‘The kitchen was my happy place’
Ruth Reichl dishes about food, farming, and family
It could have been the perfect lead of a Jewish Standard story.
The cover of her memoir, “Tender on the Bone: Growing Up at the Table,” shows a 7- or 8-year-old Ruth Reichl at a stove, cooking a meal.
Ms. Reichl, 76, is one of the most influential figures in the world of American food culture. She’s been a restaurant critic for both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, an editor of Gourmet magazine, and the host of a PBS food series, as well as a memoirist, novelist, and cookbook author.
Of course, the world’s foodies already know all that. Still, wouldn’t it be cool if that young girl at the stove was helping her mom prepare a Shabbat meal, or seder?
How cool would it be to discover that the road to cordon bleu started at brisket?
Sadly, that was not to be. Turns out the family was only culturally Jewish, and little Ruth’s duties in the kitchen were in part self-preservation. “My mother, as you know, was not a good cook,” she told me in a Zoom interview from her home in the Hudson Valley.
“I’ve always cooked, partly because my mother was such a scary cook. My first memory is watching her go through the refrigerator scraping the blue stuff off the top of some food and saying, ‘A little mold never hurt anybody.’
“So I started cooking mostly in self-defense — but then I loved it.”
I already knew some of that because I’d screened “Food and Country,” the revelatory documentary that she produced and in which she stars. It’s an important film that raises valid concerns about the nation’s food system, which most of us have always taken for granted. And it is the reason for our conversation.
But before we get to that, we must discuss wiener schnitzel at Luchow’s. And her parents. “When I was born, both of my parents were old for the time,” Ms. Reichl said. Her dad, Ernst, a German refugee, was 50, and her mom, Miriam, was 40.
“My parents already had a life,” she continued. And they sort of just took me along. And because my mom wasn’t really a cook, they ate out a lot. My mother was enchanted by restaurants. So I did develop a taste for food then.”
Luchow’s, a famous German-American restaurant on 14th Street in Manhattan, was a regular stop for the family, and the schnitzel was a regular order.
“Then I went to a French boarding school in Montreal, and that’s where I really learned about good food,” Ms. Reichl said. “From my friend’s parents who, you know, really didn’t eat like Americans.
“Then I was in that first generation of Americans who got to travel. In the 1960s, airline travel, which had been for rich people, was suddenly affordable for the middle class. You could go to Europe for $3 a day.”
Food ultimately provided emotional resonance as well. “My father and I would take a walk on Saturdays. He loved to visit used book stores, and then we would walk to Yorkville,” the neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was home to members of many European ethnic groups, “where we went into a butcher shop.
“I didn’t think of my father as German. He didn’t speak German at home. But suddenly he’s talking to people in German. He has this warm conversation with a butcher, and it hit me that he had gone home. That by looking at him through food, I was seeing him in a new way.
“And then I just got fascinated by going to markets.
“We’d go down to Chinatown to markets. We’d go up to Spanish Harlem and Little Italy. For me it was a way to see people connect with their other selves. I was a chubby, kind of unattractive teenager, but cooking was the one thing I could do for people.
“I tried everything. The great thing about being a young cook is that you’re fearless. It was everything. French. Italian. I made my own pasta. I love Chinese food. I’d go down to Chinatown and get recipes. The kitchen was my happy place. It’s always been, because my mother didn’t go there. It was the place I knew I could have privacy. It’s the place I felt more at home.”
After college, she and her first husband, the artist David Hollis, whom she’d met at the University of Michigan, moved to a loft on Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side, “My Aunt Bertie, who died in 1980 at 102, said, ‘Rivington Street? Why would you live on Rivington Street?’
“We had this big loft, and friends would come and stay with us, and I would cook these giant meals. One daughter of one of my friends said, ‘You’re such a good cook. You should write a cookbook.’
“My father was a book designer. I grew up in Greenwich Village. Half my parents’ friends were writers. Writing was something I could do. When I wrote essays in college, the professors would always talk about my prose style. I did social work one summer and my bosses talked about how my reports were like stories.
“It just never occurred to me that I was good enough to be a published writer. But because I knew all these people in publishing, I went to my favorite editor and said that I had this idea of writing a cookbook. She told me to write a sample chapter and an outline and show it to her. Then she’d tell me what to do with it.
“Two weeks later, she called me and said, ‘We’ll publish your book.’”
The year was 1972. The book was “Mmmmm: A Feastiary.” And set her on her career. She was officially a professional writer.
A few months later, Ms. Reichl and Mr. Hollis moved to Berkeley and found themselves establishing a sort-of commune.
“It wasn’t like we really thought we were going to set up a commune,” she said. “It was just that my husband and I couldn’t afford to buy a house. We thought that if we did it with friends, it would be cheaper. So a group of us got together and bought this giant old Victorian for $29,000.
“These were people we knew from college or we met in Berkeley. But then we had some Italian people knock on our door. They were here on a Fulbright, and they moved in with us. And when they left, they sent another couple.”
She joined a collective restaurant, Swallow, and also started freelance writing for New West magazine. Most of her articles were about art, her major at Michigan, where she earned a master’s degree. One evening, her editor joined her for dinner at Swallow, and said, ‘You know, you’re a much better writer than our restaurant critic.’”
