San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Reporter set new standard for food writing
Gael Greene, who reinvented the art of the restaurant review with sass and sensuality in four decades as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, died Tuesday at her home in an assisted living facility in Manhattan. She was 88.
The cause was cancer, said her niece Dana Sachs Stoddard.
Until her death, Greene had continued to serve as chairwoman of Citymeals on Wheels, a New York charity she helped create in the early 1980s to provide food for the elderly.
Greene, a former reporter for the New York Post, brought little more than a keen appetite and boundless energy to the critic’s job in 1968, when the editor Clay Felker asked her to review restaurants for New York, a new magazine he had started with graphic designer Milton Glaser, turning what had been a Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune into a standalone glossy.
She embarked on her new assignment with trepidation. “I felt that I was an impostor, and how was I ever going to do this?” she told Restaurant Insider in 2008. “I definitely thought they were all going to figure me out very quickly. So that is why I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll just go into this like a reporter: who, what, why, where,
when.’ ”
That she did, with great flair. A fan of the New Journalism, she put a premium on lively prose and colorful detail, throwing overboard the pompousness of the professional gourmets who dominated the profession.
At Lespinasse, Greene rhapsodized over “the layered perfumes of a jumbo sea scallop wearing a sesame tuile chapeau afloat in a curry-scented puddle”; at the Cafe Chauveron, she raved about “infant vegetables tasting as if they’d been grown in butter.”
As an avid chronicler of French nouvelle cuisine and its
offshoots and of the rapid transformation of dining culture in New York, Greene soon set “the industry standard for sensuous, brilliant and bitchy food writing,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1982.
Gael Greene was born on Dec. 22, 1933, in Detroit. Her father, Nathaniel, owned Nate Greene’s, a well-known clothing store. Her mother, Saralee (Ginsberg) Greene, was a homemaker.
At the University of Michigan, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1955, she wrote for the school newspaper and for the Detroit Free Press.
After graduation, she was hired by United Press International, which on one memorable occasion sent her to cover a show by Elvis Presley in Detroit. She wangled an invitation to the singer’s hotel room, where one thing led to another. As she left, Presley asked her to order him a fried egg sandwich from room service.
Later, she wrote in her 2006 memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” she could not remember much about the sex, but the sandwich stayed in her mind: “Yes, the totemic fried egg sandwich. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”
A one-week tryout in 1957 at the New York Post led to a fulltime job as a general assignment reporter. In her three years at the newspaper, she specialized in undercover stories. She pretended to be pregnant to report on a baby-trafficking ring and exposed high-pressure sales tactics at Arthur Murray Dance Studios. Her experiences at the Post provided much of the material for her first book, “Don’t Come Back Without It,” published in 1960.
In 1961 she married one of her editors at the paper, Donald H. Forst, who would later edit New York Newsday and the Village Voice. They divorced 13 years later. A brother, James Greene, is her only immediate survivor.
Gael Greene was earning a good living as a freelance writer, when Felker approached her about joining New York magazine.
In no time, her swaggering, fearless style made her one of the magazine’s star writers. She made short work of the Colony, an old society standby, and skewered the snobbery of Manhattan’s finer French restaurants.
To avoid detection, she began favoring large hats pulled down low.
In 1981, Greene read an article in the New York Times about a city program that provided older homebound New Yorkers with weekly meals but that could not afford to stay open on weekends. Indignant, she joined with cookbook writer and teacher James Beard to fill the gap, rounding up donors in the food and hospitality industry. Today, the charity they started, Citymeals on Wheels, pays for more than 2 million meals a year.
In addition to her memoir, she wrote the guidebooks “Sex and the College Girl” (1964) and “Delicious Sex” (1986) and two erotic novels, “Blue Skies, No Candy” (1976) and “Dr. Love” (1982).
“I have dedicated myself to the wanton indulgence of my senses,” she said. “And I shall consider it fitting and divine if on my deathbed my last words echo those of Pierrette, the sister of Brillat-Savarin, who died at table shortly before her one-hundredth birthday: ‘Bring on the dessert. I think I’m about to die.’ ”