Alan Bogen, a longtime Inland Empire food critic, died Saturday, June 8, in a car accident in Missouri.
Food critic Alan Bogen enjoys an entrée at Tutti Mangia Italian Grill in Claremont on April 25, 2012. (Photo by Gabriel Ruiz Acosta, The Sun/SCNG)
Bogen, a Redlands resident, was a restaurant reviewer for The Sun and the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in the late 1990s and early 2000s and also wrote reviews for KTIE, KCAA and YouTube.
“He was a very personable guy, very animated,” former Sun features editor John Weeks recalled on Monday. “He had a great sense of humor. He wrote passionately about food. I discovered many restaurants through his reviews, and so did thousands of readers.”
Unlike many restaurant critics, Mr. Bogen, who loved loud Hawaiian shirts, didn’t visit Inland Empire restaurants anonymously.
“Because of his television show, he couldn’t and never was anonymous,” Weeks said. “His style of reviewing was to have a big party, take the temperature in the room, get a lot of opinions on the food, including from people at the tables around him. It was a democratic approach to reviewing. He was a very distinctive person.”
According to the Missouri Highway Patrol, Borgen, 75, was driving with his partner, presenter Isabelle Busse, 54, on Interstate 44 east of Lebanon, Missouri, on Saturday when at approximately 6:45 p.m., a large tractor-trailer traveling in the opposite direction crossed into oncoming traffic and struck the 2023 Chrysler Pacifica minivan driven by Borgen.
Bogen died at the scene, and Busse later died at a nearby hospital.
Staff writer Jerry Rice contributed to this article.
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