Ruth Reichl

For Robyn - Grand Vefour was once wonderful, and it's certainly gorgeous, but when we went there hoping to use it as a centerpiece for the Paris issue a few years ago the food was barely edible. The service was appalling and there were table tents on the table, advertising something or other. Really disappointing.

No, unfortunately I never met him.

Hi Lesley, I suspect you're the very person I was just discussing on another post about your city. Do you really think Quebec is better than Montreal for food? We had such a terrible time finding anything good to eat there. (Granted, Laurie Raphael was closed at the time...) And Montreal was just one fabulous meal after another. Anyway, to answer your question backward, yes, it really is the greatest job in the world. I love the people I work with and I love all the possibilities of the job. And I love the fact that the job is different every day. I can tell you what today will be - but tomorrow will be completely different. Yesterday, for example, bears no resemblance to what today will be. Today I'll pop into the kitchen when I get there, walk around the 8 kitchens, talk to the cooks about what they're doing, stop into the photo studio to see Romulo, look at the props that Julia's collected, then head upstairs for a production meeting. We have them every Wednesday morning, a time when most of us gather to check the progress of the issue we're working on. Afterward Doc and I will have meetings with the art department and the food department, to talk about future issues. Then I'll try to clear off my desk - read manuscripts, read proofs, answer phone messages. And then, today, I've got the annual Conde Nast lunch at the Four Seasons. It's the only time of the year when all the editors and publishers of all the magazines are gathered in one room. Afterward I have a meeting about travel stories, and a meeting about Good Living. Another tasting in the kitchen. Around 5, when the office empties out, I'll sit down to do serious editing. Then I'll come home, put dinner together for the guys (left over pulled pork and leftover pommes dauphine and salad), and then I have a reading tonight for The Kitchen Sisters new book at the Illy Galleria. I'm sure this is more than any sane person wanted to know.....

Kim Severson wrote a great piece in teh NY Times a few weeks ago about a program up in Harlem, which gives some of the answers. And it WAS about just feeding kids great fresh food and insisting that they try it. It seemed to be working. My own experience as a mother is that Nick was, for years, one of those kids who only ate 5 white foods. Everyone thought it was hilarious that I had this kid who turned up his nose at everything but matzoh brei, Cheerios, French Fries and toast. For a while he ate nothing but chunks of Parmesan cheese and plain chicken. He literally never ate a fruit or vegetable until he was about 7. And he was this really skinny little kid. (Fast, though, the fastest kid in his school for years.) And I thought, well, we can make mealtimes a nightmare as we insist that he eat everything. Or we can just say, sit with us, eat what you want, and let him watch us enjoying food. I didn't want meals to be a trial, so we did the later, I was convinced that food would kick in for him at some point. And it did! At some point he just started eating - everything. By the time he was 12 he was the world's most adventurous eater, which he continues to be. He loves food, loves to try new things, will eat virtually anything you put in front of him. Loves vegetables of all kinds. He also, incidentally, grew. Not sure if it's related, but at 16 he's now 6 foot 2. So my experience is just eat well, have good food around, and wish really hard.

Oh do I not agree about Quebec City! It's a lovely place, but I spent a few days there last winter desperately trying to find great food. (The best place was closed for the week when I was there, which was too bad.) But we did go have one meal at a place touted by the NY Times in its escapes section, and I have to say it was the worst restaurant meal I have ever had in my life.

I know you said that, and I appreciate it. I meant the general you - the society of E Gullet - which seems to have real attitude about Gourmet. Frankly, I don't understand it. There are even a number of writers on this site who continually trash the magazine and then call us up and try to sell us stories. So Robyn, I'm doubly grateful for your support. As for digital, most magazines have moved to it. It's much less expensive and much easier - no reloading. I'm not an expert on this, but our art department feels that the technology is not yet where it ought to be. I hope they change their minds soon; it will save us a fortune.

Our philosophy is to make the food look as good as possible without playing any tricks. it's all real food,, and at the end of the shoot (provided it hasn't taken so long the food is scary), we eat it. A lot of the shoots are done in real time: the people there are actually eating the food as we're shooting. We spend a lot of time and energy thinking about where to shoot, how to shoot, what mood we're looking for. We think about the locations, the people, the way the food should look. The food department, the art department and the editors sit down and work out every shoot before it happens. And on every shoot we have prop stylists, the food editor who developed the recipes, a food stylist and a whole range of people from the art department. We spend a lot of time thinking about which photographers to use for which meals as well, and we try to use photographers who are not specialists in food. You get a different look. This is very different than it was when I got to Gourmet. The whole art department has grown in the past 6 years. The magazine's Creative Director, Richard Ferretti, is, I think, incredibly talented. (Not to mention nice, smart and a complete joy to work with.) He came two years ago, and started pushing the envelope. I can't take a lot of credit for this: It's pretty much Richard and his department who are giving the magazine its look. I trust him, and I think that what he is doing is important for the magazine. My basic philosophy is that pictures are the one thing that magazines can do better than anyone else, and we need to put our resources there. You can get recipes from the internet and books, but only magazines give you these kind of pictures. You may not like what we're doing, but a lot of people do: We won the ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) award for photography last year. Incidentally, we don't use digital. Richard doesn't think the quality is good enough yet.

