Garlic and Sapphires

Garlic and Sapphires is Ruth Reichl’s 2005 memoir of her years as a food critic for the New York Times. While there, she championed ethnically diverse restaurants and went to extreme lengths—even donning disguises and false identities—to get the authentic, “common woman” dining experience rather than let restaurants cater to her because of her high status. The title of the book is taken from a line in the T.S. Eliot poem “Four Quartets” about “garlic and sapphires in the mud.” Reichl has served as a food critic for both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and was Gourmet magazine’s editor-in-chief from 1999 until it folded in 2009. She has received four James Beard awards for her food writing.

Reichl sprinkles the prose chapters of her memoir with clips of relevant restaurant reviews and her own recipes.

The book opens in 1992, as Reichl moves across the country to assume her new position as restaurant critic for the New York Times. She has misgivings about the transition, worrying about rumors that the New York Times is a “snake pit” filled with people who would stab her in the back just to get ahead. She describes her position at the Los Angeles Times, in contrast, as “cozy” and welcoming. Her husband persuades her that the change will be a good one, reminding her that this new job will make her the most powerful restaurant critic in the world. The New York Times’s clout is unmatched.



But as Reichl discovers, she was right to have misgivings. The job isn’t easy. Her approach to food is considered controversial for the paper. The previous critic, Bryan Miller, is a Francophile who reserved his four-star ratings for haute French establishments. Reichl is different, eager to sing the praises of ethnic establishments like sushi bars and noodle joints. Her reviews, too, reflect her personal voice, imbued with bits of overheard dialogue and personal digressions. Some readers and editors are horrified at her comparatively casual approach. Others see her as a needed breath of fresh air.

Bryan Miller himself targets her approach to criticism. A gossip column tips Reichl off that Miller, even though he retired of his own free will, has been sending letters to Reichl’s bosses disparaging her and her work. He claims she is “destroying the system” that he and other critics from former generations strived to build. Reichl is mortified, but declines to comment on the gossip item.

The crux of the book is when Reichl decides she needs a way to dine undercover, without anyone at the restaurants she reviews knowing that she is Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic. Reichl is not interested in receiving red-carpet treatment. She wants to experience what the ordinary diner would experience for the full picture of the restaurant.



So, she embarks on an unusual scheme. Reichl enlists the help of an old friend of her mother’s, Claudia Banks, who happens to be a former acting coach. With Claudia’s help, Reichl develops different disguises for herself so she can’t be recognized by restaurant staff when she dines. Reichl develops costumes, makeup, wigs, and whole personas for each disguise, even getting credit cards under false names to keep up the pretense. The first persona Reichl uses is “Molly Hollis,” a dowdy woman from the Midwest in unflattering attire.

In character as Molly, Reichl goes to upper-crust restaurant Le Cirque for a meal. There, she faces a long wait for her table and her food. A waiter takes her wine list out of her hands so he can give it to a more important table. Later, she dines again as herself and is given VIP treatment—the maître d’ tells her they are making the King of Spain wait while they seat her at her table—and contrasts her experiences in her subsequent review. She knocks Le Cirque down from four stars to three, a catastrophic reckoning.

Over time, Reichl creates new personas, such as Chloe, the divorcee in a little black dress and blonde wig who talks like Marilyn Monroe. Or Brenda, whom Reichl describes as the best version of herself. Some personae are less pleasant; she discovers a vindictive side of herself in the bitter Emily. Reichl describes restaurants as a kind of theater, and she makes that idea even more true for herself.



During her tenure, Reichl does transform New York Times restaurant reviews. She covers Indian, Latino, and Asian eateries with as much respect as she would European dining. And with her disguises, she finds out what service is like for the diner off the street, not just those with clout.

Eventually, though, Reichl’s personae get out of hand. One night when she is Chloe, she agrees to a date with a self-proclaimed oenophile who buys her a drink and asks her to dinner the next night at a restaurant she is about to review anyway. Reichl goes to the dinner in spite of her husband’s misgivings. Afterwards, she begins to realize she is going too far inside her disguises. She realizes that she is losing herself, and that she is also becoming too self-important: her opinions on food aren’t fact. After six years at the New York Times, Reichl decides to leave the world of restaurant reviews to take on a new position as the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine.

Garlic and Sapphires received largely positive reviews. Readers and critics admired her writing style, though a New York Times review noted that there is a “dark undercurrent” to the alternate personae Reichl adopts “that its author barely seems to grasp.” However, the Washington Post described the book as “laugh-out-loud funny” nonetheless. Reichl has written additional books and cookbooks, including Not Becoming My Mother, Gourmet Today, and the novel Delicious!.