I've not been keeping up with writing up my 50 book challenge entries - suffice to say that I've been reading diligently, except for a short gap around exam time. Hopefully, I can catch up over the next week or so, mostly posted on my own web site.

But my thoughts on Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires are appropriate here, even though Will has written on it previously. I'd only disagree with Will's assessment in that I find this book's lighter emphasis on personal drama when compared with Reichl's previous memoirs a tremendous strength. Give me formalized, Handel-opera like emotion any day.

Amid a real flood of good writing, however, one passage did strike me particularly. Discussing New York's famous Le Cirque, Reichl writes, "I had meanly ordered risotto, a dish few French chefs can master". (37). First of all, of course, the author is right - my suspicion is that French chefs see risotto as a convenient, superficially elegant sop for the awkward vegetarians that fashion has forced them to accomodate. Consequently, the number of wall-paper paste risottos I've eaten in otherwise competent restaurants is a little startling.

But much more interesting is Reichl's real point, about ordering dishes "meanly". I too have been known to take part in this bizarre game, ordering dishes I know the restaurant can't cook. Of course, to some extent this one sided exercise is silly, rather like the pitched academic rivalry we at St. Andrews maintained against Cambridge, and about which the latter knew nothing. And it's also somewhat masochistic - I know for a fact that the Cheesecake Factory isn't going to produce a creditable pasta carbonara, and it's idiotic to order it just to prove to myself that they couldn't. But I do it anyway, because I feel like part of what you're suposed to be doing at a restaurant is finding out if the menu is serious. Unless someone is paying for me to eat the entire menu, like a proper critic, the best I can do is make sure the most unlikely entry isn't a joke. And yet, this technique obviously results in me eating a lot of junk I don't want to eat. So who is really being mean, and to who? At least in Reichl's case, she was at a good restaurant, and the meal was great regardless. That doesn't often happen for me.