Ruth Reichl: Dining in disguise
By Candace Dempsey


Meet a woman so famous that she used to sneak into swanky restaurants concealed in blond wigs, thrift-store clothes and tacky jewelry. That was when Reichl was restaurant reviewer for The New York Times. 

During her bittersweet childhood, her mother stole the show. Suffering from manic-depression in Fifties America, when that condition was poorly understood, Reichl’s mother had a dangerous relationship with exotic food, which she loved to buy but invariably ruined. Once Reichl found a whole suckling pig, ringed by tiny crab apples, staring at her from the freezer

“I learned that food could be dangerous,” writes Reichl in her funny memoir, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. In self-defense, she learned to cook her own food and savor devil’s food cake, wiener schnitzel and her Aunt Birdie’s potato salad. She became an accomplished cook, as well as restaurant critic. Since this interview ran, she has become editor of Gourmet magazine and written several more food memoirs.

What does food mean to you?
Food is one way to express love. When things are going badly in a household, what you have to do is cook. It’s the thing that brings people together. A way that people manage to be generous to other people.

My son is nine and he cooks with me. He cooks like all kids cook. He likes to bake brownies. We make brownies and cupcakes a lot. We make pasta and he likes to grate the cheese and roast the pine nuts.

Any foods you simply won’t eat?
Honey. It’s the taste. The taste makes me gag and always has. Who knows why you don’t like some foods? It’s innate. I was born with this hatred of honey. The first time I went to interview MFK Fisher (the late, great American food writer), she offered me tea and said,’ I’m sorry, I don’t like honey.’ I replied, ‘I don’t like it either.' The smell just makes me shiver.

You love to look at food, smell it and shop for it. Ever use coupons?
Never a coupon. That takes the pleasure out of shopping. I love any kind of market. Supermarkets, delis, whatever. I’ve never been a person who took a shopping list. You go in and see what’s there and wander down the aisle. Even when I was in Berkeley and had no money, I would never clip coupons.

Do you eat where you live?
I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a neighborhood not known for good restaurants. But New York is so easy to get around in that you don't have to eat in your neighborhood. Queens has this amazing diversity, these wonderful old Italian neighborhoods. I went out to a neighborhood in Queens and you could see in three blocks that the old neighborhood had given way to Asian Americans and then to Dominicans, so you had all these different kinds of restaurants.

What was it like going to restaurants in disguise?
A little fun and weird. Fun in the sense that I’m not a person who wears makeup normally, so you do have a little of the feeling of dressing up in your mother’s clothes. It’s weird because people start relating to you differently because of how you look. There I am in granny glasses, gray hair or old lady necklaces. Or sometimes I might do blond hair and bright lipstick. I had nine wigs.

Waiters treat you differently if you’re a little old lady than if you're a competent businesswoman or if you’re doing your Dolly Parton imitation. It’s even weirder when you run into a friend. I saw one of my best friends leaving a restaurant and I went up to her and said hello. She looked at me and I could tell she was thinking, ‘Who’s this horrible woman talking to me?’

How do you keep from repeating words like ‘tasty’ in your reviews?
I work hard at it. When I first started writing about food, I read people whose writing I liked. I was living in New York on the Lower East Side. I would go out and collect recipes from chefs and then come back and read writers who wrote about food, like A.J. Liebling (author of Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris. I love a cookbook called Vibration Cooking: Or the Travels of a Geechee Girl, by Vertamee Smart-Grosvenor. Her writing is very sensual.

I read books that had the same feelings about food that I did. Then I’d start writing. But it’s hard. You do find yourself repeating words. So I go over my copy and say, ‘My God, I've got flavor in there three times.’

What made you write Tender at the Bone?
I wanted to break out of food writing. I really, really wanted to try something longer. When I started, I didn’t think I was writing about me. I always wanted to write about Aunt Birdie and my mother and all these other people. The odd thing was I thought I was writing short stories. Then I realized I wanted a line running through the book. I wanted it to be almost novelistic. So I made myself the through line of the book.

Did you feel your parents hovering over you while you wrote?
Both my parents are dead. Otherwise I couldn’t have done it. My mother really would have been humiliated by this book. As she said herself, she didn’t have much of a sense of humor. I think this would have been hard for her.

Have you ever forgiven your mother for dropping you off at a Montreal boarding school when you were a child, supposedly so you could learn French?
That’s the only thing I haven’t forgiven her for, especially now that I have a child. Things like that change you forever. I was in a place where nothing made any sense, where I couldn’t speak to anyone and I wasn’t the person I thought I was. I learned what profound unhappiness is. And, of course, I learned that you can survive it, which is the important thing.

I’m actually starting work on a book about my mother’s illness that’s from her point of view. It was my mother's dream to write about being a manic-depressive, because there was so little help available to her. She wrote about her illness in lots of notebooks and took notes on her meetings with psychiatrists.

I think it would be so painful to be a person who would go to bed at night and not know who you were going to be the next day. She didn’t know if she’d wake up in a manic high or really, really depressed. She didn’t have much of an in-between. That was hard for everybody, but especially for her. It must have been so terrible, living like that.”