Eating My Words

by SHERATON MIMI

• ISBN13: 9780060501099
• ISBN10: 006050109X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-14
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

What's it like to be a food writer? What's it like dining at some of the world's best restaurants, as well as some of the worst? What's it like to share your opinion about food and restaurants with readers around the world? Mimi Sheraton is one of the most renowned food writers and restaurant reviewers in the country. And perhaps the most frequently asked question is, How did she do it? Her response is simple: "Live my life." Now, in this entertaining and candid memoir, the doyenne of food critics provides a heartfelt and poignant look at the events of her extraordinary life. A devoted journalist, Mimi's engaging style and meticulous research have made her the standard by which restaurant reviewing and food criticism in the United States is measured. In Eating My Words, she describes how she developed her passion for writing about food and travel. Witty and straightforward, Mimi takes you on an engrossing journey of memorable meals, unforgettable people and outrageous experiences. Travel with Mimi from her childhood growing up in a food-loving Brooklyn family with a very demanding mother ("You call that a chicken?") and a father in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business, through her college years in Manhattan and her rise to fame. Best known for her work as the restaurant critic at the New York Times, Mimi relates her experiences from how she landed the job there to why she left eight years later. As a journalist, she has tasted and reported on some of the world's finest cuisine, including three-starred French restaurants, and on some of the most dismal food imaginable, from hospital and public school meals to the often unrecognizable fare served in airplanes and fast food chains. Forthright and never afraid to be controversial, Mimi talks about the importance of a reviewer's anonymity and the excitement of making a new culinary discovery like the now notorious Rao's, and then sharing it through her writing. She reveals some of her most challenging moments, right down to a masked appearance on French television with several well-known French chefs that ended in a mini-brawl. Fueled by her passion for food, wine and travel, Mimi Sheraton's memoir is a degustation that is as engaging as it is enlightening. A true reflection of this bon vivant's voracious appetite for life, Eating My Words is an irresistible treat you will savor word by word ... and will feel utterly satisfied.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction---Fed Up	1	(10)
The Making of a Critic
Like Mother, Like Daughter	11	(16)
A Taste of New York	27	(12)
Nibbling Around the Edges	39	(16)
A Table Before Me	55	(32)
Achieving Critical Mass
My Time at the Times	87	(17)
Don't Call Me Mimi	104	(24)
Operation Otto	128	(10)
What Makes a Restaurant Tick?	138	(20)
The Care and Feeding of Passengers, Patients and Other Captives	158	(23)
Matters of Taste
I Eat Hot!	181	(18)
We Eat What We Are	199	(11)
Season to Taste	210	(14)
Eating My Words	224

Excerpts

Eating My Words
An Appetite For Life

Chapter One

Like Mother, Like Daughter

"Today you're a maven of dreck ..."

"Good morning, Mother."

It is 8:10 A.M. and I know that my mother has been aching to talk since 6:30, when the New York Times arrives at her door. Unable to contain herself any longer after reading one of my most negative Friday restaurant reviews, she finally calls, certain that I will be awake.

"You think what you do is so nice?" she begins. "A man invests a lot of money and builds a beautiful restaurant and has a family to support. He has customers and everything is fine, until one day, in walks Big Mouth. Then you write and say that this was too salty, and that was too dry, and this was too that, and pretty soon nobody goes there. Who cares if people eat in a terrible place? If you don't like it, go someplace else. Do you think everyone knows what good is? And even if you're right, what business is it of yours?"

It would have been futile to explain that my business was exactly that, and, furthermore, that I was building a gratifying following.Just as pointless would be the information that I had won an award,or that I was told by several restaurant owners that they were ableto get bank loans on the basis of my two-star rating.

I knew why the review had earned me the accolade maven ofdreck -- a connoisseur of crap in Yiddish. The subject was an Italianrestaurant where I reported on the mussels, snails and eels I hadeaten, foods my mother never would touch and so regarded as unfitfor all humans. It was a strange line in the sand drawn by a womanwho not only ate but prepared raw and cooked clams and oysters,every kind of fish, innards like brains, sweetbreads, heart, liver,kidneys and lungs and who, when making pickled herring, mashedthe spleen (miltz) to add creaminess to the brine.

"We don't eat mussels, snails and eels," she said. By "we," Iknew she meant Jews.

"I don't know about we," I answered, "but you haven't a kosherbone in your body and the we you're talking about don't eat clamsor oysters, either. You also say we don't eat olive oil, but that willbe news to Sephardic Jews and many Israelis. So who are we?"

"A sane person can't talk to you. You'd better speak to yourfather."

Many readers of my Times columns shared my mother's opinionof me as nitpicker and busybody, questioning not only my aestheticjudgments but my morals and my sanity. Among such was aBrooklyn minister who wrote, "If Mimi Sheraton were invited to dinner beyond the Pearly Gates, she would probably complain thatthe light was too bright." To which I replied, "If it were, I would."

When I described a tiny, succulent soft-shell crab as looking likean infant's hand, a reader warned the editors, "Be careful. Yourcritic is becoming cannibalistic."

Similarly, in a review of a very authentic Japanese restaurant, Ireported on first being shocked to see lobster sashimi presented as asplit lobster, still energetically writhing on my plate. Recoveringquickly, I dug in and so was able to praise the meat's silken textureand airy, sea-breeze flavor.

"Your restaurant critic has lost her mind," came the first of severalirate letters. "She is now eating live animals."

My answer now, as then, is that it is arguable whether any creaturethat has been cut in half is really alive just because nerves aretwitching. Or to point out that devotees of clams and oysters on thehalf shell better be eating them live if the eaters want to stay thatway. Perhaps bivalve mollusks arouse little sympathy because theyhave less personality than crustaceans and their stubborn fight forlife is apparent only to shuckers. In any event, I assured readersthat even I had humanitarian limits, citing my refusal of a dinnerinvitation in Hong Kong in 1960, when the special treat was to bemonkey brains, served as a dip in the chopped-open head stillattached to the live -- or, at least, quivering -- animal.

One of my most persistent critics through the years sent postcardsto the Times, sometimes addressed to me by name, othertimes only to "Maven af Pork Ass," a sobriquet that did not stumpthe mail-room staff at all. Whether neatly typed or handwritten ina wild sprawl, these picture postcards came from various restaurantswhenever I reported on eating pork. Each was signed with adifferent female name, once that of the legendary actress MollyPicon. Having obviously read me for some time, the writer knewthat my grandfather had been a rabbi, who, I was warned, must be turning in his grave. I was admonished to think more about myancestral heritage and less about pork ass, and was advised, as aparting thought, "You have too much to say in general, anyway."My mother couldn't have said it any better.

Although my parents were proud of my working at the New YorkTimes, they hated my role as a restaurant critic, my father mainlybecause he feared I might be harmed by an irate owner. Fortunately,he needn't have worried. I was never even threatened, no lessharmed, nor was I ever offered a bribe. My mother, although myfiercest defender, expressed her unconditional love through unrelentingcriticism that she clearly meant to be constructive -- for myown good. And not only with food. In summer, she said my dresslooked too warm. In winter, she said my coat did not look warmenough.When I told her I was taking a second trip to Europe, sheadvised, "Take a really good look this time, so you don't have to goback again!" And when I had my apartment walls painted white, shechided, "For the same money, you could have a color!"

Eating My Words
An Appetite For Life. Copyright © by Mimi Sheraton. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life by Mimi Sheraton
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