Ruth Reichl Recalls That Vicious Review of Delicious!

Last year around this time, Dwight Garner was decimating Ruth Reichl’s novel Delicious! in the pages of The New York Times. Here’s a brief reminder:

It’s a gauzy ode to the liberating virtues of pleasure, glazed with warmth and uplift, so feebly written and idea-free that it will make you wonder if the energy we’ve been putting into food these last few decades hasn’t made us each lose, on average, a dozen IQ points.

Garner’s slam of the one-time NYT journalist’s effort reverberated far and wide, prompting for example Los Angeles magazine a few days later to itemize the review’s “5 Most Cringeworthy Slams.”