Editor of Gourmet magazine tries to look out for everyday people

When Ruth Reichl was the restaurant critic for the New York Times, she showed her readers the way to everything — from the city's finest high-end restaurants to really good sushi bars.

But one thing was the same almost every time.

"I had this couple I kept in my head," Reichl told a rapt audience during her appearance at the Salt Lake City Library Saturday as part of the Dewey Lecture Series.

Reichl's fictional couple, invented to stiffen her spine when she considered being "too nice" to a restaurant in a review, were not connoisseurs of the New York scene. In fact, they went out once a year.

"They had taken my advice because I was too wimpy to tell the truth, and they had gotten a bad meal," she said. "You can't do that. ... The only way to get good restaurants is by demanding them."

Reichl's presentation burnished her reputation as a mostly unabashed "food sensualist" who looks out for everyday people, whether at restaurants or with the 10-minute meals added this past year to Gourmet magazine, which Reichl has edited since 1999.

Audience members groaned with longing as Reichl described eating apricot tarts with olive oil ice cream, hollowed-out eggshells filled with custard and pureed truffles or thin-crusted pizza topped with lardo, the subcutaneous fat of acorn-fed pigs that is cured in marble caves in Italy.

They laughed at Reichl's description of her recent forays into Hollywood, where producers and writers have tried to adapt her 2005 memoir "Garlic and Sapphires" for television and film.

"It's like falling through the rabbit hole," she said, telling the story of "Carrington Woods," a big-shot producer who wooed her to California with promises of an HBO series and not a little hyperbole.

"He lowered his voice, and he said this without a trace of irony: 'You know, food is the new sex,"" Reichl said. When she stopped laughing, she agreed to travel to California and even set up a meeting at a local restaurant with "Carrington" and some of the project's writers.

That meeting starred La Brea Bakery owner Nancy Silverton and celebrity chef Mario Batali, who welcomed the Hollywood types to the unfinished dining room of a not-yet-open restaurant.

It was during a salumi (cured Italian meat) course, as Reichl devoured lively mole salami, that a writer she called Misty said, in a shocked voice, "Is that meat?"