One of two reasons to wear a costume to work

Just for the record, the Read Before You Eat list currently stands at 5:

Kitchen Confidential- Anthony Bourdain
Hey Waitress- Alison Owings
The Man Who Ate Everything- Jeffrey Steingarten
Salt- Mark Kurlansky
What Einstein Told His Cook- Robert L. Wolke

Well, I know it’s already been out for 6 months, but Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl has just made the cut by successfully making me re-think every single restaurant meal I’ve ever sat down to.

No, really. You may have liked the little apology canapés that the kitchen sent you last time the server spilled your drink, but compared to the royal treatment given to food critics, that’s Purina. The service gets better. The wait gets shorter. Even the size of the berries in the desert gets bigger. As the food critic for the New York Times, Reichl’s recognizable face meant that she had to use fake names, credit cards, wigs, and stage makeup to extract fair reviews.

She even manages to avoid the saccharine Oprah-isms that mar her previous two books, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples (which are both otherwise fabulous, by the way)… till the very last chapter. At that point you might as well just scan for plot. It’s hard to criticize what is basically a memoir for becoming too self-centered, but even so, some of the symbolism that she reads into her costumes smacks of angst.

That aside, this is probably the best book I can think of to throw some light on the seedy world of high-level restaurant reviewing. You will finish it wondering if there are actually two different restaurants inhabiting every dining space: the one the reviewers are experiencing, and the one the rest of us go to. The result is something like a culinary cross between Black Like Me and The Truman Show.