It’s the birthday of food writer and editor Ruth Reichl, known for her bestselling memoirs such as Tender at the Bone (1998), Comfort Me with Apples (2001), and Garlic and Sapphires (2005), which last describes Reichl’s experiences as the most powerful restaurant critic in the world.
Reichl was born in New York City in 1948 to a gentle, stable German-Jewish refugee father and a decidedly unstable American Jewish mother, a terrible cook who would sometimes serve dangerously spoiled food to guests; Reichl grew up feeling that it was up to her to keep the guests from dying. She studied art history at the University of Michigan (receiving her M.A. in 1970), worked as a waitress, and ended up cooking at a Berkeley collective and taking part in the culinary revolution of the 1970s. Reichl has described her early training at a French restaurant: she was taught that the chef was at war with the customers, and it was her job as waitress to keep the customers from knowing this. She began working as a restaurant critic while in California and left the Los Angeles Times in 1993 to become the critic for The New York Times. Voila! Most powerful restaurant critic in the world!
Garlic and Sapphires details how Reichl would literally go under cover for many of her restaurant reviews (wigs, make up, the whole schmear), given that restaurants would often treat her very differently when they knew who she was. One of her most controversial reviews was a double review of Le Cirque, at the time one of the most highly celebrated restaurants in NYC (and now closed since the end of 2017). She first went undercover as a nondescript nobody and reported that the service was rude and the food soggy, even forlorn; then she returned as critic, and was given better treatment than the King of Spain (who was made to wait his turn at the bar). Due in part to this snobby and inconsistent treatment of patrons, Reichl rated the restaurant a mere three stars, which was considered scandalous.
Reichl also scandalized some of the old guard by insisting on reviewing more than just French restaurants: she reviewed Korean food, sushi, and other cuisines that had been considered beneath a restaurant critic’s notice. Reichl left The Times in 1999 to become Editor in Chief of Gourmet Magazine until the magazine was shuttered in 2009, a traumatic event that she wrote about in My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life (2015).
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it: make spaghetti carbonara for dinner tonight. In an interview, Reichl once listed the dish as one of her favorite weeknight dinners because it comes together so quickly. Hearing this, I felt vindicated for often serving this less-than-completely-healthy dinner to my own family. Link to her recipe below. (Note: this isn’t the recipe I use; I base mine on Marcella Hazan’s, which includes a splash of white wine added to the bacon. I’m not claiming to be a better cook than Reichl, but possibly Hazan is. I have no idea. They’re both pretty brilliant.)
Have a delicious Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.
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