Comfort Me With Special Treatment

Ruth Reichl is a hero to most, but she never meant shit to me.

That’s an absolute lie. I’ve read all her books, most of her columns, and I subscribe to her Substack newsletter La Briffe.

As a young writer I imitated her style. Sometimes I still drop callbacks to things like her famous Le Cirque review in my own writing.

She was one of the first food critics to really understand the power of using story, rather than just rehashing everything she ate.

When I worked on the Alinea cookbook, we had a mutual acquaintance in Grant Achatz, and I exchanged a few emails with her. As she had with her hero MFK Fisher, I’d tried to visit her in New York a couple of times, but the timing never worked out.

I started paying closer attention to her narratives, thinking about how so many of them always seemed to be centered on the attention paid to her by those in the food community. 

When she was editor of Gourmet and had left behind the anonymity of New York Times criticism, she was front and center, a huge public figure, traveling around, being doted on and seemingly playing favorites in coverage with those who took care of her.

I asked her once whether she was conflicted or felt like this intermingling of being close to people she covered was somehow an ethical challenge. I never got a response.

I started thinking back to things like that famous Le Cirque piece, which seemed like a triumph in ethics, i.e. that she dressed in full disguise to get an honest experience as a reviewer and found that the restaurant treated her like a nobody.

But the other part of that review is she visited the restaurant out of disguise and maître d Sirio Maccioni told her she was more important than the king of Spain. 

Sirio was a master at his craft.  Would he really be fooled by a dime store disguise?  Surely he knew Reichl was in the house every time she’d been there. Or maybe he wasn’t in the restaurant the times she dined as a normal New York rich lady.

Did any of this really happen? Or was it a constructed or hyperbolized narrative? 

Does it matter? I know that my standards for trying to keep those I cover at arm’s length are an old school kind of thing. I know maybe I’m even a little too hardcore.  Or maybe sometimes not enough. Even though I generally try not to develop friendships with my sources, I do become fond of the real artists in this business, forging connections with them on social that arguably can influence my coverage.

I mean life’s short.  People are people. Relationships are important, especially if you’re the public head of the biggest food magazine in the world, Gourmet. I kind of understand.

I saw how Reichl’s successors at the New York Times conducted themselves, and it felt like their narratives weren’t as self-important. I can’t say for sure that Pete Wells isn’t walking around Brooklyn saying, “I’m the Times food critic, motherfuckers! Hook me up!” But, it does feel like the way he’s kind of kept his head down (when he’s not blasting Guy Fieri) that this sort of thing doesn’t happen.

Recently, Wells used his platform to criticize the shortcomings of the Worlds 50 Best list. If he is a self-important food writer, he certainly doesn’t care what the Pellegrino princes and their tasting-menu-creating chefs think about him.

I know Reichl has been critical of the establishment at times, but in the context of her peers, I started to think of her as an Anna Wintour-like figure, courting celebrities and celebrity chefs to do her bidding precisely because she was a powerful taste-making queen. 

In some ways Wintour and Reichl are the grandmothers of influence. If you want to study the art of the social media-driven power play, all you have to do is look in the 1990s and 2000s pages of Condé Nast management.

I stopped thinking about Reichl in this context for a very long time. I kind of let go and just read her stuff and said, yeah, she doesn’t see the game the way I do, but she’s got great narratives. Just enjoy her work.

And I kinda did, until this Friday when she dropped her latest post on her Substack, La Briffe.  In this issue, she recounted her experiences receiving a Beard award last week in Chicago.

She went to Alinea, which of course. She also went to Asador Bastian. Everyone goes to Asador Bastian. If you believe the influencers and the listicles, it might be the best restaurant in the world, certainly the greatest in this little hogbutcher hamlet!  But, also as you might know from Eater Chicago and my own column, its owner is problematic.

Maybe Reichl doesn’t know Doug Psaltis puts his hands on people.  A lot of people don’t. I’m currently hearing a lot of rumors about a chef at a restaurant I really like, and if these things are true, it shames me to think I promoted that spot.  But, again, no one had written these rumors in Eater!

What’s very clear is that as long as the heaping platters of designer beef and Spanish seafood flow, nothing else really matters. And this is nothing new, hardly even worth caring about.

But then after Reichl won her award Monday night, she tried to do what every improvisational tourist does, drop in at Au Cheval hoping there’s no line for their burgers.

Unlike most tourists, Reichl had a shiny bauble they do not.

“Try Au Cheval,” a friend said, “they’re open until 11:15 and there won’t be a line at this time of night.”

But there was a line, and when I put my name on the list the hostess told me she couldn’t guarantee we’d get in before the kitchen closed. Desperate, I pulled out my medal. “I just won a James Beard award,” I pleaded. She was not impressed. She dutifully took my phone number and suggested we get drinks at one of the bars across the street. Maybe, she said, we’d get lucky; maybe a table would open up, maybe she’d give me a call.

Disconsolately we trudged across the street to wait.”

Welcome to Hogsalt restaurants, Ruth! But, hey if you don’t succeed…

“Then we spied Girl and the Goat. The kitchen had just closed, the hostess told us, and she couldn’t give us a table. Again I tried pulling out my medal; again the hostess was unimpressed. “You have to admit,” I said as the hostess led us to seats at the bar, “it’s pretty funny.”

We settled onto our stools, and as the bartender poured our drinks he looked at my son and asked “Did she really win a James Beard award?”

Nick nodded.

“Very cool,” he said, “what for?”

Suddenly the man disappeared into the kitchen. Suddenly the bar was covered with dishes. And all of it was truly wonderful.”

I like the fake disbelief.  “Suddenly!” Like how could this happen? I forgot I even waived my red flag, err medal, at the publicity bull.

It’s easy to see Au Cheval as being the villain and BOKA group a beacon of great hospitality here. But, if Reichl jumps the line at Au Cheval, she’s taking the place of someone who got their first. Preserving the equality of all patrons is the best hospitality.

As for Girl and the Goat. Imagine the cooks cleaning their stations, dreaming of a post-shift drink or just a long slumber before they have to come back to labor on Tuesday, when someone says, “Hey, fancy food lady out front just shook her medal at us, so get back to work and stick around for another unplanned hour so we can get some glory here!”

In Reddit parlance, maybe I’m the a-hole. Again, I’ll defer to you the reader.  But it just feels so self-congratulatory and manipulative. Walk in, ask for what anyone else can get, but if things aren’t available, find a place that is ready and prepared for you. Don’t ask for special treatment.

Or maybe do. What’s a lifetime of great writing worth? Maybe this is what you’re entitled to. You get to go on the victory lap and take what you can take. It doesn’t feel right to me. I believe it’s the kind of Trumpy all-eyes-on-me behavior that just encourages young food content creators to go, look, if the doyenne does it, I’m totally gonna do this too.

So, yeah, Ruth Reichl was a hero to me. If I’m completely honest, in many ways, she still is. But, also as they say, don’t meet your heroes.

Reichl without her medal