As Ms. Reichl recalls it, “I told him, ‘You know you are crazy? I don’t have any money. I don’t even have a credit card. How am I going to go write restaurant reviews?’ And he said, ‘We’ll give you a tryout here. Write a sample restaurant review, and we’ll pay for the meal.’
“And so I went out and went to a fancy French restaurant on their dime and wrote a restaurant review.”
The editors loved it. They canned their reviewer and replaced him with Ruth Reichl. From New West, she went to the L.A. Times and then the New York Times. Her reviews could make or break restaurants. Though Ms. Reichl was not — how to put this? — ruthless, there was a figurative bounty placed on her head.
“A waitress told me that every restaurant in New York had a photograph of me in the back with the word ‘wanted’ written across the bottom,” she said. “The owners would pay anyone who spotted me in a restaurant.
“I thought, I’m not going to have them roll out the red carpet and treat me special. So I decided I would wear disguises. My mother was no longer alive, but her best friend had been an acting coach. I called her up, and asked, ‘Where do I go to get a wig?’ She said, ‘You can’t just wear a wig. You have to do this right.’ And she made me create a whole character. She got me a makeup artist to turn me into somebody who was nothing like me.
“By the time I was done my character, whose name was Molly Hollis, had her own set of clothing, her own credit card in her name, her own jewelry, her own pocketbook.”
Because it turned out that Molly and Ruth were treated quite differently, as readers discovered in her controversial review of Le Cirque, the famous four-star French restaurant.
“I took Claudia, one of my mother’s friends, to Le Cirque,” she said. “The two of us go, and it’s clear they do not want us there. They pretend they don’t have the reservation until I pointed it out to them in the reservation book. They treat us like dirt. They made us wait an hour for a table. They put us in a smoking section, although we’d asked for no smoking. The food was very good, but the way they treated us was not.
“I went back a few more times with her, and it was always like that. For my last visit to the restaurant, I called my nephew and said I want you to make a reservation, using your own name. All he could get was 9:30 and I said that’s fine. Let’s go at 8 o’clock and see what happens.
“I knew they had a photograph of me, and it couldn’t have been a more different experience.
“The owner spots me and parts the sea of waiting people to reach me. He says the king of Spain is waiting at the bar for his table, but he takes the two of us to a table for four. Then he says, ‘May we make you a meal?’ There is champagne and white truffles and black truffles and caviar.
“I said to my nephew, ‘That’s a great line, the king of Spain is waiting.’ But my nephew turns to me and says, ‘No, that is the king of Spain.’
“So I wrote the review in two takes: what happened to me when I was Molly and they didn’t want me, and what happened to the restaurant critic of the New York Times. I said that this could be a very different restaurant depending upon who you are.
“I took a star away from them. I dropped them from four to three stars.”
Since then she has edited Gourmet magazine, written books, and hosted a podcast. But in 2019, covid changed everything. “I went to do major shopping before we went into quarantine,” she said. “I got to the supermarket, and it was a huge sign on the door that says, ‘We have no bread. None. Don’t ask.’
“I went in, and there was nothing. There was no chicken. There was no hamburger. There was no cereal. There was no rice.
“And I thought, maybe this is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life. Maybe this is the moment when Americans finally start paying attention to food and realize how important food is, and that they should be paying attention to where our food comes from.
“This could be an incredible thing.”
Ms. Reichl’s second husband, Michael Dinger, quickly brought her down to earth. He suggested that “maybe it will be the moment when all the restaurants go out of business, and we’re left with nothing but industrial food.”
Sadly, Michael’s prophecy seems closer to the truth than she was. Meanwhile, the director of “Food and Country,” Laura Gabbert, was thinking along the same lines, and trying to make a documentary on the subject. When Ruth heard about it, she suggested they combine their efforts.
What they found was disturbing. As expected, restaurants were forced to close. But this set off a ripple effect, usually harming smaller farmers who relied on restaurants as their primary customers. They had to lay off workers or shut down.
And there is no end in sight.
“Even though I interviewed chefs, policy makers, and so forth, the film turns out to be mostly about farmers and how really difficult it is to farm in America today. Unfortunately, we’ve had a bad year for farmers this year, and it looks like next year isn’t gonna be very good either.
“The thing about farmers is that so many of them are highly leveraged. Some of the machines they use to farm cost three-quarters of a million dollars. For many, a bad year means the end.”
There is some good news. During the pandemic, some farmers became more resilient. Increasingly, they are moving into regenerative farming, and there are now organizations around to help them. “We better do it because we’re poisoning the atmosphere with all the insecticides we use,” Ms. Reichl said.
“There’s so much land that we’ve been able to get away with farming like that, because when you exhaust one piece of land you just move to another. But that’s no longer the case and we better pay attention to this.”
She believes that the federal government has a responsibility to get involved. Congress should “pass a farm bill that recognizes climate change, the need for regenerative agriculture. And they should be funding small slaughterhouses everywhere. All the meat in this country is concentrated in the hands of only four giant packers.”
On a positive note, she contends that covid-related food shortages upended the way people pay attention to food. “It had changed dramatically over the last 15 years, but I think the pandemic really changed it,” Ms. Reichl said.
“Food and Country” opened in theaters Oct. 2
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