Robyn's certainly right that just because someone can use a computer doesn't mean that he knows anything about food. But the same is, unfortunately, true of reviewers. Just because someone's been hired to write about food does not necessarily mean that the person is qualified to do so. Most newspapers tend to think that just about anyone on the staff can review restaurants (and movies too). Nobu still has my review posted? Odd - but then Nobu doesn't need any review's posted. They probably just never got around to putting up any new ones.

Gourmet have anything planned? Yes, definitely. It'll be good. I LOVE New Orleans, but then what food person doesn't? WEnt there for the first time in 1980 and it was like getting hit over the head. I think my first meal was Uglesich's, followed by Dooky Chase, Acme, K-Paul and Galatoire's. Pascale's. After that I couldn't keep away. And I love the way the restaurants evolved; there came a time when you could actually get something green to eat there, and it seemed like a miracle! I'm sure that New Orleans will come back, stronger than ever. You guys are survivors - and somebody has to teach the rest of the country how to party. Book signings; I actually like them. I groan before I get there, but then I end up having a great time. ← I think it's genetic, rather than something that can be taught. Much like New Yorkers (who are always very happy here, it seems), we are used to a 24 hour lifestyle that has been ripped away from us. It's all very disconcerting. I am organizing a meal tomorrow night that consists of primarily restaurant folks(chefs and writers) from the East Coast and some writing types from here and the term "herding cats" has come to mind more than once. Convincing out-of-towners who have been here a million times and truly love this place that "Yes! We do have to eat at 7:30-they will close on us if we don't" is much harder than it sounds. It's not what people want to hear when they come here, even if they know that the place is a confusing mess. It's a new world, and we're all pretty brave, but what kind of place is it that you can't get a cocktail and a decent meal at 4 in the morning? Sheesh. I have had some good meals lately though. One effect of the storm seems to be that chefs realize that, with a market this small-and the same small pool of diners night after night in a kind of rotation, that they need to bring the "A Game" to every plate. In fact, Bourbon House where you did a thing this spring, has been an incredibly inconsistent place over it's history, but because D. Brennan has the better part of his staff from 3 different restaurants in the kitchen, the food has been pretty outstanding. Another effect of the labor shortage is guys who would normally be commanding from the pass window are back in the trenches in their own restaurants, and things get pretty good pretty fast when the boss is on your side of the line working. I'm glad to hear that you have some things coming out (though I kind of knew it beforehand). I am looking forward to reading it. Come see us. We'll leave the light on for you-if they are working. Otherwise, candlelight is a very romantic way to dine. In either case, it's still New Orleans and there is no shortage of good things to eat and drink. ← Well, I will be there in February for the Viking event. But I expect you knew that too....

Absolutely!

Gourmet have anything planned? Yes, definitely. It'll be good. I LOVE New Orleans, but then what food person doesn't? Went there for the first time in 1980 and it was like getting hit over the head. I think my first meal was Uglesich's, followed by Dooky Chase, Acme, K-Paul and Galatoire's. Pascale's. After that I couldn't keep away. And I love the way the restaurants evolved; there came a time when you could actually get something green to eat there, and it seemed like a miracle! I'm sure that New Orleans will come back, stronger than ever. You guys are survivors - and somebody has to teach the rest of the country how to party. Book signings; I actually like them. I groan before I get there, but then I end up having a great time.

Send me your address and I'll send you a third edition... The book's too good to go unused.

Are you trying to say that you think every restaurant should offer prix fixe menus, and every consumer should be forced to order them? I'm not with you there. When I go out to eat, I'm not really going to satisfy the chef's creative urge, I'm going to satisfy my own appetite. Frankly, most of the time I don't care about your creative needs. That's not why I'm paying you. That said, I am the sort of person who loves going to a restaurant and being able to say, "Just feed me. Bring me whatever you think is best." Most of the time I'm thrilled to ahve a tasting menu. But not always, and I don't want to be forced. Also: What credible reviewer would base a review on one meal? No one I know..... (Is this un PC enough for you?)

