Garlic and Sapphires Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Daily Special

  Backstory

  Molly

  The King of Spain

  Looking for Umami

  Miriam

  Meat and Potatoes

  Chloe

  Brenda

  Dinner with Chairman Punch

  Betty

  A FRUGAL REPAST FOR BETTY

  Food Warrior

  The Missionary of the Delicious

  Emily

  Ghosts

  A SIMPLE CELEBRATION MEAL

  RECIPE INDEX

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Praise for Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires

  “[A] vivacious, fascinating memoir. . . . Reichl’s ability to experience meals in such a dramatic way brings an infectious passion to her memoir . . . reading this work ensures that the next time readers sit down in a restaurant, they’ll notice things they’ve never noticed before.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Sure, she can write; sure, sure she knows about food. But what finally distinguishes her response is the passion she brings to the table . . . beguiling.”

  —Newsweek

  “As much as I’ve enjoyed her work over the past twelve years, it’s her new book, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, that I’ve really been waiting for. Here, at last, is the behind-the-scenes story of Reichl’s years at the Times. . . . We get all the mouth-watering food writing that Reichl is famous for, as well as well as a fascinating peek at what it’s like to be the most powerful restaurant critic in the country, but we also get Reichl’s take on the theater and politics of eating out.”

  —Newsday

  “For foodies with a penchant for the inside scoop, Reichl’s behind-the-scenes stories of the Gray Lady deliver the goods. . . . Spicy and sweet by turns, with crackle and bite throughout.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Reichl is so gifted that she can make any topic interesting . . . the reader remains hungry for more of Reichl.”—USA Today

  “Costume mixed with cuisine—a delicious read any way you slice it.”

  —Gotham

  “Ruth Reichl is simultaneously a world-class foodie and an unfailingly approachable writer.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Wise and thoroughly satisfying; highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Reichl is a skilled, witty storyteller.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “Garlic and Sapphires is a fast-paced, witty memoir that explores the meaning of reviewing, the stuffy culture at the Times and Reichl’s ongoing love affair with food.”—The Star-Ledger (Newark)

  “If you’re intrigued by the idea of catching a glimpse inside the competitive cubicles of one of the most famous, revered newsrooms on the planet—and at the lengths food writers will go not to tip their hands—you won’t be disappointed. . . . Reichl’s memoir is an engaging, entertaining tour through the cutthroat worlds of both the newsroom and the kitchen. [She] has a wonderful knack for making publicly accessible the essentially personal pleasure of eating fabulous food.”—Ruminator

  “The sensuous, feisty, sharp, wild-haired Reichl has written another evocative memoir. . . . Reichl’s writing is so fantastic anything seems possible when she and food are involved.”—The Buffalo News

  “An engaging and witty read.”—New Haven Advocate

  “Reichl has done it again. In fact, she might have outdone herself.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  GARLIC AND SAPPHIRES

  Ruth Reichl is the editor in chief of Gourmet and the author of the bestsellers Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me with Apples. She has been the restaurant critic at The New York Times and the food editor and restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times. Reichl lives in New York City with her husband and son.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

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  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  Copyright © Ruth Reichl, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The following columns originally appeared in The New York Times and they are reprinted here with permissions: Le Cirque review, October 29, 1993; Honmura An, September 10, 1993; Lespinasse, March 11, 1994; Daniel, November 11, 1994; Kurumazushi, October 6, 1995; Tavern on the Green, December 8, 1995; Windows on the World, November 8, 1996; Box Tree, March 11, 1998; Sparks, March 25, 1998; Union Pacific, August 5, 1998; “Why I Disapprove of What I Do” (The New York Times Magazine), March 10, 1996. The New York Times owns the copyright in the columns. Inquiries concerning permission to reprint any column or portion of it should be directed to The New York Times Company, Rights and Permissions, Ninth Floor, 229 West 43rd Street, New York, New York 10036.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16334-4

  (pbk.)

  1. Cookery. 2. Reichl, Ruth—Biography. I. Title

  TX649.R45A3 2005

  641.5’092—dc22

  [B] 2004051362

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my family, all of you,

  with many thanks and much love.

  Also by Ruth Reichl

  Tender at the Bone

  Comfort Me with Apples

  The Daily Special

  You gonna eat that?”

  The woman is eyeing the tray the flight attendant has just set before me. I can’t tell if she wants reassurance that I find it as repellent as she does or if she is simply hungry and hopeful that I will hand my food over. I loosen my seatbelt, swivel in the narrow seat, and see that her face holds a challenge. Is she daring me to eat the food?

