Two foodie icons—Ruth Reichl, the former Gourmet editor and food critic for the New York Times, and Eric Ripert, the chef and owner of famed New York City restaurant Le Bernardin—made a stop in New Jersey on Thursday.
Appearing as part of Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival, the pair spoke to a sold-out crowd at the Glen Ridge Country Club about Reichl’s new book, The Paris Novel, as well as food critics, cooking and, of course, restaurants.
Ripert, 59, who is French, is widely considered one of the best chefs in the world. He earned four stars from the New York Times for his famous restaurant at the age of 29, and three stars from the Michelin Guide.
Reichl’s novel, her second, is an adventure about food, art and fashion in 1980s Paris—partly based on her own travels there. It follows a young woman who goes to Paris after her mother dies and leaves her with a one-way plane ticket and a note that reads: “Go to Paris.” Alone in a foreign city, she meets a who’s who of the Parisian literary, art and culinary worlds.
Many readers first encountered Reichl when she was the much-admired restaurant critic for the New York Times. She’s also the author of several memoirs, including Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires.
At the event, Ripert, who is now friends with Reichl, said he remembered when he first heard that the Times had a new restaurant critic back in 1993. All the top chefs in New York, he recalled, were nervous about what she would be like. Ripert had also heard that Reichl hated French food.
“When you came to New York, the food critics of the New York Times were really powerful,” Ripert recalled to Reichl. “At the time, you could close or open a restaurant depending on the review. I never told you this, but before you arrived, everyone was faxing pictures of you, saying that Ruth Reichl was coming to New York. We were so scared of you—we thought, We’re going to get destroyed.”
Reichl remembered that, too: “I knew there were pictures of me floating around, and that someone said, ‘She has a lot of curly hair, and she smiles a lot.’ I thought, Oh, that’s good. They think whenever someone in the restaurant smiles a lot, it must be me.”
At that time, Reichl had moved to New York, where she’d grown up, after 20 years in California, where she’d fallen in love with Thai, Korean and Mexican food—which were not popular at the time. Contrary to the rumors, she loved French food—but “had a sense that there were all these [other] foods that New Yorkers needed to discover,” she recalled. “So I did come with a kind of mission. I thought, It’s time that somebody besides the French has a shot.”
In 1995, Reichl gave Le Bernardin—Ripert’s flagship restaurant serving modern French cuisine, his first four-star review in the Times.
“I was 29 years old, and you basically saved my job and my life,” Ripert said. Le Bernardin went on to receive six more four-star reviews from the Times—an unprecedented achievement. Ripert would go on to appear on several TV cooking shows, including Top Chef, A Cook’s Tour and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Ripert and Bourdain were close friends until Bourdain’s death in 2018.
In Reichl’s novel, the main character, Stella, tastes her first oysters and discovers a passion for food in the City of Lights. Every meal in the book, Reichl said, is based on a meal that she actually ate in Paris.
“One of the reasons I chose to set [the book] in 1983 is that when I went to Paris, I was living on $2 a day—which in those days, you could do,” she said. (A year later, she was named the restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times—her first job with an expense account.)
“Stella is experiencing all of this for the very first time,” she explained. “So I got to imagine—really imagine—what it’s like for someone who’s never experienced pleasure, to give herself to the food. And it was very fun for me to do that.”
The Montclair Literary Festival continues this weekend; the lineup includes historian and retired Princeton professor Nell Irvin Painter. Find more info on the festival here.
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