Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise | Ruth Reichl

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise | Ruth Reichl | You Could Eat Her Up!

books:

Garlic and Sapphir...

	Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise Ruth Reichl Penguin (Non-Classics), 2006 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 131 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Excellent book!

I so enjoyed this book! As a foodie and cooking instructor, I enjoyed Ruth Reichl's detailed descriptions of the meals she experienced, and I loved the behind-the-scenes politics of a big city newspaper in a town that takes its newsapaper, restaurants and restaurant reviews VERY seriously.

You Could Eat Her Up!

Ruth is a wonderful writer who holds nothing back. She is down to earth, honest, and very funny. We've read every one of her books and highly recommend them.

A New York Food Guide

If you love food, you'll love this author's captivating style, which will leave you hungry for more.

Reading about writing about eating!

First, the obvious: food is for eating. Food is very, very rarely fun to read about; we may think we enjoy it, but ultimately, it's no fun being teased unless we can have some kind of release at the end (and last I checked most food books don't come with a mini-fridge). For this reason, food literature seems to appeal to a very particular group of masochists, or those who at least have the means and ease of running out to satisfy their cravings when the going gets tantalizing. Somehow, however, Ruth Reichl manages to make not only writing about food, but writing about writing about food both entertaining and gastronomically bearable.

In Garlic & Sapphires: The Life and Times of a Food Critic in Disguise, Reichl grudgingly accepts a position as the new NY Times food critic, but the trouble starts before she even moves to New York to start the job. On a plane from LA, she is recognized by a waitress who begs her to reveal where she'll be eating that night, confessing that the information is worth a lot of money in the high-stakes restaurant world of the Big Apple. Not only does the waitress know Ruth by sight, however, but she quickly ticks of a list of personal details like the name and age of her son, and what her husband does for a living.

The lack of anonymity may not be a problem for some food critics, who make it their business to dangle coveted four-star ratings before chefs who are all-too eager to create fabulous dream-like meals and offer the most idyllic table service. After all, the Times picks up the bill, and what would be the point of paying big bucks for small fries? Reichl, however, sees herself as something different - during her interview, she openly criticizes the paper's high-brow approach to restaurant ratings, telling the editors that most people reading the reviews will never be able to eat at Le Cirque or Daniel (at least not on a regular basis) but want to be able to imagine that they can. And once they're there, Reichl discovers, they probably never get the same service as the glitterati.

It quickly becomes established Ruth Reichl is the Peoples' Food Critic (which occasionally gets her into trouble at the paper and with her readers). So, in order to maintain her anonymity - to have a truly authentic experience as a diner - she begins to don disguises, taking on different identities in her quest to rate the restaurants of New York with open eyes. She gets in character, complete with wigs, make-up, and costumes that render her unrecognizable to her coworkers, the elevator operator, and her husband (but never her pre-school age son, Nicky, which becomes one of the book's many charms). She dons the attitudes of her fantasy eaters along with their clothing, becoming in turn her mother, a red-headed bohemian that her husband develops a crush on, or a frumpy and invisible forgotten old aunt at a table of her friends and colleagues. The differences in how Reichl is treated (often going to the same restaurant in and out of character) is astonishing, and these moments are the punchlines of the memoir.

Reichl's work as an editor at Gourmet shows; she seems to anticipate potential criticisms. After I started feeling a bit uncomfortable reading about the casual consumption of fois gras and the lunch menus of the elite, she addresses the morality of being a food critic. One review near the end feels lackluster and a bit dull; the following chapter explores a period of ennui, as she tires of the costumes and the pomp and circumstance of eating out. Occasionally, text in the chapters and the reviews were a little repetitive, and at times the restaurant reviews are a bit anti-climactic (maybe because Reichl's writing skills have since improved, or because of the mandated seventh-grade reading level for newspapers). I sometimes tired, just a little, of the descriptions of foods that I will probably never eat myself.

Still, Reichl does such a marvelous job of putting you in the seat of a restaurant critic (or one of her ill-treated characters), that it's easy to play along; her descriptions of food manage to conjure the intangible and utterly personal.Her treatment of the gender, class, and generational issues pervasive in the world of fine food gives Garlic & Sapphires more weight. Each chapter is a different restaurant experience, typically with a new character, and includes the original restaurant review and Reichl's own recipes (an acceptable substitute for a mini-fridge). I've found that my own experience of going to restaurants has changed for the better since reading this book, which is probably the highest praise one can offer someone who spends a lot of their time writing about food. Reichl manages to balance our interest in and out of the restaurants, through the streets of New York, and in the office, delivering a fast-paced and dynamic memoir - it's almost good enough to eat.

for more information click here

Great read for the foodies out there!

Ruth Riechl has a way with words when it comes to food. One can't help but be hungry after reading her accounts of meals in New York - they are so vivid, you can almost taste them yourself.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

products you might be interested in