“I was criticized for not being interested enough in romance. But each reviewer has their own approach to it. Because, when all that blablabla stops, what will we eat? The phrase is from the first gastronomic critic that The New York Times newspaper had, Mimi Sheraton, born in New York in 1926 and died this past April 6, at the age of 97, in the same city that she ate for decades.
Tough, brave and direct, Sheraton leaves behind a career of 60 years dedicated to gastronomy, an endless number of articles in which he reviewed both luxurious restaurants and street carts, school canteens, hospitals and prisons (for which he consulted) and more. of a dozen books, including City Portraits; a Guide to 60 of the World's Great Cities (1964), From My Mother's Kitchen (1977), The Whole World Loves Chicken Soup (1995), his memoirs Eating My Words (2004) or 1,000 Foods to Eat Before you Die (2015) , which is both a travel book and a culinary dictionary.
Some of her most famous reviews take an in-depth, methodological approach, like her precise analysis of delis sandwiches, in which she took 104 corned beef and pastrami sandwiches in one day, laid them out in front of her, and determined things like , for example, how they were built or the texture and flavor of the meats. He also dedicated himself to testing all the food products in the Bloomingdale's store, in 1972: there were 1,196 products and the task took him 11 months. On another occasion, he dedicated himself to eating at all the restaurants in Greenwich Village and in 1997 he published about it, a year before the food critic did the same with the Los Angeles Pico Boulevard for L.A. weekly.
His reviews were considered 'clinical' by his industry peers. “They said it as something negative, but they were right: because my first love was science, I think that when I was little I wanted to be a doctor or a researcher. I remember when I first used a microscope, I was amazed that there were things to see if you knew how to look. I am very suspicious of the hype: I dismantle it and want to see for myself what is really there. When I look at a menu, I want to see how things are. I admire archaeologists because they dig up the surface to find things." In line, she would say about restaurants: “I am interested in the structure. Under what happens in a restaurant there is a business framework and a production plan, regardless of the restaurant”.
“I think my passion for markets is one of the reasons why I write about gastronomy. For a newcomer to a city, food markets offer an eye-opening look at how its inhabitants go about their daily routines,” Sheraton said. The daughter of Joseph Solom, a fruit and vegetable distributor, and Beatrice, a mother she considered a very good cook and also very demanding, she said that she came to writing food by chance. Food has always been discussed at home, especially at dinner time: the quality of one product or another, how the recipe of the day was made and how it was prepared by her aunt or in a restaurant, if the products she received his father had some singularity, etc. "Before considering being a food critic, she was already pretty critical of food."
The journalist, who trained in marketing and journalism, studied at the NYU School of Commerce and began her professional life as a copywriter for home products, as well as an interior designer. That job for Seventeen magazine gave her the opportunity to travel and begin to explore her interest in food. But it would not be until December 1975 that she achieved her first big milestone: she became the first woman to hold the position of food critic for The New York Times newspaper. She would do so until 1983, and later she would continue working as a freelance for media such as Vanity Fair, Time, New Yorker or Condé Nast Traveler.
He paid cash for the tickets, which he later passed on in full to the media for which he wrote, and he visited each place on more than one occasion. Three times was the required number for The New York Times, but he came to go to a restaurant up to 12 times to ensure the sensations it produced in him, according to what he recounted in Eating my words (Thorndike, 2005). In total, he had calculated in 2013 that he ate, professionally, in 21,170 restaurants in 49 countries. During her career, she ate dinner every weekday at a restaurant with her husband and another couple. She and she did it disguised, so they wouldn't recognize her, with a wig and glasses. She was the first to do so, since she considered anonymity essential to be able to develop her work in the conditions she wanted. “The more time I spent in my role as a food critic, the more convinced I became that the unknown customer has a completely different experience than a famous chef or well-known critic. It's actually like they eat at different restaurants,” she said in her memoir.
When he left that role, he explained that he continued to dine out at least 3 or 4 nights, with the intention of finding out what was going on in the city but without the obligation to try the entire menu. Of the present, she said to The Culinary Institute of America: “The fashion for the new seems very unappealing to me now. The cooks cook for the press and for the other cooks. They do what fashion designers do.”
