Hidden appetite

Former New York Times food critic Ruth Reichl talks about the disguises she used, the madness of $500 meals and why restaurants are the great levelers.

By Rebecca Traister

Apr 10, 2005 | I walk into Cafe Gray, a swank restaurant in the Time-Warner Center in Manhattan, at 6 p.m., dressed in jeans, tank top and cheap-but-stylish coat, my hair extremely frizzy. "Do you have a reservation?" I'm asked at the door. I stutter, realizing that I have not thought to make one. The hostess's eyebrows lift as I hesitate. Then, taking a guess that my drinks date, as editor of Gourmet and a food critic for over 20 years, will have considered this situation, I say, "It might be under Reichl. R-E-I ..."

"Oh, of course!" says the hostess, practically jumping at me. "She's not here yet." I'm led to a perfect corner table where a young waitress immediately arrives and asks me if I'm comfortable. I am. She hovers for a moment, then begins stuttering: "Of course we know who Ms. Reichl is." Great! I reply. "So I'll lead her directly to the table when she gets here." Thanks! There is a pause. "Do you need anything else before she gets here?" Nope. The waitress has just disappeared when a waiter descends, bringing me water in a silver water-bottle-carrying device. "If you need anything, my name is Giovanni," he says, bowing slightly.

It's good to eat with Ruth Reichl. In fact, it is the kind of attention I'm getting -- so out of proportion to the way that "civilian" diners are usually treated -- that forced Ruth Reichl into multiple disguises when she was New York Times restaurant critic from 1993-99. The experience of her transformations are at the core of "Garlic and Sapphires," a new memoir about her tenure at the Times.

When Reichl arrives, she is hard to miss. First, there is her trademark nimbus of black curls. Then there is the bright chinois-style top she's wearing -- it's hot pink, orange and red. And then there's the cluster of wait staff, tripping over themselves in an effort to lead her to me. As soon as she sits down, a waitress tells us that chef Gray Kunz, whose 1990s restaurant Lespinasse makes an appearance (and receives four stars) in "Garlic and Sapphires," wants to present us with some food on the house.

I ask Reichl if this sort of treatment happens at every restaurant she frequents.

"Yeah, it does," she says, a what-can-I-do expression on her face. But now that she's not responsible for evaluating the dining experience objectively, she says, "It's really fun." Reichl does not go out to eat much anymore; one of the reasons she left the Times was that she wanted more time to have dinners at home with her family in the evenings, rather than heading out to the city's priciest troughs every night. This week, however, her husband, Michael, is playing golf in Phoenix while their 16-year-old son, Nick, is on a school trip in China, leaving Reichl free to drink and dine like a single woman. "I would guess that I haven't met anyone for drinks in four years," she says with a laugh.

Reichl has the kind of face for which the term "ear-to-ear grin" was coined; she smiles constantly, and it splits her strong features in half. With her prodigious mane and colorful ensemble, she looks very Berkeley, Calif., very Upper West Side. Which is appropriate, since the Upper West Side is where she now lives, and Berkeley is where she came into her own personally and professionally, after a childhood in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, boarding school in Montreal and college at the University Michigan.

"Garlic and Sapphires" is Reichl's third memoir. The first two, "Tender at the Bone" and "Comfort Me With Apples," deal with the relationships between food and love, families, sex, politics and identity. Reichl grew up with a mother who routinely poisoned guests by serving rotten food (earning her the nickname "the Queen of Mold") and suffered from severe manic depression. She moved to Berkeley after college, where she lived in a millet-heavy commune with her first husband and became an unlikely restaurant critic, driving to restaurants that had valet-parking service in a Volvo that she started with a screwdriver in the ignition. Reichl befriended chefs like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, who would go on to transform the American culinary scene over the decades Reichl spent writing about it. Eventually divorcing her first husband and marrying television news producer Michael Singer, Reichl became restaurant critic and food editor at the L.A. Times for nine years, until she joined the staff of the New York Times in 1993.

That's where "Garlic and Sapphires" picks up, and on its surface, it's much more a professional story than her first two memoirs, beginning with the call summoning her to the Times and ending with one inviting her to Gourmet. The book is about an institution, the New York Times, but also about the transformations -- both physical and emotional -- that Reichl made in order to succeed there.

At the heart of "Garlic and Sapphires" are her disguises, which she begins to employ upon learning that her photo is tacked up in the kitchen of every restaurant in New York. When Reichl donned a costume, she went whole-hog, developing finely honed characters -- complete with their own credit cards and personal histories -- for her undercover dining. "Molly," Reichl's first alter ego, is a former English teacher from Michigan with short brown hair and dowdy Armani suits who visits New York a few times a year with her strip-mall magnate husband. When Reichl becomes Molly, the Midwesterner's demeanor exerts itself over Reichl's New York brass so powerfully that she doesn't balk when she's given a bad table at Le Cirque or when a wine list is ripped from her hands and handed to a man three tables down. Later, when Reichl returns to Le Cirque with a Times editor who is recognized, the dining experience (down to the size of the raspberries on their desserts) improves radically. The gulf between the different kinds of treatment inspires Reichl to write a now-famous review of Le Cirque, in which she contrasts her meals as an unknown diner with her forays as a most favored patron.

Over a glass of 2003 Gruner Veltliner, Reichl says that she cared so much about this chasm of experience because in her mind, restaurants -- even very expensive ones -- are economic levelers. "One of the things I really love about restaurants is that in many ways they are the ultimate democratic institutions," she said, "where you get to walk in the door, plunk down your money, and for however long that you're there you can be anyone you want to be. It's like a contract that we have. One of the big reasons people go out to eat is to have that experience of being glamorous and wealthy. When restaurants violate that contract, it really annoys me." In "Garlic and Sapphires," during a fancy meal at which Reichl is dressed as tweedy, bitter divorcee "Emily," she is so struck by a young couple who have clearly saved up for an expensive, celebratory meal, only to be disappointed by food and service, that she breaks her character and picks up their tab. "You know, if you're a young couple, and you save for years to go out to eat, you deserve that magic moment," she says. If restaurants cheat you of it, she continues, "It's just not right."

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