A love letter to Gael Greene, who treated restaurant criticism as erotic bloodsport.
Gael Greene wore a hat. Always with an extravagant brim, always pulled low over her brow—at first to mask her identity and later, probably, to announce it. This was back when anonymity was possible for restaurant critics , and Gael believed such theatrics deserved to be part of the gig’s mythos. She lived long enough to see this through: On November 1, Gael died at home at the age of 88.’s original restaurant critic, she would come to codify the game as much as she changed it.
And then there’s the stuff that does hold up. It would be a stretch to call Gael a woman of the people, but she loathed snobbery, and reserved her sharpest daggers for the restaurants that traded in it. She was funny—voicey, we might call it today—at a time when situating criticism within the personality and identity of the critic was not the convention. “Most of the appetizers were first rate,” then-critic Moira Hodgson wrote of iconic Tribeca bistro the Odeon in 1980.
with bubblegum and shoelaces, and I was having dinner with Gael Greene. She wanted me to call her Barbara. So I did. After dinner “Barb” and I shuffled out onto the street and got her to a cab, and with the door open and the wind up Sixth Avenue setting all the red feathers a-ripple, she grabbed my wrists. “Here we go,” I thought, willing my pores open, the better to absorb her wisdom that was surely, imminently coming.
She clapped when I modeled the muff and sent up a little plume of powdered sugar from the madeleines I’d brought as an offering. She rifled through boxes of handbags, pausing occasionally to tell me about the French train ticket she has never removed from the pocket of one, or the lacy handkerchief she rediscovered in another. She kept a rack of negligees in her bathroom and fished out a long mauve number that she said, in a pinch, would ball up very nicely inside a purse.
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