Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

From Barnes & Noble

Ruth Reichl's delightful memoir offers hilarious and sad recollections of her childhood role as "Food Monitor" in a household where her mother's manic-depressive illness sometimes resulted in meals that were likely to prove hazardous to the guests, her mouthwatering accounts of food awakenings through fried oysters or Guyanese coconut bread, and the triumphal stories of success as a chef and restaurant owner, Tender at the Bone is irresistible.

Newsday

An absolute delight to read...how lucky we are that [Reich] had the courage to follow her appetite.

Chicago Sun-Times

A poignant, yet hilarious, collection of stories about people [Reichl] has known, and loved and who...steered her on the path to fulfill her destiny as one of the world's leading food writers.

New York Times Book Review

Reichl writes with such simplicity...even the recipes included in this memoir are stripped down to their bare goodness.

Washington Post Book World

Reading Ruth Reichl on food is almost as good as eating it.

Deirdre Donahue

A prominent food critic, Reichl writes memorably about food. But her real gift is making the people who taught her about food live on in the pages of this funny and moving memoir.... You can read this book anywhere.
— USA Today

Publishers Weekly

Reichl discovered early on that since she wasn't "pretty or funny or sexy," she could attract friends with food instead. But that initiative isn't likely to secure her an audience for her chaotic, self-satisfied memoirs, although her restaurant reviews in The New York Times are popular. Reichl's knack for describing food gives one a new appreciation for the pleasures of the table, as when she writes here: "There were eggplants the color of amethysts and plates of sliced salami and bresaola that looked like stacks of rose petals left to dry." But when she is recalling her life, she seems unable to judge what's interesting. Raised in Manhattan and Connecticut by a docile father who was a book designer and a mother who suffered from manic depression, Reichl enjoyed such middle-class perks as a Christmas in Paris when she was 13 and high school in Canada to learn French. But her mother a blight whom Reichl disdains to the discomfort of the reader who wonders if she exaggerates. The author studied at the University of Michigan, earned a graduate degree in art history, married a sculptor named Doug, lived in a loft in Manhattan's Bowery and then with friends bought a 17-room "cottage" in Berkeley, California, which turned into a commune so self-consciously offbeat that their Thanksgiving feast one year was prepared from throwaways found in a supermarket dumpster. Seasoning her memoir with recipes, Reichl takes us only through the '70s, which seems like an arbitrary cutoff, and one hopes the years that followed were more engaging than the era recreated here.

School Library Journal

This gastronomic delight is best taken slowly so that readers can savor each word. Motivated by fear of her mother's bizarre cooking escapades ("She liked to brag about `Everything Stew,' a dish invented while she was concocting a casserole out of a two-week-old turkey carcass"), Reichl learned to cook early and her entertaining descriptions of kitchen disasters are sure to cause howls of laughter time and again. There were also some requisite difficulties, too, and readers will wince while reading of the author's weight battles and self-image problems while growing up; her college roommate's estrangement; and her mother's mental imbalances. Every job she took, from social work to commune cook, gave her one more piece of experience that eventually led to her current career, that of restaurant reviewer and writer extraordinaire. As an added bonus, this thoroughly enjoyable memoir also includes a handful of recipes that will make readers' mouths water. -- Susan R. Farber, Ardsley Public Library, New York

Paul Levy

While all good food writers are humorous...few are so riotously, effortlessly entertaining as Ruth Reichl...[she] is also witty, fair-minded, brave and a wonderful writer. -- The New York Times Book Review

Washington Post Book World

Reading Ruth Reichl on food is almsot as good as eating it.

NY Times Book Review

While all good food writers are humorous...few are so riotously, effortlessly entertaining as Ruth Reichl...[She] is also witty, fair-minded, brave and a wonderful writer.

Kirkus Reviews

The departing restaurant critic ofThe New York Times whips up a savory memoir of her apprentice years. Growing up in New York City and Connecticut during the '50s, Reichl learned early "that food could be dangerous." Her manic-depressive mother favored weird melanges crafted from culinary bargains of dubious freshness; throwing an engagement party for Reichl's half-brother, Mom served spoiled leftovers from Horn and Hardart that sent 26 people to the hospital. Reichl enjoyed safer food elsewhere: at her Aunt Birdie's, the apple dumplings of an African-American cook; at the home of a wealthy classmate from her Montreal boarding school, classic French cuisine. The descriptions of each sublime taste are mouthwateringly precise, and the recipes scattered throughout nicely reflect the author's personal odyssey. After a disorderly adolescence, she attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The education of her taste buds continued during trips to North Africa and Europe, a waitressing stint at a doomed French restaurant in Michigan, and impoverished early married life on New York's Lower East Side. In Berkeley, California, she worked at a collectively owned restaurant whose entire staff cooked, cleaned, and served such vintage '70s dishes as quiche and Indonesian fishball soup. Reichl describes these experiences with infectious humor, then achieves a deeper level of emotion and maturity when her story reaches the year 1977. That summer, she returned to New York and for the first time successfully rescued one of her mother's manic party efforts. In the fall, she became restaurant critic for a San Francisco magazine and found the voices of various people who had taught herabout food echoing in her ears as she discovered the work her editor told her "you were born to do." The book closes with a moving scene in which Reichl eats a sumptuous lunch with two women as forceful and resilient as she has finally become. A perfectly balanced stew of memories: not too sweet, not too tart.