How does a journalist score a gig jet-setting from country to country — eating dinner at a remote village in Italy and breakfast at a mountain chalet in Slovenia — on a mission to compile a list of the 50 best restaurants in the world?
Acclaimed food critic Besha Rodell reveals the grind required to land her coveted job working for Food & Wine and Travel + Leisure magazines in her memoir “Hunger Like a Thirst: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, a Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table.” And it is quite a delectable journey.
Before Rodell delves into the glory years of making her bones as a female food writer in the male-dominated, early aughts restaurant industry, she starts with an amuse-bouche — a single bite to awaken the palate and prepare the diner for the meal ahead.
In Rodell’s opening story, she and her sister have just left “Lambstock,” where they spent the better part of a week camping on a Virginia sheep farm, “drinking moonshine and cooking over fires with a bunch of bartenders and line cooks” for her profile on a celebrity shepherd for Modern Farmer magazine.
They get pulled over while driving to the airport. Rodell knows they look rough, and the North Carolina police agree when they ask to search her vehicle. Desperate for a shower and unwilling to miss her flight, Rodell refuses their request by explaining where she’s been and what she’s been up to (minus the moonshine). “If I really was just some girl running meth down the highways,” she asks the officer, “do you think this is the story I’d come up with?” He chooses to believe her, and they make it to the airport in time to catch their flight.
Rodell utilizes the same unflinching honesty and keen sense of self-awareness that got her out of trouble to enrich her food writing. The author self-identifies as a “classic restaurant critic with a slightly filthier vocabulary” whose target audience is “less wealthy gourmand and more ratbag line cook.” Although writing about the everyday food experience is how she made her name, Rodell didn’t start out with the ordinary as her focus. She got into food reviewing to support her “addiction, not to drugs or sex or gambling but to fancy restaurants.”
As the amuse-bouche “course” concludes and Rodell’s memoir ventures into the appetizer chapter, she revisits the Australian childhood that sparked her love of eating. Subjecting her younger self to a healthy dose of scrutiny while dropping F-bombs with the savoir faire of a sailor, Rodell quickly reveals herself to be one cool customer.
In a 2013 piece reprinted from LA Weekly, where she shreds the restaurant chain Outback Steakhouse for serving American fare and labeling it Australian, Rodell writes about her relocation to Denver with her American mother: “I arrived at an American high school with purple hair and a bad attitude right on the heels of Crocodile Dundee.”
The family is on the move during Rodell’s nomadic adolescence as her mother advances in her journalism career — a lifestyle Rodell resents in her youth but winds up mimicking in adulthood. Rodell’s teenage rebellion morphs into a punk-rock attitude in her early 20s as she waitresses in the toxic underbelly of the New York City restaurant scene. While studying writing in college, she gets her start reviewing food.
By the time the appetizer course of her memoir concludes and the entrée chapter begins, Rodell has her first byline, is expecting a child and is living in North Carolina with the love of her life. She’s also relying on food stamps to eat and is painfully broke. It’s a cycle that repeats throughout her life as she scrabbles together enough writing work to pay the bills while her chef husband works tirelessly to keep their family afloat.
Through it all, her love of food remains paramount.
Rodell’s big break comes when she replaces Bill Addison as the restaurant critic and food editor at the Atlanta alternative weekly, Creative Loafing. Her family embarks on their first of many relocations to support Rodell’s career. Always refreshingly honest, Rodell is frank about the price these moves cost her husband and son as time marches forward.
Like a good meal, Rodell’s memoir includes a side-dish of history to provide context. Her fascination with “the way normal people eat out” started with curiosity about the culture surrounding fair food, which introduced her to how cafeterias changed the way post-Industrial Revolution working Americans ate lunch.
Nobody was reviewing places like Outback Steakhouse or TGI Friday’s when she started her career. The author homed in on the middle-class food experience and was rewarded for her creative perspective; she won a James Beard Award for her 2014 essay on malt liquor published in Punch magazine titled “40 ounces to Freedom.”
In the handful of Rodell’s reviews reprinted throughout the memoir, spanning from her high-profile years at The New York Times to her time at LA Weekly as Jonathan Gold’s replacement to her start with now-defunct online zines, her writing is fresh, biting and accessible. And her food descriptions are mouthwatering and luscious.
Perhaps Rodell’s most endearing quality is her humorous dedication to self-deprecation. But focusing on the unvarnished side of life does more than contribute to an enjoyable memoir. It’s how Rodell set herself apart and scored a job traveling the world to compile a list of the best 50 restaurants. “Hunger Like a Thirst” reveals that journey is both more glamorous and more grueling than the unindoctrinated might anticipate. Hopefully one day she can complete that list.
NONFICTION
“Hunger Like a Thirst”
by Besha Rodell
Celadon Books
272 pages, $28.99
Author Event
Besha Rodell. In conversation with Greg Best. Presented by A Cappella Books. 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. May 21. $45, including book and cocktail. Ticonderoga Club, Krog Street Market, Krog St., Atlanta. 404-681-5128, acappellabooks.com
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