Garlic And Sapphires: The Secret Life Of A Critic In Disguise

Garlic and Sapphires is Ruth Reichl's delicious and compulsively readable account of her experience undercover in her position as food critic for The New York Times. She throws back the curtain on the sumptuously appointed stages of the epicurean world to reveal the comic absurdity, artifice and excellence there, giving us her remarkable reflections on role playing and identity.

Reichl knows that to be a good restaurant critic you have to be anonymous, but when she signs up to be the most important restaurant critic in the country, her picture is posted in every four-star, low-star, and no-star kitchen in town. Managers offer cash bonuses for advance notice of her visits and roll out the red carpet whether she likes it or not. What's a critic in search of the truth to do?

And so begin Reichl's "adventures in deception." She dons a frumpy blond wig and an off-season beige Armani suit, and on the advice of a friend—an acting coach with a Pygmalion complex—she starts to assemble her new character's backstory. She takes to the assignment with astonishing ardor, and thus Molly Hollis, the retired high school teacher from Birmingham, Michigan, nouveau riche from her husband's real estate speculation, is born. Molly is duly ignored, mishandled and condescended to by the high-power staff at Le Cirque. The result: Reichl's famous double review, first as she ate there as Molly and then as she was coddled and pampered on her visit there as Ruth, New York Times food critic.

When restaurateurs learn to watch for Molly, Reichl buys another wig and becomes someone else, and then someone else again, from a chic interior decorator to an eccentric redhead on whom her husband—both disconcertingly and reassuringly—develops a terrible crush. As she puts on her disguises, she finds herself changed not just superficially but in character. She becomes Molly the school marm, Chloe the seductress, and Brenda the downtown earth mother—and imagine the complexities when she dines out as Miriam, her own mother. As Reichl metes out her critical stars, she gives a remarkable account of how one's outer appearance can influence one's inner character, expectations and appetites. She writes, "Every restaurant is a theater . . . even the modest restaurants offer the opportunity to become someone else, at least for a little while."