Ruth Reichl Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ruth Reichl is an editor and writer that is known for her variety of speaking engagements and creative projects all over the United States and Europe.

She is a woman in high demand as during the many years she has been active, she had become a veritable force that has shaped the way we experience and think about food.

Ruth has worked as a restaurant critic for both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She would become known for her honest criticism that could break or make a restaurant. She is now the author of four bestselling memoirs.
She has also been an editor and had been a contributor or had features in numerous food-related publications including “Gourmet Today” her cookbook. She was also the host of the Food Network’s “Eating Out Loud.”

Things took a turn for the worse when she lost her job as “Gourmet” editor-in-chief, a post which she had held for more than a decade. Ruth was let go when the magazine abruptly shut.

Following the demise of the 68-year-old magazine “Gourmet,” Ruth Reichl licked her wounds and went to the kitchen to concentrate on cooking. She has said that her son and husband were very well fed and she used cooking to heal herself.
After grieving for several weeks, she had enough and decided to get her groove back. It was at this time that she had a strong urge to pen a novel just when she was panicking about what to do with herself.

Apart from writing features and critiques of restaurants, she had never written any fiction before then. However, she had always believed that one ought to do the hardest thing when they are in trouble.

While she had a lot of self-doubts, she soon realized that fiction was something she had always thought of doing for years but never got around to. She had a great time being one of the most respected restaurant critics in the US over six years between 1993 and 1999.
It was a surreal time in her career as she disguised herself with weird wardrobes, wigs, and theatric personalities. It was these experiences that she would go on to document in “Garlic and Sapphires” her debut work.

Ruth Reichl never believed that she could make a career from food writing or even that she could be a writer. After graduating from school, she was living with her friends in a New York loft and looking for employment.

The 1970s were great since she loved to cook all manner of meals for her friends and particularly researching them. During this time, they lived on the Lower East Side which was full of great Jewish, Italian, and Chinese food and she soon started wandering all over the place collecting all manner of recipes.

She would go to Chinatown and collect several recipes and also got some from Italian ladies on Mulberry Street. She also remembers getting recipes from the fast-talking Italian guy who ran the butcher shop.
Cooking every day for her friends, one of them once told her that she was so good and ought to consider writing a cookbook. She sat down to pen her debut cookbook which would then become the 1972 published “Mmmmmmm…A Feastiary, from 1972?”

“Garlic and Sapphires” by Ruth Reichl is a chronicle of the author decade long stint with the New York Times. In her efforts to bring food to the masses, she created Mrs. Doubtfire as an alter ego so that she will not be subjected to red-carpet treatment as she believed this would influence her reviews of establishments.

Ruth is a big-brain thinker and this is evident in how she lays out her work. Every chapter has its own unique disguise or character which is then followed by going to the establishment and finally the review along with a rating. Some of the chapters even come with her favorite recipe that ties into her life outside work.

Soon after starting, she discovered that there are a lot of perks and power when one is a restaurant critic for the New York Times. The big challenge is remaining the down to Earth culinary critic that she was before she became a household name.
Ruth is very gifted at describing the aromas, and textures of her dishes as she links the to relatable things making it easy to follow along even if you have never tried the foods.

Ruth Reichl’s novel “Delicious” is the story of Ruth’s mother Billie Breslin that has traveled for hundreds of miles to her home in California to get take up a job at “Delicious,” one of New York’s most iconic magazines.
When the organization was shut down, Billie who had come to see her colleagues as family must pick up the pieces and move on. But then the higher-ups invite her to stay behind and take care of a public relations hotline for recipe inquiries and complaints referred to as the “Delicious Guarantee.”

What she did not expect was that this lonely and very boring job would lead her toward a life-changing discovery.

It is a story that carries its readers to downtown New York with its colorful artisanal purveyors and restaurateurs, and from the small food shop where Billie works in Little Italy during the weekends to a magazine library with its hidden room.
In that small room, she finds the letters of a plucky preteen girl named Lulu Swan that lived during the Second World War and had been communicating with James Beard the legendary chef.

The letters lead her to a deeper understanding of food and also inspire her to come to terms with the panic attacks she usually has when she tries to cook. They also open her up to love and to deal with the truth about her sister who she adores.

“Tender at the Bone” by Ruth Reichl is a delightful memoir in which the author regales her with her unconventional and often raucous childhood. It was a childhood in which everyone had been bought together by food.

However, it is interesting that none of her grandmothers could cook even though that did not prevent her from having all the caring and love from her family. Still, all she ever wanted was to cook delicious meals for her family right from when she was six.
She was lucky that the likes of Mrs. Peavey the family servant encouraged and helped her hone her skills. When she, later on, goes to a Catholic boarding school in Canada, her appreciation of food blossoms.

This only accelerated when she moved to Europe and then to California where she worked at “The Swallow,” which was a cooperative restaurant and lived in a commune.

It was while she was living in California that she met the legendary chef Beard and several others that would shepherd her toward a career in the culinary arts and in writing.