Just a year ago, the Orange County Register's food section was amongst the best in California, with multiple recipes and general features, food reviews published on Thursdays and Fridays, an end-of-the-week dining guide and a “Wine of the Week” column by longtime Register investigative reporter Chris Knap. But the section has weathered too many hits in the past 12 months, starting with the departure of Tenny Tatusian earlier this year and the elimination of the Friday food review and dining guide a couple of months later. Now comes word via the Register's food blog that critic Cynthia Furey is leaving, meaning Orange County's paper of record has no full-time staff food critic (longtime Register food critic Elizabeth Evans has been freelancing for years). Furey's post states that other Register staffers will take over the blogging responsibilities but doesn't offer any word on whether the paper will ever hire another full-time reviewer or continue pegging freelancers and non-food section Register staffers to write reviews. Knap's last wine column, by the way, was on October 25–a raised glass to hoping he's on vacation, and that the syndicated crap from the San Francisco Chronicle that the Reg published the past couple of Thursdays is just filler.
