EATING OUT: When one of New York's best-known food critics became too recognisable, she found a drastic solution. And it involved lots of wigs, writes Anna Mundow
When Ruth Reichl became the restaurant critic for the New York Times, in 1993, she also became famous. Her photograph was pinned up on kitchen bulletin boards across town; waiters, cooks and even busboys were trained to recognise her; restaurant managers offered cash rewards to anyone who alerted them to Reichl's arrival.
Reichl grew up in Greenwich Village, an experience she describes in the memoirs Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table and Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table. But returning to New York from laid-back California, where she had been the food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, she was startled by this new, creepy celebrity. "I know you," a stranger beside her on the flight from Los Angeles laughed, "I even know why you're on this plane." She knew that Reichl was married with a four-year-old son and that her first New York Times review would appear in September.
The stranger, it turned out, was a Manhattan waitress whose boss was offering $500 to anyone who spotted Reichl at his restaurant. "Forget anonymity," she told an astonished Reichl, "a good review from the New York Times is worth thousands. Could be millions."
Reichl had worked in restaurants before she began writing about them. She was aware that "no restaurant can change the food on the spur of the moment, but when the critic of the New York Times shows up, they can certainly show her a swell time. The kitchen selects its largest raspberries, the maitre d' gives her the quiet table in the middle of the dining room with a dedicated waiter all her own. The sommelier makes sure that every wine she orders is a good one, and that her glass is never empty. The pastry chef makes an extra effort." By the time her flight landed in New York, Reichl had a plan. "If every restaurant in New York knew what I looked like, I had to look like someone else." That was not going to be easy. Reichl is a tall, striking woman with long, unruly hair and large, generous features. Professional help was needed.
Enter Claudia Banks, a friend and retired acting coach who, over the next few months, turned Ruth Reichl first into Molly Hollis, a frumpy retired school teacher from Michigan, and later into other characters. In Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Reichl engagingly describes the experience of becoming somebody else while eating perhaps the world's finest food in the world's most competitive city.
Padded for extra girth and wearing a dowdy Armani suit and short brown wig, Molly had her first dinner at four-star Le Cirque. The food was fair, the service terrible. Although she booked weeks ahead, Molly waited half an hour for a bad table and 20 minutes for a wine list, and she was generally ignored. When Reichl returned as herself, things were quite different. Minutes after she arrived, the owner himself swooped down on her, announcing: "The king of Spain is waiting in the bar, but your table is ready" . . . "Then fireworks began shooting across the table: black truffles and white ones, foie gras, lobster, turbot, venison . . . as if we were the only people in the restaurant and 50 chefs were cooking just to please us." As is her custom, Reichl visited Le Cirque at least three times before writing a review that not only broke with New York Times tradition but also announced to the restaurant trade that Reichl was a wild card.
One half of the review described "Dinner as the Unknown Diner," the other "Dinner as a Most Favoured Patron." In her preamble, Reichl explained that "nobody goes to Le Cirque just to eat. People go for the experience of being in a great restaurant. Sometimes they get it; sometimes they don't. It all depends on who they are." Demoting the restaurant to three stars, she anticipated outrage but was generally applauded.
Most readers sensed that when it came to food Reichl was as democratic as she was passionate. "I'll eat almost anything rather than endure the trauma of sending it back," she confesses, tracing this timidity to mortifying outings with her mother, Miriam, who rejected almost every dish on principle yet who cooked the worst food imaginable. When Reichl goes to the Four Seasons dressed as her deceased parent - complete with silk dress, pearls, make-up and wig - she discovers that "when she was happy she was uniquely capable of abandoning herself to the moment. By becoming her I had shed the critic . . . I had originally put on a disguise as a way of fooling the restaurants, but now I saw that it was also a way of fooling myself." Ruth/Miriam declares the peppered loin of bison to be the best thing she has ever eaten.
Subversive in her taste as well as in her approach, Reichl wrote about a midtown Korean barbecue joint that most uptown readers of the New York Times would dismiss; she crossed the river to find the best Chinese restaurant in Flushing, Queens, and drew fire when she awarded a famous steakhouse, Sparks, just one star.
Meanwhile, in various disguises, she visited gastronomic shrines such as Lespinasse ("Sour-spicy shimeji mushroom broth . . . raw tuna with caviar . . . braised salmon and crisped artichokes . . . the creme brulee slides sexily into your mouth, its smoothness set off by the little pots of berries at its side." Four stars), Daniel ("Nine-herb ravioli . . . wild hare stew . . . chilled lobster consomee . . . quail salad." Four stars) and Kurumazushi ("Japanese red snapper . . . crisp giant clam . . . small sweet scallops . . . marinated herring roe." Three stars) while exposing such tourist traps as Tavern on the Green ("This is an expensive restaurant; does it really have to be such a blatant example of our famous rudeness?" One star) and the Box Tree ("Best of all, it is almost time to leave." Poor).
Besides Molly and Miriam, Reichl invented Chloe, Brenda, Betty and, finally, Emily. When Chloe, a pampered, blond divorcee, raised her hand "two taxis came screeching to a halt, avoiding a collision by mere inches". A handsome stranger asked her out to dinner. At Lespinasse, Chloe accepted and gazed adoringly as her date sparred with the sommelier while Ruth observed: "This was man talk." As Chloe, Reichl had the most offers; as Brenda, an ageing free spirit, she had the most fun; as Betty, a struggling elderly widow, she was either ignored or insulted; as Emily, a merciless control freak, she was loathed. Each experience coloured each review.
But one in particular - that of being humiliated as Betty at the Cote Basque restaurant - inspired the essay "Why I Disapprove of What I Do: It's Indecent to Glamorize a $100 meal. Or Is It?" in which Reichl described her journey from 1970s California commune cook to New York Times critic. "I understood that my piece was actually a cop-out," she concludes, "I was making excuses, and the Betty inside me knew it." A hideous night out at Windows on the World with a boor who had won dinner with Ruth Reichl in a fund-raising event prompted further soul-searching. " 'I read you religiously,' strangers often said when I told them my name, and I'd smile modestly and murmur something polite. But when people flatter you constantly it is very tempting to think that you deserve it. I had started my career at the Times by insisting that there was no right or wrong in matters of taste. Did I still believe that, or had I turned into a fatuous food snob, one of those people who thought my own opinion was the truth?" After five years at the self-regarding New York Times, Reichl was ready for a change. In 1998, when Condé Nast asked her to become the editor of Gourmet magazine, she and all six of her personalities said yes.
Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl is published by Penguin, but will not be available on this side of the Atlantic until March 2006. It is available on Amazon.com for $24.95.