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

Ruth Reichl was a food and restaurant critic for the New York Times in the 1990’s. Apparently, as I learned from reading this book, this position is more powerful than one might imagine. Restaurant reviews and the number of “stars” awarded to a restaurant in NYC can make or break a restaurant. Who knew?

So, since she became a powerful force with her job at the New York Times, Ruth Reichl also became an immediate celebrity in the restaurant world. Her picture was posted in all the restaurant kitchens, and all of the waiters and managers and other workers were warned, even given a bounty, to spot her coming. Which makes it difficult to get at the truth about a restaurant and its food and its service to regular, non-food critic customers.

That’s when Reichl began to don elaborate disguises in order to visit the restaurants on her list, incognito. Not only did she disguise herself, she imagined, with the help of an ex-drama coach and old friend of her mother’s, an entire persona for herself as she visited restaurants as Molly the retired high school teacher, or Betty Jones the poor spinster, or Brenda the redheaded extrovert, or even her own mother (deceased). The disguises enabled Reichl to do her job, which was to write an unbiased and honest review of a given high dollar restaurant, but they also gave her insight into herself, the kind of person she was able to become, the kind of person she wanted to be, and the core of her own identity.

I thought Ms. Reichl’s food memoir was interesting and insightful, especially in the chapter where Reichl becomes Emily Stone, a “dried-up prune” of a woman with an entitled attitude and a chip on her shoulder. When her dinner companion tells her, “These disguises have gone too far. I hate the person you’ve become,” Reichl realizes that “if Brenda was my best self, Emily was my worst.” All of the people she pretends to be are really at least partly herself. It made me wonder again about actors and actresses and the stress of pretending to be people who may be drawn from the worst aspects of one’s own secret self.

I did enjoy reading about Ms. Reichl’s adventures in New York City restaurants that are all so expensive and exotic that I will certainly never visit them myself. Eventually I’d like to read some of her other books, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, or Save Me the Plums. This book, Garlic and Sapphires, does include recipes (which I will probably never try since I’ve grown a deep aversion to cooking in my old age) and a few of the articles that Ms. Reichl wrote for the Times when she was their food critic. Ruth Reichl went on to become editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.