So it goes for Reichl who, after 10 months in the most scrutinized food-writing job in the country, is putting New York’s restaurant owners through a Cuisinart. It’s not because she’s the Butcher of Bistros; indeed, she’s just as likely to pour large portions of praise on restaurants. It’s more as if she’s making people uncomfortable by serving red wine with fish. She has elevated out-of-the-way ethnic restaurants, handing out, for instance, a rare three stars to bare-bone Japanese noodle and sushi shops. She is also shaking up the often lifeless conventions of food writing – the whiny “too much salt” syndrome, as Reichl derides it. Instead, she spices her reviews with a highly personal, literary flavor that tries, albeit awkwardly at times, to capture the restaurant’s ambience. (At La Goulue, “women, their hair like helmets, their faces perfect masks, put their heads together and whisper.”) Says Reichl: “Just because what you’re saying is “good-bad’ doesn’t mean it has to be dry.”
Hired from the Los Angeles Times, where she wrote reviews and edited the food section, Reichl, 46, was immediately the focus of gossip in a city that obsesses on food. A liquor salesman, by one account, offered restaurant owners a picture of Reichl – who sometimes wears wigs to remain anonymous – if they bought his product. She blasted onto the New York scene with a delicious two-in-one review of Le Cirque, the eminent four-star restaurant. Going as an unknown, she writes of waiting a half hour for a table. A wine list is snatched from her by a captain who wants it for another table. The food is so-so. “Atop the fish, a single sprig of chervil waves forlornly.” But at another time, when recognized as the Times’s reviewer, she is swept to a table past the waiting King of Spain, the service is impeccable and the food glorious. Even the raspberries get bigger. The review confirmed every John Doe customer’s worst fears, but a Le Cirque spokesman demurs: “It’s a very delicate matter that requires us to be very careful.”
Reichl’s critics think her fancy writing only confuses readers who want consistent advice. Says Andy Birsh, Gourmet magazine’s New York restaurant critic: “She thinks she’s being very clever, but it comes across as something in a third-rate creative-writing class.” Some argue she’s making the Times’s star ratings meaningless. “She writes excellent reviews and gives two stars and then she writes poor reviews and still gives two stars,” grumbles Pino Luongo, owner of several ritzy restaurants. Reichl is no fan of the stars, either, and would be inclined to drop them but for her editors. In the meantime, she’s off to her 12 restaurant meals a week and worrying not a whit, she says, whether the restaurants “like it or not.” She’s a writer, after all, and readers are devouring her work.
