion invited me to join her for two of her restaurant dinners that she would be reviewing,” she says via email. “She took her role very seriously. She also cared about maintaining her anonymity so that no restaurant gave her special treatment. When I think of Marion, I think of someone who valued her integrity and was passionate about all types of restaurants.”

Indeed, her anonymity was her superpower, allowing her to slip in and out of places undetected — and uninfluenced. Incognito reviewing is hard to imagine in a time when restaurant critics are also personalities who judge food competitions and maintain social media presences.

Of course, people would say they knew her. Sometimes people would even say they were her, says Mark, who also regularly went dining with her.

“Sometimes it was a bit like watching a comedy movie or a farce,” Mark says. “She’d have her little recorder and tilt her head inconspicuously and talk into her purse. Occasionally she’d steal a menu — not usually, but sometimes she’d take off with a menu.”

Warhaft’s 37 years as the Free Press restaurant critic were not without controversy.

In the late 1990s, a group of 60 Winnipeg restaurant owners signed a petition demanding the paper fire her — “mostly crap restaurants,” Mark says, “any decent restaurant appreciated her honesty and didn’t want to get rid of her” — and in the ’80s she was sued by restaurant owner Oscar Grubert over one of her reviews.

And then, in early 2012, came the infamous “Marion retire you ignorant slut” comment.

Chef Scott Bagshaw took to social media to express displeasure that his restaurant, Deseo, was left off Warhaft’s annual Top 10 restaurant list for 2011. The only reason she hadn’t included it is because she hadn’t yet reviewed it at its new location.

Bagshaw apologized via a letter to the editor. And Warhaft, for her part, judged the restaurant on its merit and awarded Deseo 4 1/2 stars; she would go on to give his later restaurant, Enoteca, the full five stars.

What the public couldn’t see is how she weathered things like that personally.

“She was a fairly sensitive woman, in her way,” Mark says. “She really was angry at Scott. She had praised him (in the past) — she didn’t know him, but she considered him tops.”

Warhaft’s final Dining Out column ran in 2015. “She loved that job,” Mark says. “She was very sad when she couldn’t work anymore.”

But people still talk about her reviews, and many restaurants in the city — especially the little guys — still have their framed Marion Warhaft reviews displayed prominently in their entryways.

“She did love her notoriety,” her son says. “Nobody knew who she was, but still. She loved the fact that people loved her columns. She’d get letters from restaurants: ‘Thank you for saving my daughter’s college education’; ‘You put us on the map’; ‘You’re the best.’

“She loved that kind of stuff.”

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com