  It steams unappetizingly up at me: a squishy brown square of meat surrounded by a sticky stockade of potatoes that might have been mashed last year. The wrinkled gray peas look as if they were born in a laboratory test tube. The roll glows with such an unearthly lunar yellow that I can feel its chill before my fingers even touch the surface. The lettuce in the salad has gone brown at the edges, and the tomatoes are too tired to even pretend that nature intended them to be red. The dressing in its little cup stares up at me, bright orange. I stare back.

  “Nah,” says the woman, “you won’t eat that. Not our little Ruthie!” Triumphantly she snatches the neon roll from my plate. “I’d like your butter too, please,” she says, reaching for it.

  I stop her hand in midair. “Do I know you?” I ask. She grins enigmatically, and I realize that she has a
slight gap between her teeth. Her hair is blond and she is blowsily attractive; for a moment I wonder if she’s Lauren Hutton. But what would Lauren Hutton be doing here, wedged into steerage, stealing my roll?

  “No,” she says, retrieving her hand. She snags the butter. “But I know you. I even know why you’re on this plane.”

  “You do?” I say, rather stupidly. She has wolfed down the roll and now has her eye on the dubious meat. “Please,” I say, “help yourself.” She grabs the plate.

  “I didn’t think that you would be eating this stuff,” she says. “Truth be told, I’d be disappointed if you did.”

  “But who do you think I am?” I ask.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she says, the s hissing snake like from the gap in her teeth, “I don’t think. I know. In fact, if you would be kind enough to tell me where you’re going to eat when we land in New York, you’d be doing me a big favor.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” I am truly baffled now. She has gobbled up the protein, avoided the peas, and her pale blue eyes are staring longingly at the sad salad. “Be my guest,” I say, holding out the plate.

  “Your picture is all over New York,” she says, her mouth full of lettuce. “You’re the restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times, but you’re about to become the most important restaurant critic in the world. You start at the New York Times on”—she pauses for a moment, calculating—“Friday, September third!” She forks up the last of the salad and adds, “Every restaurant in town has your picture pinned to the bulletin board, next to the specials of the day.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I say.

  She nods her blond head vigorously, and the lank hair whips across her face. As she shoves it out of her eyes I notice that she is wearing a sparkly little bracelet that spells out “Jackie” in rhinestones, that her nails are covered with chipped purple polish, and that her muscled arms look as if they have carried a lifetime of heavy trays. “I am. The place I work isn’t the world’s best restaurant, but the boss has a standing offer of five hundred bucks to anyone who spots you. Forget anonymity. A good review from the New York Times is worth thousands.” She considers for a few seconds. “Could be millions.”

  “But it’s only June! It’s three months till I even start the job.” I am truly stunned.

  “I know,” she says, wagging one of those purple fingers in my face, “but if your first review’s in September you’ve got to be eating somewhere now, don’t you?” There’s a certain triumph in her voice as she adds, “You see, there’s not much we don’t know about you.”

  “What do you know?” This comes out a little more nervously than I’d like.

  “Oh,” she says breezily, “ask me anything. You’ll see.”

  “Am I married?”

  “Please,” she scoffs, “ask me something harder than that. Your husband’s name is Michael Singer, he’s a producer at CBS, and he does mostly investigative work. I know he won a Peabody Award last year for something he did on the Mafia and the recording industry.”

  “How could you know that?” I ask.

  “I told you,” she says, “we’ve been studying you. We all have. Didn’t I say we were on the lookout for you? No critic eats alone, so that means watching for him too. Not to mention your kid. He’s about four—”

  “Four and a half,” I say, the response so automatic that it is out before I realize that I ought to be feeding her misinformation, not filling her in.

  “At least I know you’re alone on this trip,” she says a little too smugly. “That’s useful.”

  “They could be joining me later,” I point out.

  “They could . . .” she says, considering. Then she cocks her head to one side and says, “Nah, I’d guess not. Guys don’t have any patience, and in my experience it’s always the woman who has to travel with the children. If Michael were coming, you’d have the kid.”

  “What are you,” I ask, “Mickey Spillane?”

  “In this business,” she confides, “it pays to keep your eyes open. You’d be surprised how much you can figure out about people after they’ve been sitting at your table for a couple of hours. It makes the job more fun. This is how I figure it: You’re on your way to New York to do a little restaurant research. And maybe look for an apartment?” Her eyes meet mine as she says this, and they light up.

  “Gotcha!” she says. “You are!”