"Restaurants want to be judged by their intentions and not by their results." That's how critical he was with the attention chefs received from the press. In 2004, at the age of 78, in the gap left by a schedule full of travel and writing (in which he said his mythical phrase "I'm too old to be so young"), he expressed himself like this in an interview with Alex Witcher for The New York Times: “Spend too much time on chefs' philosophies. They are not Picasso, after all, this is eating. So I don't want to hear anything about the intentions of the chefs. Let them call me when they do it well”.
His judgment was implacable and he did not hesitate to point out the failures to anyone, and that generated everything from lawsuits to angry letters from readers and restorers. The most notorious starred the French chef Paul Bocuse himself. This and other French tri-stars made him experience one of the most unfortunate episodes caused by a dispute between cooks and a journalist. According to Sheraton, it was a "semi-critical" review of Bocuse's Lyon restaurant, L'Auberge du Pont de Collonges, that sparked the fury. It also didn't help that her articles on Michel Guérard or Alain Chapel weren't entirely positive. They claimed things like that Sheraton had never been there, but Bocuse went further in the offense, stating to the French media that the journalist, to write such things, "must have a very unsatisfactory sex life."
With all that, she says that the French press went crazy, and that she was even invited to French television, where she appeared in disguise to maintain her anonymity in front of André Daguin, the Troisgros brothers, Christian Millau and Bocuse. Sheraton stood firm: She again told them to their faces about the mistakes she had perceived in specific dishes, as well as some service failures. And she also dared to question both nouvelle cuisine and classic French cooking.
One of the darts against Bocuse, which he repeated on the show, was that the French chef was almost never in his restaurant. “I felt (and feel) that when the cook is a big media star and the public is paying big bills, they expect to see him or her, even if he or she isn't stirring the pots or turning the crepes. I suggested that Bocuse raise a flag over her restaurant to signal that he was there, just as they do at Buckingham Palace when the Queen is home." Critics said that when the show ended, Bocuse tried to remove the mask to reveal it, without success. However, she says that they ironed out differences and, years after leaving the position of The New York Times, she ran into the chef in a restaurant in the city, who greeted her kindly and told her that she was right, that the boom of the nouvelle cuisine had been too much.
Asked about her writing process, which was with a typewriter until she began dictating them over the phone when everything was digitized, she replied: “It's agony. I hate writing. Do something other than write. I'm always late with my texts. There is nothing like the paralysis of looking at a blank page. (...) I think this improved when I stopped thinking of it as writing and started thinking of it as a way of saying something. (...) I made an effort to clarify my thoughts and communicate them”. Despite everything, she received different awards, such as the James Beard Award for gastronomic critics (2000) and her name rose for years as a reference for her, both in New York City and in the English-speaking press.
The journalist maintained that in restaurants we rise: “we have higher quality conversations in restaurants than at home. It's like we rise to the occasion, selecting less mundane topics to discuss when we eat out, just as we think more about what to wear." She revealed that she loved to listen to what was happening at other people's tables and that she was very good at it: “There is a lot of excitement in a restaurant room. Things are happening all the time that have nothing to do with food, little dramas at every table. (...) There is a story on each table”.
Sheraton argued that cooking is not an art, "that it may be artistic, but it is not an art, but rather a combination of cunning, science and craft." He also advised both the reader and the critic not to get carried away by the glamor of things. “This is what amazes me about so many reviews today, that they are very colourful, entertaining, refer to the current context, establish a special aura of going to a restaurant and for that and more you want to go. But, for me, there are only two reasons to go: because the atmosphere of the place suits your mood and because of the food on your plate. Don't be fooled into liking something you don't because of the chef's glamorous history, the clientele he attracts, or because the review points out some attractive aspects of contemporary life.”
Mimi Sheraton married William Schlifman in 1945 and divorced in 1954. A year later, Richard Falcone would join them and they would have a son, Marc, who would give them a granddaughter. They both survive her.