The big money's not from restaurant ads. It's from supermarkets. Wine is, at least in the big urban markets, a big source of income. Food products, cookware and appliances are often big advertisers. Increasingly cookbooks are too. These are all products that have built-in ad budgets that go to succesful food sections.

Favorites: of course, MFK Fisher. Joseph Wechsberg. Angelo Pellegrini's The Unprejudiced Palate. Joseph Mitchell, not a memoirist, but one of the great writers on food. A.J. Liebling. Shoba Narayan's book. I'm sure I'll think of more before the evening's out....

Do you think they are likely to succeed? Why or why not? ← Will they get four stars from the Times? Only Frank Bruni can answer that question. But will the restaurant be successful? I wouldn't bet against either Mario or Joe; they're two of the most impressive restaurateurs I know. They know their audience, they know their business, and between them they run both the kitchen and the front of the house extremely well. And they are taking this very, very seriously. I can't wait until the place opens! I recently did a fund-raiser for Katrina victims with Mario and Joe, and I have to tell you, I was incredibly impressed. I suggested it to Joe, and within 24 hours he had laid the entire framework. Thanks to him, and the extraordinary generosity of the wine community, we raised a really serious amount of money (more than 3/4 of a million dollars) in one night. It left me with a very strong respect for their capabilities.

I wouldn't dream of offering advice to the Times critic. It would not be appreciated. Methodology: Go a lot of times, try to eat all the food, try to be as fair as possible, try to give your readers a sense of what they'll experience when they go there. Most importantly, try to make it a great read. That's pretty much it. The restaurant itself dictates how much weight you need to give to the various elements. Sometimes it's all about the food; most times it's not. My basic theory is that very few people go out just to eat: Most go for the theater of dining, and I always tried to take that into consideration.

It's a cookbook I wrote when I was 21 and living in a loft on the Bowery with Doug. Published by Holt, Rinehart and WInston, with art by my friends on every page. It's been out of print for a million years, and is actually now quite valuable, if you can find a copy. To be honest, I still use a lot of the recipes....

Per Se's not alone: Daniel, Jean Georges, Ducasse, Le Bernardin, The Four Seasons... they all charge major money, and they're all full. Clearly there's still a demand for that kind of ultra-luxe experience. Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich are banking on that: Their about-to-open restaurant, Dal Posto, is aiming at that market. They want to be the first four-star Italian in New York.

I'm pretty much a home cook myself. I don't believe that homes should be like restaurants, and I don't attempt to do much cheffy cooking. Last night I made a Bolognese sauce - which is the sort of standard stuff I do. And although this sounds self-serving, my favorite cookbook is the the Gourmet Cookbook. I use it on an almost daily basis. The thing is, I know that those recipes work. My other default cookbooks are Marcella, Marion Cunningham's Breakfast Book (I made her yeast-raised waffles for breakfast this morning), and Elizabeth David. ← I get the feeling that you're partial to Italian? ← Yes, I love Italian food. But I also love French, American, Indian, Chinese, Japanese....The thing about Italian food, though, is that it's very friendly to the home cook. It's earthy, based on simple ingredients, and generally healthy. Also fast. I come home to cook dinner almost every night, and most nights I don't get home until 7. My guys aren't real patient when they're hungry, so I try to get dinner on the table by 7:30 or so. I do a lot of cooking out of the magazine's Gourmet EveryDay section.

If you look at the food section for any major city paper, you can see that ad content compared with editorial usually exceeds the average for the rest of the paper. Do food sections subsidize editorial and reportorial content for other parts of the paper? If they do, what do you think is the rationale for that, given your assertion that readers are devoted to the subject of food? It's hard for me to buy, at least on its face, the argument that newspapers in places like Houston, San Francisco or Atlanta "recycle canned material because they don't have the staff to fill the section with their own stories." Are you saying that they can't pay reasonable rates, or that they won't? Or is it that they can't find people to fill the need at any price? ← No, I didn't mean to say that the big papers use canned material. Most don't. And in the case of the SF Chronicle, the food section pretty much IS the paper. I mean that small ones do. Go to any meeting of the AFJ (American society of food journalists) and you meet dozens of beleaguered food editors at small papers who put out fairly large sections, write the restaurant reviews and have absolutely no help. They do subsidize the rest of the paper, often, are generally looked down on by the "real" journalists, and have to use wire stories because they can't possibly write enough to fill the sections. As for subsidizing the paper; things are changing with the consolidation of supermarkets and the proliferation of direct mail and inserts, but when I was at the LA Times the food section was the cash cow. It was hugely fat with ads, and generally ignored by the editors of the paper who couldn't have cared less how badly edited and produced it was. That changed, but the attitude persists in many places.

