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In her best-selling memoir Save Me the Plums, legendary food writer and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl recounts a work trip to Paris in her trademark delectable detail, from the foods she ate to the gorgeous $6,000 black dress she almost bought. “My editor said, ‘I love that chapter so much. Couldn’t you imagine a novel based on that?’” says Reichl.
And thus came her newest work of fiction, The Paris Novel, out now, which combines “all of the things that I love best: fashion and food and art and literature,” and is set in the 1980s. And while Reichl—who just this week was honored with the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award—hits up the City of Lights at least once a year, she made another trip as she was finishing up the book. “I thought, Oh, I better get all the details. Just to make sure,” she says. “It’s great to have an excuse.”
While on the road for her book tour, Ruth Reichl chatted with Condé Nast Traveler about her annual food trips with girlfriends, the East Asian hot spots she wants to travel to next, and under what circumstances she’s thrilled not to make restaurant reservations.
Her priorities when planning a trip for work vs. leisure:
The difference is when I'm doing something for work, it's pretty much all about the food. It's trying to get as many meals as you possibly can in a day. When it's just me, there's a lot of wandering time. One of my great pleasures in life is not making reservations and just finding places to eat. It's a really different experience wandering a city and saying, “Oh, that looks good. Let's go in there.” On my own, there are a lot more museums and theater [performances].
Why she loves to write on the road:
There's something about being someplace else, being out of your routine, that makes me start thinking in a different way. Especially when you're [immersed] in another language—your thoughts become more visible to you. One of the reasons I chose to set this book in the 1980s is that before the internet, before iPhones, traveling was so much richer. When you went somewhere, you were gone. The world has gotten so small. You get on a plane, you get off, you've got your whole world with you in your pocket. You can talk to your friends anytime you want to. You pay with credit cards.
As an example, I was in Yugoslavia the first year it was open to tourism, 1967, and had a really bad car accident. I was in the hospital, and my parents didn't know about it for three weeks! To me, that's always been one of the really fantastic things about traveling. You'd go to Paris and people didn't speak English, and if they did, they wouldn't speak it to you anyway. Today, everybody speaks English and you can navigate the city as if it were New York. You put it in Google Maps and you never get lost. Getting lost, to me, is also one of the great joys of traveling.
How she handles people always asking for restaurant recommendations:
I give them, but always with a caveat that I haven't been in Paris now for six months, and things change. At the moment, I've been in New York since the first of the year, so I feel very confident about giving people recommendations in the city right now. But everything changes all the time, so you just have to keep saying to people, “Look, this isn't up-to-date information. It's X months old or X years old.” There are places where things don't change that much; in Japan, the 400-year-old restaurants are still there.
One of her first times in first class:
My life changed so much when I [became editor-in-chief of] Gourmet. I wasn't used to traveling first class or staying in great hotels or any of that. I remember, I went to London and my secretary made a first-class reservation on British Airways. They feed you before you get on the plane, then they take you onto the plane right before it's about to leave, and then they make a full bed for you and they give you pajamas. I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. Then I looked at the price and I said, “Are you out of your mind?! We're not doing this again. This is crazy.”
Why the Concorde wasn’t all it was cracked up to be:
In 1986 or 1987, Pat Wells had written The Food Lover’s Guide to France and her publisher arranged a tour for journalists. There were a few of us who worked for newspapers and we couldn't take anything for free, but we went on the Concorde, which I wanted to like so much more than I did. It was amazing, but I have never had worse jet lag. We were staying at the Crillon or some [other] fabulous hotel in Paris, and I just remember it was midnight and I'm wandering around my room completely jet-lagged, unable to sleep, thinking: “I just wish I'd been on a regular flight!”
Her approach to hotels:
I'm perfectly happy to stay in really nice hotels, but it's not where I spend my money. I do these girls' trips with friends—we travel to different cities to eat. We've been doing it for more than 15 years. The first time, we went to Paris, and they said, “You're never making hotel reservations in Paris again.” I had us in such a cheap hotel. They were all horrified.
How those girls’ trips began:
[Chef] Nancy Silverton is a really good friend, and I was in LA and we were taking a walk. I get a phone call from José Andrés, who says, “Ferran [Adrià] is closing his restaurant. You've never been, and he wants you to come.” I turned to Nancy and said, “You want to go to El Bulli?” Of course, all our friends wanted to come too, so we gathered this group of people. It ended up being [only women] and my son. It was the year he graduated from college, so I said, “You can come be the one guy.”
It was a weird combination of friends—mostly food people, some not. We had such a great time. Traveling with friends is so different from traveling with your family. I wrote about that on [my Substack] La Briffe: When you're with your family, there are all kinds of expectations and tensions, which don't happen when you're with friends. It's just easy. We’ve gone to Tokyo, Paris, London, the south of France, and to Baja. Nancy has a house in Umbria so we descend on her a lot in the summer. I'm dying to go to Seoul, Taiwan, and Singapore. They're all places I want to go with the girls.
The cities with food scenes that surprised her:
I just came back from Philadelphia and I was stunned by it. I hadn't been there in probably 10, 15 years, and it blew me away with how great the food was. It didn't used to be like that! The first time I went to Tokyo, I was blown away. You expect there to be great Japanese food, but there's great every kind of food. Italian food, French food, whatever it is that you want, you can find a really good version of it in Tokyo. I hadn't anticipated that. [It’s] because they are perfectionists. Their idea is not to do a lot of things pretty well; their idea is to do one or two things perfectly. The first time I went was in the ’80s, and that was before the coffee thing happened in America. It was the best coffee I'd ever had! There were all these places that were obsessive about giving you great coffee.
Her travel pet peeve:
Americans expect everyone to speak English, and it's embarrassing to me. It's like, wait a minute, you are in their country. You should be grateful if they do speak English, and you should be trying to speak their language! You see these people going, “Oh, this stupid person who doesn't understand me,” and you want to say, “You're the stupid person!”
