Bal Harbour

W hen it comes to my relationship with chefs, I've got it pretty good. In 2000, my wife and I celebrated our wedding—an announced elopement—with an intimate lunch personally prepared by Alfred Portale at New York's Gotham Bar and Grill, and a month later with a party at Union Pacific, where Rocco DiSpirito was a phenomenon. For my book "Knives at Dawn," I was welcomed behind the scenes at the French Laundry, Thomas Keller's landmark Napa Valley restaurant. And so on… It's been 20 years now that I've been writing about the professional kitchen. But I'll tell you something: As a chronicler of chefs, I've got nothing on Ruth Reichl. Reichl's place in the food world isn't news. It's the stuff of legend and lore: Her life and career trace the evolution of new American cuisine, from her formative days in Berkeley, California, to her coverage of the Los Angeles restaurant scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, to her stints as The New York Times restaurant critic in the 1990s and then as editor of Gourmet magazine. Oh, and she has immortalized the double helix of her life and its culinary backdrop in a series of beloved, best-selling memoirs. The riches of Reichl's life render the privileges of mine positively paltry by comparison: How quaint that Rocco cooked for my wedding, when Ruth put him on the cover of Gourmet, the first chef ever featured there. Alfred treated us to lunch? Well, Ruth once helped Alfred cook at a benefit event she was covering. Those weeks observing at the French Laundry felt like a coup, but really what were they next to the fact that Reichl helped make the restaurant when she wrote in The New York Times, in 1997, that it was "the most exciting place to eat in the United States"? And yet, it wasn't until I researched my book about the American chef movement of the 1970s and 1980s, "Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession" (Ecco/HarperCollins), that I truly understood the chasm between Ruth's life and mine, not merely the superiority of her titles and output, but of something greater and more uniquely hers. My book interviews conjured a moment of breathtaking innocence and access. Where today publicists, managers, agents and other RUTH REICHL ENVY She blazed a trail creating a genre of restaurant and chef chronicling that, in today's culinary era, is impossible to replicate. Author Andrew Friedman sits down with the inimitable Ruth Reichl. PORTRAIT BY EVAN SUNG 98 BAL HARBOUR

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