Book Review: Mini-Review

Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table

Random House, 302 pp., $24.95

Like many regional newspaper food writers eager to learn from a master, I studied Ruth Reichl's restaurant reviews, first in the Los Angeles Times and later in The New York Times. I especially appreciated her wit and obvious insight into the inner workings of restaurants but knew almost nothing about the background and training that qualified her to be one of the most respected (and feared) restaurant critics in the country. After reading her first memoir, Tender at the Bone (Broadway Books, $14), I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that although we had very different backgrounds, we had several things in common. We'd both had contentious relationships with difficult mothers, honed our cooking skills in communal living situations in the early Seventies, and actually cooked in restaurants before making careers writing about them. Feeling a new kinship with the author, I eagerly awaited the second volume of her memoir as if it were a letter from a long lost friend.

Reichl's new book, Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table, picks up her life story in the early Seventies. She's married to her first husband, still living in the co-op house on Channing Way in Berkeley, and just beginning to seriously consider a career as a food writer. The author's early days as a restaurant writer for New West (later California) magazine provide fascinating fodder for memoir. The book opens with a totally unexpected liaison with her then-editor Colman Andrews (now the editor of Saveur) which leads to one of every foodie's romantic fantasies: a 10-day whirlwind lover's tryst in Paris. It was coffee and croissants in sidewalk cafes, incredible meals at Tour d'Argent and Boyer, vintage champagne, foie gras, whole truffles, cognac -- all consumed in the company of a handsome bon vivant with great connections and a seductive appetite. Quite a story hook to inspire the envy (and continued reading) of any food lover. (The story of Reichl's affair with Andrews generated a fair amount of buzz about the book in the national food press, and the publicity certainly contributed to its spot on bestseller lists.)

Reichl's first job provided her with a front-row seat for the development of what we've come to know as "California cuisine." She takes readers along as she covers the early restaurant work of chefs Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Michael McCarty, Bruce Cost, and Ken Frank. She's been lucky enough to interview and become friends with the late culinary prose icon MFK Fisher, attend garlic festivals at Chez Panisse, and be one of the first American food writers to visit the newly opened mainland China. For added spice, she includes tales of culinary snafus such as an inedible Thanksgiving dinner at the legendary Booneville Inn and a hilarious five-star chef disaster in Barcelona. Throughout the book, one of the most revealing aspects is that Reichl's experience as a professional cook put her at ease in chefs' kitchens and further informed her writing about their work. Along the way, the thread of her personal life is woven into the story; the affair that finally ends one marriage and begins another, a move to Los Angeles to become the restaurant critic and then food editor of the Los Angeles Times, the heart-wrenching loss of one child and near-miraculous birth of another. It's both a career and life trajectory that make for very interesting reading, as Reichl reveals herself, foibles and all, as a woman who embraces life with appetite and gusto.

Busy foodies who want to enjoy Ruth Reichl's further adventures at the table while they're cooking now have a "listen and cook" option. Random House Audio Books has a series of food-related titles newly available on audio cassette, making it possible to pop in a tape and hear all the delicious details of illicit love and great food in Paris in Ruth Reichl's own voice while preparing a recipe from the book. Listeners may also choose to hear chef Anthony Bourdain read about the creativity and chaos in the restaurant underbelly of New York City from his Kitchen Confidential or solve the tasty culinary mystery Sticks and Scones with author Diane Mott Davidson and her intrepid caterer/sleuth Goldy Schultz.