Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Reichl
A review of Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise.
“Every restaurant is a theater, and the truly great ones allow us to indulge in the fantasy that we are rich and powerful. When restaurants hold up their end of the bargain, they give us the illusion of being surrounded by servants intent on ensuring our happiness and offering extraordinary food. But even modest restaurants offer the opportunity to become someone else, at least for a little while. Restaurants free us from mundane reality; that is part of their charm. When you walk through the door, you are entering neutral territory where you are free to be whoever you choose for the duration of the meal.”
Food writing is my bop. Literally, I can’t get enough of it, since I’m just into food and the concept of storytelling with it in such a painfully doting way. Ever since a took a class with a critic with The New York Times, I especially started digging my hackles deeper into this industry. A lot of the personal essays and fiction I’m writing now even revolve around food. My Goodreads is exploding with food memoirs, cookbooks, and essays based around the concept of gastronomy. It’s a full-on obsession.
Ruth Reichl is one of the core figures in the industry, and she has published many food memoirs on the topic of her childhood and life as a critic. I’ve previously read her memoir Tender is the Bone in chunks, and I thought that was pretty decent, so I added this one onto my TBR list. The other day I saw it at my library, was reminded about it all over again, and so I picked it up to read.
It’s an interesting read, that’s for sure. It gives insight into how The New York Times worked in the nineties, as well as the life of a food critic. I found it to be quite fascinating, so let’s unpack all of that here.
Book Blurb
Ruth Reichl, world-renowned food critic and editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, knows a thing or two about food. She also knows that as the most important food critic in the country, you need to be anonymous when reviewing some of the most high-profile establishments in the biggest restaurant town in the world--a charge she took very seriously, taking on the guise of a series of eccentric personalities. In Garlic and Sapphires, Reichl reveals the comic absurdity, artifice, and excellence to be found in the sumptuously appointed stages of the epicurean world and gives us--along with some of her favorite recipes and reviews--her remarkable reflections on how one's outer appearance can influence one's inner character, expectations, and appetites, not to mention the quality of service one receives.
Content
Essentially, this book is about the years at Ruth Reichl served as the food critic at The New York Times. Ruth Reichl is legendary in the world of food writing, and we start out in this food memoir about how her husband and she are sick of Los Angeles, then the NYT just calls her asking her to be the top of the food chain, quite literally. She has her reservations about it originally because she thinks that the NYT is snobby, that New York City would be nothing like LA (despite her complaining about LA for several paragraphs before this), and, somehow, she finds herself charmed into the concept of being the food critic. And so her career begins in NYC, where she turns the concept of food journalism at the Times on its head.
Reichl isn’t like the other food critics. She wants to talk about hole-in-the-wall immigrant joints and ethnic cuisine, and she also wants to talk about how these restaurants are to the everyday people. The meat of this book, however, is about how she can’t actually walk into a restaurant without being recognized. On the flight to NYC, a lady recognizes her immediately, then spills out major details of her life. This woman has memorized who Ruth is, and she is unnerved by that. So this pops into her head about how she’s going to get special treatment from every restaurant she goes to just because they know who she is.
So Reichl comes up with a brilliant plan: every time she goes to write a review, she’s going to wear a disguise. And she gets into this, crafts entire backstories for each person she’s impersonating, and then goes to the restaurant and sees how they treat her differently. And, boy, do they treat her differently than when she’s the hotshot critic coming in to dine. You’re going to see a lot of that in this book.
Although she talks about foods and restaurants being accessible to everyday people and claims to be a voice for these people, she can be kind of condescending at times. When she goes to the Japanese sushi bar, she belittles some guy in Birkenstocks for dipping his sushi in soy sauce. She watches in horror as she describes how he ruined the taste of the sushi, then launches into how she studied in Japan the proper way of eating sushi. That really rubbed me the wrong way, because maybe this poor dude just doesn’t know and can’t afford expensive food lessons in Japan. It kind of comes across as elitist in its own way because launches into the story about how she learned to eat in Japan the quote-on-quote proper way after seeing him do this. It’s moments like these where it feels like she’s defeating the purpose of the book since she claims to be an advocate for the people throughout.
Overall Thoughts
I think if you’re into food writing, the life of a food critic, or even the restaurant scene in NYC during the 1990s then this might be the book for you. If not, then don’t buy it. Overall, I don’t think it’s a book worth actually purchasing unless you’re a big Ruth Reichl fan, and am glad I did not pay for a personal copy. All in all, it’s worth reading once if you’re into these topics.
