It’s a dismal, rainy evening, but Ruth Reichl has a crowd of soggy New Yorkers in stitches.
The iconic food critic and former editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine is telling the story of her attempt to review a hot new restaurant in the ’90s. In her time as food critic for the New York Times, Reichl was fiercely protective of her identity, donning disguises and booking reservations under pseudonyms. For this particular visit, she’d worn a wig, large glasses, and piles of her late mother Mimi’s costume jewelry. Her likeness to her mother startled her a little. Once at the restaurant, Reichl realized something else that would make her pursuit of anonymity more challenging: She’d forgotten the James Beard Awards were well underway, and every famous chef in the country was in town—many of them dining at this new restaurant.
Among these chefs was the legendary Julia Child, a notoriously sharp cookie and Mimi’s old friend. Child was unfooled. She walked by Reichl’s table and began to play along with loving acknowledgement—then, without missing a beat, over to another Michelin-starred chef to whisper in his ear. A parade of luminaries, many of them reviewed in varying degrees of favor by the critic, passed Reichl’s table to get a good look at the Mimi costume and the real critic underneath.
I’m here at Rizzoli’s bookstore to hear the food writers Helen Rosner and Francis Lam in conversation with Reichl and editor Silvia Killingsworth. Reichl and Killingsworth’s new anthology, Best American Food Writing 2018, is the first of its kind. It joins the other annual collections of celebrated work by American authors, like this year’s Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay, or Best American Poetry, series edited by David Lehman, emeritus Riggio faculty. The writers discussed the changing landscape of food media and the breadth of topics covered under its umbrella.
Lam, host of the Splendid Table podcast and former NYT columnist, shares his unique path to the field. “I chose culinary school over grad school,” he says. While there, Lam found that there were, in fact, other people who shared his passion for food. After graduating, he read all the food writing he could and approached Reichl after a book signing: “I couldn’t believe she was standing right there, and I couldn’t talk. I just said, ‘Hi!’ and she said, ‘So…you’re a writer?’” Reichl encouraged Lam to send her his work, and both a friendship and burgeoning career were born. Lam, himself the son of immigrants, frequently highlights chefs of color and marginalized voices in his writing and spoke of his optimism towards food media today. His recent time spent with a Cantonese barbecue expert showed him the importance of telling diverse stories, of “how families feed themselves and want their kids to progress.”
Helen Rosner started her food writing career in New York in the early aughts, during a shift toward the political in food media. She also uses her work to highlight issues of personal importance. She says, “The act of eating is, essentially, an act of not dying. I think that’s important to recognize.” Rosner is an unapologetic crusader for the joy all types of food can bring, regardless of their perceived worth. She won a James Beard Award for her essay on chicken tenders. She’s faced Twitter pearl-clutching earlier this year after sharing that she uses a hair dryer to prep a whole chicken for roasting and has been unafraid to challenge industry stalwarts like Mario Batali and Gabrielle Hamilton after the #MeToo controversies that shook the food world.
Rosner shares the other panelists’ sentiments about what constitutes food writing: simply put, everything. “Food provides access to stories in infinite ways,” Rosner says. The anthology’s selected works range in style and topic, from an interrogation of the fraught racial history of rice to writer Baxter Holmes’ story about the popularity and superstition surrounding the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the NBA. Food influences every sphere of life: politics, gender, class, faith, academia, science, education.
“This isn’t a niche interest anymore,” Rosner says. “Food writing is changing the tide.”