  I’m also looking for a nursery school for Nick, but I manage not to blurt this out. When I don’t reply, my new friend examines my tray to see if it contains anything else she might desire. She seems to be waging an inner skirmish over the ice cream bar that now sits there, forlorn and alone. But she abandons the struggle to say smugly, “Well, don’t think one of those big hats is going to protect you.” She studies my face, as if memorizing it, her eyes slowly moving from the long, tangled brown curls, past my thick bushy eyebrows and slightly tilted brown eyes to take in my pale skin and large mouth. At last she produces a bumptious New York smile and adds, “You’re going to find that being our critic is very different from being the restaurant critic of the L.A. Times. We’re not so easy to fool.”

  “I can see that,” I say sincerely. In the fifteen years I’ve been a restaurant critic in San Francisco and Los Angeles, nobody has ever bothered to study me before. This woman knows a scary lot about me: I wouldn’t be surprised if she knows that the New York Times is going to pay me $82,000 a year (a cut from what I’ve been making in Los Angeles), or even that CBS has been very good about letting Michael move to the New York bureau. Knowing that my personal life is now public makes me so nervous that I try to change the subject. “Please,” I say, holding out my ice cream, “take this. I need to save my appetite for dinner.”

  She accepts. “No wonder you’re so thin,” she says. Peeling off the paper wrapper, she looks at the ice cream before taking a bite. Mouth full, she adds, “This isn’t bad. But I’d much rather have the name of the restaurant you’re going to tonight. It’s worth a lot of money, and I could certainly use it.”

  “Not a chance,” I reply, and turn to stare at the clouds floating outside the window like great billows of Marshmallow Fluff.

  “You’ve finished everything!” says the flight attendant when she picks up the trays. She seems genuinely surprised.

  I smile up at her. “This was an educational lunch.”

  “Oh,” she says, looking slightly bewildered, “I’m glad.” Piling the trays onto her cart, she adds, “People don’t usually say that.” Then she pushes off quickly, as if she’s afraid that I will attempt to engage in further discussion of the food.

  But food is the farthest thing from my mind: I am considering my next plan of action. One of the primary requisites of a good restaurant critic is the ability to be anonymous. Clearly I am going to have to do something. But what?

  Flying east, it takes four and a half hours to go from LAX to JFK. It is just long enough. By the time we land I have figured the whole thing out.

  Backstory

  This is Warren Hoge,” announced a self-satisfied voice when I picked up the phone, “assistant managing editor of the New York Times.” He proclaimed it proudly, as if faint trumpets were sounding off in the background.

  “Yes?” I said, hoping my tone conveyed more interest than I was actually feeling. It was two months before that fateful trip to New York, and I was staring across the sad, low landscape of downtown Los Angeles, wondering how to make Easter more exciting. Holidays are a restaurant critic’s nightmare, and this one, with its perennially boring brunches featuring ham or lamb, is particularly gruesome. The copy I had just produced was deadly.

  “I suppose you’ve heard that our restaurant critic, Bryan Miller, has decided to leave the job?” the voice continued. This bland assurance that the eyes of the entire world were focused on Times Square was so irritating that I lied. “No,” I said, “I hadn’t heard that.”

  The voice ignored this. “I was thinking,” it continued smoothly, “that it can�
�t be much fun for you, being a restaurant critic in the middle of a recession . . .” I dropped Easter; he had captured my attention.

  The eighties hit Los Angeles like the month of March: they came roaring in, then tiptoed sheepishly out as the money stopped and the good times ended. It all happened so fast: First the aerospace industry shut its doors and the city slumped into depression. Then the cops beat Rodney King on the nightly news, exposing the racism that had been hiding behind the prosperity. The anger simmering just below the surface erupted into a furious boil. Riots were followed by floods and then fires, which spilled out across the city in an almost biblical manner. When the tide of disasters finally receded, the city it left behind was thin, brittle, dangerous, and poor.

  The very rich retreated into their golden communities—into Bel Air, the Palisades, and Beverly Hills—locking the gates behind them. The valleys on the far side of the mountains swelled with fleeing people. Those of us left in Los Angeles huddled in our houses, haunted by memories of snipers shooting from freeway overpasses, looters setting fires that came creeping inexorably into our neighborhoods, contorted faces throwing rocks. Staying home seemed the safest option, and the great Los Angeles restaurant boom came screeching to a halt.

  “New York is the center of the American restaurant world.” The man’s sinuous voice wormed its way into my ear and I imagined him holding out an enormous, bright red apple.

  I was not about to bite. “I have a job, thank you,” I said crisply. “I love working at the Los Angeles Times. I’m not looking to move.”