Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl

I seem to have got in a groove of reading non-fiction at the moment. I have god knows how many novels started – to the extent that I’m now having to search for bookmarks as my previous forest of bookmarks are all being used for X marks the spot on all the books that I’m not reading. I think part of it is the continued Covid weirdness where I can’t quite commit to narratives, so non-fiction books, especially memoirs, feel easier to read in increments when I’m in the mood.

Add to this is that we’ve got seriously ‘smoky skies’ on the island just now which is caused by the drift from the wildfires in Oregon, Washington State and California. I’ve been watching the news in horror and can’t imagine what it’s like if you’re living in one of the wildfire areas. I know we’re very fortunate not to have had a bad wildfire season this year in B.C. but living with the constant haze and resultant diminishing air quality is bad enough. It’s kind of counter intuitive because the crappy atmospherics should make me want to curl up with a good book, but what I’m actually doing is constantly looking out the window to see if there is any break in the haze which will allow us to go out which is not conducive to concentrating on evolving narratives. So, I’m back to looking for books that I can lift and lay.

Having said all that, my current mood was well served by Ruth Reichl’s Garlic and Sapphires. Reichl is a lauded US food writer and restaurant critic and I’ve previously enjoyed her delightful memoir Tender at the Bone, so I had high hopes for this book and I’m happy to say that I wasn’t disappointed.

Garlic and Sapphires details Reichl’s time as restaurant critic at the New York Times. She accepted the job with some trepidation after a long stint at the LA Times, a city that seems to have a relatively relaxed attitude to food critics (at least compared to New York...) The restaurant critic of the New York Times is seen as an incredibly influential position and even as a native New Yorker Reichl is horrified to find that every restaurant of note in New York has her picture on the wall of their kitchen and knows all about her, including details about her husband and kids. The aim of the restaurant of course is that if she is spotted in a dining room, she will get the best of everything and therefore write a glowing review.

The subtitle for the book is ‘The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise’, so you can guess what Reichl’s solution was to this less than satisfactory situation. Because she realizes that she’ll never get an honest view of what a restaurant is really like for the average punter if she’s always being treated like royalty, she decides to don a variety of disguises so that she can dine anonymously and therefore get a real sense of the food, service and ambience of a place. This seems like an obvious solution, especially as she only writes a review once she’s been to a restaurant multiple times so she can get a proper impression, but what’s interesting and unexpected about this memoir is that her disguises aren't just skin deep. Each of her undercover personas has a name and in putting on the wig, makeup, clothes and shoes she takes on a new personality and mannerisms and she experiences the restaurant as that person. To this end we meet timid Molly, who has never had good service in her life, Brenda who is flamboyant and sees the best in people, Chloe who gets Reichl into all sorts of bother with an admirer who is not her husband,  Betty who is sour and disapproves of everything and memorably Miriam, through whom Reichl channels  her mother and discovers that there is more of her mother in her than she could have imagined.

As well as being an entertaining account of her getting into character, the book also includes copies of the actual reviews that were written after each character’s experience which is a nice payoff for both the reader and for Reichl’s alter-egos who in many cases have to put up with some pretty bad experiences in some of the Big Apple’s so called finest restaurants.

What also makes this more than a series of vignettes of Reichl’s experiences playing dress up is the realization that becoming other people allows her to act in ways she wouldn’t normally do. Sometimes this brings out the best in her, and sometimes it brings out the worst, a realization that makes her question both her calling and her role at the New York Times.

Added in to all of this, Reichl paints a picture of what it’s like to work at the New York Times with its famous fact checkers (the idea of them catching her out keeps her up at night), the editors in their own little fiefdoms, and the sheer grind and lack of glamour behind one of the world’s most famous newspapers. 

It’s also illuminating to get a sense of the snobbery in the New York food scene where the ownership of a ‘four star review’ from the New York Times is the equivalent of the culinary holy grail, and god help the critic who downgrades a restaurant to fewer stars. Reichl also decides that she wants to profile restaurants that don’t usually get headlines, or celebrity guests, but an article about the magic needed to make perfect soba noodles or praise of a neighbourhood Korean restaurant that is in the ‘wrong part of town’ isn’t necessarily what is expected of the New York Times restaurant critic, either from editors or some readers. Oh and the sheer pettiness of one of her predecessors who has discovered he’s become just an ordinary punter now he’s no longer the king of New York’s food scene is both astonishing and extremely entertaining unless you are Reichl and on the sharp end of his spleen.

Ruth Reichl is an accomplished tour guide to the world of big city journalism and the eccentricities of New York life and she’s clear eyed about the discoveries she made about herself while walking someone else's shoes as well as the discoveries she made about New York. All this makes Garlic and Sapphires an engaging and very well written memoir that galloped along and scratched my current short attention span nicely. Oh, and the book is peppered with a selection of her favourite recipes, which leavens the mix nicely,

And if you wondered about the title, it is part of a quote from part one of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl was first published in 2005 and my copy was published by Penguin.