Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
written by Ruth Reichl
read by Bernadette Dunn
2005

This is a fascinating and funny book that kept me well entertained on my commute, and I may need to check out the hardcopy from the library after this because the author includes recipes between chapters and there are a couple of ones that sounded fun to try. The book is a memoir of the author’s time as the food critic of the New York Times, starting with her being head-hunted from the LA Times to a decade later when she accepts an offer from Gourmet Magazine, and it is wild! The New York restaurant scene is intense! When she discovers that restaurants are preparing to identify and cater to her specifically in order to sway her reviews in their favor, she decides the answer is to check them out while in disguise: costumes, wigs, and whole personas are created in order to fool the waitstaff and see what the food and service is like for whoever she is being at that time.

The book is divided into sections based on the personas she creates, including discussions of how that persona came to be. She worked with a family friend who was an acting teacher to develop her first character, and others came in a variety of ways from mimicking a stranger she noticed to having a friend insist that they would dress her up. There’s at least on vintage clothing shop she describes that I desperately want to visit!

Reichl is clearly some kind of supertaster who can both identify and enjoy all kinds of food and I loved hearing her raptures about the flavors and textures and experiences at all of these restaurants she reviewed. At one point, Reichl describes her rules for her dining companions: they could order as much as they thought they could eat, but there were to be no repeat dishes on the table and she got to take a bite of every dish. It sounded amazing and I wish I could have had the chance to eat with her. Apparently, such meals were a semi-regular charity auction item, but the usual winners thought it meant that they could have a free meal at an expensive restaurant rather than seeing the background on how a restaurant critic judged the experience. A missed opportunity!

Despite not being able to experience it in person, this book is a great look at how a restaurant is more than the food, it’s the experience as a whole: the setting, the service, and the expectations. And it can all vary wildly based on who you are perceived to be and what your expectations are. My conclusion though, was that in addition to that, the restaurants have to contend with the mood that the food critic happened to be in that day or week or month. I was also struck by how often she would compliment a dish by describing it as unlike anything she’d ever had before. And I get it: she’s eating out *a lot* and thus having something unique would be a wonderful experience, but a unique dish would not necessarily be good for someone who wasn’t already glutted by standard fare.

Restaurants do come in a range, and restaurant reviews are useful resources, but at the same time, absolutely all of it should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I really enjoyed the book!