Insatiable: Gael Greene

By JULIETTE ROSSANT Which came first, food writers or the chefs, restaurants, and food they write about? In the case of super chefs, one of the three key ingredients is celebrity: getting the press to write about you in ways that celebrate (or at times exaggerate) what you cook. Gael Greene, longtime restaurant critic for New York Magazine, made it her business to know the food world intimately. She tells her life story -- including quickies with Elvis Presley and everyone else she has ever slept with, in Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess (Warner Books 2006). One of the most significant restaurants in New York in the late 1970s and 80s was The Quilted Giraffe, Barry Wine and Susan Wine's experimental mecca that nurtured the talents of super chef Tom Colicchio among others (see Super Chef, pp. 179-180 ). Gael captures the spirit of the Quilted Giraffe: Barry, wide-eyed and usually smiling, remained sweetly obsessed, a perfectionist with a passion for quality, the urge to experiment, and the gene for high risk. He delighted in circling the room, introducing guests to a two-foot rod of Japanese radish. "It's so hairy" a woman squealed. "It tastes like potato," Barry would announce proudly. (p. 265) There are certainly racier and more sex-obsessed sections of Gael's book, but what is so wonderful is that she captures the essence of chefs and restaurants and places them in context. The Quilted Giraffe on the East Coast and Chez Panisse, among other cutting-edge restaurants (mainly French), may have changed American food, but reporters and restaurant critics were the ones to spread the gospel beyond rarified society (and those few cities that were part of the early revolution) to the mass consuming public. Gael writes of the other food writers, among them James Beard, M. F. K. Fisher, and Craig Claiborne, with awe, gratitude, and camaraderie. And Gael is nothing if not opionated: "We are going to have a nice salade composeé," said Julia [Child] in that rolling profundo that promised if she could cook it, you could, too... I must admit I was disappointed. Disappointed? Shocked. What did I expect? Nothing complicated. A lovely cold pork roast. A deviled chicken. I was not demanding a suckling pig turning on a spit or a laborious ballontine requiring birds be boned and gelatin gelled... To be with Julia... it should have been enough. What an ingrate I am to have expected lukewarm loup de mer with a sauce gribiche. Forever the Insatiable Critic. (p. 241) Sometimes the Insatiable finds satisfaction: I remember thinking, Okay, show me. And to my astonishment, she [Alice Waters] did. There was something radically daring in the simplicity of every perfect vegetable, the pristine leaves of baby greens that had not yet hit kitchens in New York, the clarity of an oddly shaped tomato. Until that moment, heirloom meant a hideous vase you dare not send to the thrift shop because it had been your grandmother's. If there were zealots reviving forgotten spieces of tomato or twenty strains of heirloom potatoes on the East Coast, I was not yet aware of it. (p. 172) Insatiable addresses the question of what a good food writer has to know in order to write well. Gael's answer is clear: know everything -- through experience. Book details: Publisher Amazon.com Barnes & Noble Previous articles: Celebrity Cooking Showdown: Low-Brow [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging --> back to superchefblog