Garlic and Sapphires: the secret life of a food critic in disguise
Ruth Reichl Century, 333pp, £12.99
ISBN 0143036610
It was explained to me by a newspaper executive that a restaurant critic no longer needs to possess gastronomic know-ledge, or even curiosity, because "restaurants have been democratised". As football has been for ever democratised, should we assume that ignorance of the offside law or the Lisbon Lions or the punishment that Harald Schumacher received for his foul of the century are not bars to becoming a match reporter or soccer columnist? Silly question.
There exists, evidently, a journalistic hierarchy of topics. And while what is risibly referred to as "the national game" must be taken seriously, restaurants are reckoned by most editors to be easy meat for gag writers of varying degrees of lameness, for chirpy berks with an unvarying tale to tell of their dismally characterful friends, for Olympian name-droppers to do a turn. We are talking, too, of slow learners who, year after year, continue to be foxed by monosyllabic foreign words, who persist in the belief that sweetbreads are testicles and who, apparently, neither own reference books nor have access to search engines.
So much for Britain. American writing about restaurants - indeed, about food in general - is different. There is hardly anything that could express more emphatically our division by a common language. Instead of proudly displayed pig ignorance, the transatlantic critical norms are literal-mindedness, earnestness and heavily worn learning. In the case of Ruth Reichl, one can add her startling conviction that her adventures as a critic are fascinating, and her horribly breezy prose style: this is a woman who talks blithely of something called "the food community", and to whom guileless hyperbole comes easily.
Reichl was the New York Times's critic for some of the period that I was critic for the London Times. No doubt it might be expected that I should understand her distended anxieties, share her preoccupations, sympathise with her solipsistic self-regard. But I recognise almost nothing. Her demeanour caused me to wince constantly. I wouldn't go so far as Kingsley Amis did apropos Woody Allen and own to shame at belonging to the same species. None the less, Reichl does make me feel an inchoate shame at having followed the same peculiar trade, to which she grants a preposterous importance. This memoir - her third, God help us - begins with a coy, falsely modest account of being prised away from the Los Angeles Times by the New York Times, a paper she was so reluctant to join that she flew back and forth across America throughout one summer to talk to its editors. Then the account gets into its tedious swing.
New Yorkers who can afford to do so do not eat at home. Theirs is a city that is unusually reliant on professional cooking. Restaurants and diners and delis are utilities - but, at a certain level, they are also fashion items. The opinion of the New York Times's critic can, apparently, create a fashion, or can rupture it. I wonder. Reichl has little difficulty in convincing herself so. She believes that the only way she can assess restaurants and suffer the full gamut of waiter abuse, patronisation, neglect and lousy tables is by adopting a variety of disguises. Her face, she reckons, would otherwise become so well known that her experience would be unakin to that of the average customer. Again, I wonder. Still, she dons wigs and wears clothes to turn herself into different characters. And all too predictably, like a certain sort of actor, she discovers that the roles she has invented for herself acquire an autonomy. This is both tiresome and alarming. Does she require psychiatric help? We shall have to wait for her fourth memoir to find out.
Reichl's fairly brief tenure at the New York Times was not smooth. Her dumb bias against French cooking, which, like so many members of Britain's "food community", she seems to identify exclusively with Michelin-starred luxury, led her to "research" Japanese noodle bars and Korean grills, and so incur the des-pisal of her predecessor Bryan Miller, a petulant-sounding fellow who wrote laughably embittered letters to the newspaper's management about the betrayal of his legacy. (Who do these people think that they are?)
One of Reichl's problems is that she subscribes to the hackneyed notion that restaurants are theatre. A graver problem is that she has a greater aptitude for dressing up, eating and cooking than for writing. For all the sartorial efforts she goes to, for all the occluded visits she makes, her reviews - several of which are included here after we have been told the exciting story behind them - are drab. They are annotated inventories of dishes, gushingly approximate paeans to chefs ("Della Hardman served inspiration with her food"). They lack the turn of simile, the synaesthetic trick that might render a gustatory sensation in the medium of prose.
Jonathan Meades was restaurant critic of the Times from 1986 to 2001
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