Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl is an American chef, food writer and editor who, for ten years, was the editor-in-chief of Gourmet Magazine. In addition to two decades as a food critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, Reichl has also written cookbooks, memoirs and novels. She was culinary editor for the Modern Library and has won six James Beard Foundation Awards.

Reichl was co-producer of PBS’s Gourmet Diary of a Foodie and was host of PBS’s Gourmet’s Adventures with Ruth.

Her memoirs are Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Not Becoming My Mother, and Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019). In 2009, she published Gourmet Today, a 1,008-page cookbook containing over 1,000 recipes.

She published her first novel Delicious! in 2014 and, in 2015, published My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life, a memoir of recipes prepared in the year following the shuttering of Gourmet. Her most recent novel is entitled The Paris Novel.