Bal Harbour

100 BAL HARBOUR gatekeepers control a chef's time and often serve as consigliere during interviews, then there were no such go-betweens, and the result was reporting the rest of us can only dream of. To learn more, I invited Reichl to lunch. She graciously accepted, and in December, we met on a sun-drenched weekday in the dining room of Porter House Bar and Grill, overlooking Central Park. Reichl wears her prestige well. She arrived attired in emerald green that regally offset her trademark black bangs, and made my day by inclusively asking what I was working on. I kicked off our interview with a reality check: Was my impression, and envy, of her charmed professional life accurate, or the product of misplaced nostalgia? A smile spread across her face: "Oh, you are definitely right to be jealous." Over the next hour, she transported me with stories that left me as green as her ensemble, like the year she spent covering the genesis of Michael McCarty's seminal restaurant Michael's Santa Monica, becoming such a constant presence that at one point, McCarty, who'd run out of seed money, asked if she could loan him some. "That's how blurred the lines were," said Reichl. "I spent so much time there that they forgot I was writing a story." The moment exemplifies a defining dynamic of the era: Chefs and writers had more in common than not in those days, when the American food landscape was remade. "There was this sense that nobody cared about food, but we cared and we were promoting it together," she said. A focal point was a new breed of professional cook—American, and often college-educated—who took cooking in more expressive directions. And so, Reichl, who had a masters in art history, covered chefs the way journalists covered other creative figures, introducing the public to the eclectic characters who were remaking American restaurants: Chez Panisse's Alice Waters, McCarty, Michael's chef Jonathan Waxman, Boston's Lydia Shire, and on and on. "They were all fascinating to me," she said. "It's changed now: Chefs have become very self-conscious; in those days they weren't. They were excited that you were interested in them… I just loved them." The food world of the time was minuscule. "There were a handful of us who really cared where American food went, and it was up to us to advance it any way we could," she said. The intimacy and shared mission made it perfectly natural for Reichl to ring up Waters and ask her to take her to Chino Farm, or to travel with chef friends to the opening of Mark Miller's Southwestern restaurant Coyote Café in Santa Fe in 1987, or to spend a week on the road with Wolfgang Puck to write a Los Angeles Times profile. At one crucial moment, journalist and subject, seated alongside each other, nodded off on a flight. Puck snapped awake, sharing with her a nightmare that he forgot a catering gig for a Hollywood mogul. The moment gave Reichl the insightful ending to the story. "You can't get those pieces if you have a PR person trailing along behind you," she said. Ironically, stories like that helped catapult chefs to a level of celebrity that threw down a roadblock for those of us who came later. "Restaurants occupy a completely different place in the culture now," she said. "It has to be the way it is now. It's not a fledgling industry anymore. You need to recognize that reporters do one thing, critics do one thing, and chefs do another." That observation really brings home the most defining difference between Reichl and pretty much any writer of my generation: We may be lucky enough to write about a world we love as much as she, and even to probe its history. But Reichl is a part of that history—she helped forge the very world we inhabit—and it occurred to me as I put these thoughts down that for all of the heartfelt flattery I threw her way at lunch, I left out two crucial words: Thank you. Reichl with chef Jonathan Waxman; at right, chefs Alice Waters, Cecilia Chiang and Wolfgang Puck at Reichl's wedding. COURTESY OF RUTH REICHL

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