Which Paris 3-star do you think doesn't deserve a star? Also, what did you think about Luger getting a star while Katz's was not even mentioned in the Michelin Guide for New York? Which of those things surprised you more? ← Grand Vefour. Beautiful and stupid. I was not surprised that they didn't mention Katz's, although I think it's a sign of how out of touch with American tastes they are. If only for history it should have been included (although I'll admit that I'm a big fan of their pastrami and the knoblewurst). And I'm on record as being a big Peter Luger fan - and I'm surprised that they recognized the quality of the meat there in spite of the atmosphere. ON the other hand, that kind of gorgeously aged American beef is exactly what you can't find in France, and exactly the sort of thing that the French crave when they come to visit.

I guess the first Chinatown place I went to was Nam Wah, where we were taken by some Chinese colleagues of my parents when I was about 4. I was utterly taken by the idea that you just ate and they counted the plates to give you the bill, and completely hooked on the idea of dim sum. But then, of course, in 66 the immigration law changed and we had this flood of new Chinese cooks into America and everything became more exciting. I think my next big epiphany was Hunan in San Francisco; I didn't know it was a parody of the cuisine, and I loved the heat, the garlic, the force of the food. Then, in the late 70s I did a long piece in New West, with three Chinese people, about regional Chinese food all over the state. It's still one of the things I'm proudest of in my career. The guys included the now-famous director Wayne Wang, who was then working in a Chinatown community center, and the now-famous architect Fu-Tung Cheng. Fu-Tung's mother was very helpful in this too. And I really learned about Chinese food, and how subtle it could be, and how varied it was from region to region. Then I moved to LA, and there I really learned about the differences in the food. Which is all a long way of saying that after living in California, it's hard to get very excited about Chinese food in New York. We just don't have the kind of monied, sophisticated Chinese eaters who support great restaurants. So it's hard for me to get really enthusiastic about local Chinese restaurants. They just don't have the same quality as those on the other coast - or those in Canada - where most of the big Chinese money resides. I know, too long an answer. Short answer is that I'm addicted to the chiles in black beans at Grand Sichuan, and the Au Zhu chicken when it's made with the freshly killed birds. I love the soup dumplings at Goody's. I love the boiled shrimp at any of the places that have them live in tanks (Ocean Garden). I think Ping is a terrific chef who doesn't usually do what he's capable of doing. And if I want a great banquet to impress a Chinese visitor, I'll call up Michael Tong at Shun Lee, who can put on a breathtakingly good spread if you call ahead and don't care what it costs. He'll bring in live eels, he'll do impressive set pieces (Pandas at Play), he'll get fish maw and giant shark fins and soak kidneys in ten changes of milk until they're as soft as clouds.

Balance is easy. Zanne Stewart, who's the Executive Food Editor, has been here more than 30 years. Kempy Minifie's been here almost thirty. My assistant, Robin, has been here almost 25. The staff here has the DNA of the magazine in their bones, and they're the barometer. When I came, they all wanted the magazine to change, to stretch, to be more than it had been. You pretty much have to change just to stay the same. If we were putting out the same magazine that Mr. McAusland started 65 years ago, it would be absurd. My basic feeling is that you put out the best magazine you can, the one you most want to read, and hope that other people will want to read it too. Otherwise you're stuck doing it by formula, trying to second guess a public, relying on focus groups. And what you end up with is just dull.

It's a question I get asked a lot, and the answer always changes. It could be that meal on a hill in Crete, or the one in Shenzen where Bruce Cost and I had to point at the food on other tables, or at L'Ami Louis when the waiter organized all the kids in the room for a game of catch out in the street and the whole place became one big party. Or maybe the New Year's Eve dinner up in the mountains of Tuscany, the one that went on for hours and I gradually lost my voice so that by the time we'd had the 7th fish I couldn't talk, just clap my appreciation. But today the best meal I ever ate was one that Alice Waters and Paul Bertolli cooked at the Phelps Winery years ago. IT was an incredible meal, served on long wooden tables in amazing golden light, a meal that went on all afternoon and into the night, one slow course after another, served at such a perfect pace that we never got full. The wines were all Joe's, I think, and all wonderful. And the company was fabulous - it was all the California food people, and I think that both Gilbert LeCoze and Barbara Tropp were also there, having a brief romance. What did we eat? The dish I remember best was the tripe - perfectly cooked with little crisp croutons on top. And the pears with gorgonzola - all that softness, sweetness, flavor.