A farewell to Ruth Reichl’s Reluctant Gourmet, dining world everyman

An appreciation for one of the dining world’s great curmudgeons. Also, two reasons to head to L.A.’s Fairfax neighborhood: love and plantains as well as a don’t-miss art show, and two Route 66 destinations to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mother Road. Plus more food stories worth a read. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with a special edition of Tasting Notes.

The dining world’s everyman

When you went out to eat with the Reluctant Gourmet, as journalist Michael Singer was known to readers of restaurant critic Ruth Reichl‘s reviews when she worked at this paper, you were never sure if he would still be at the table by the time dessert arrived.

If a meal was too long, too stuffy, too trendy, or if he just wanted to get home to catch the end of a football game, he was out.

A check of The Times’ archives shows that Singer — who died May 13 at 85 in his Manhattan home after a long illness — made his first appearance as the Reluctant Gourmet on Nov. 18, 1984.

Reichl, who was reviewing a restaurant called Oscar’s at the Premiere in Universal City, introduced him with a dress code complaint:

“‘A jacket!’ groaned the Reluctant Gourmet, the last man on Earth least thrilled by the prospect of another wonderful meal, when the person taking the reservations gently suggested that he would not be welcome without one.”

Fortunately for the restaurant, Singer ended up enjoying his blackened steak and even the lemon souffle:

“The Reluctant Gourmet looked positively pleased,” Reichl wrote at the end of her review of her husband. “You could almost see the cigar he pictured himself waving in the air. ‘It was worth putting on a jacket.’”

After that, “the RG,” as she frequently called him, appeared in more than 30 reviews, the everyman of the dining world who could puncture the pretension out of restaurants that served what he called “frilly food” or “chichi nonsense.”

He didn’t like “wimpy Westside stuff,” restaurants “with names I can’t pronounce,” obsequious waiters, “$14 [in 1988] for a puny plate of greens” or “baby pizzas with skinny crusts and fancy toppings — the kind you have to eat three or four of before you get full.”

What did he like? “Simple food that’s more satisfying than fancy” in restaurants “with the kind of food that ordinary people want to eat.”

That could mean everything from Mr. Jim’s barbecue (“This tastes like St. Louis barbecue,” he said, citing his hometown roots) to a $17.50 crab Louis from the Grill in Beverly Hills.

“I don’t mind restaurants being expensive,” he told Reichl, “as long as you don’t feel like you’re getting ripped off.”

And he loved everything about Evan Kleiman‘s much-missed Melrose Avenue Italian restaurant Angeli: “The way it looks. The fact that it doesn’t take a long time to eat here. The reasonable prices. The friendliness of the people who work here. But most of all the food.”

At a time when Los Angeles was quickly evolving into one of the world’s most exciting restaurant cities, it was useful for Reichl to have Singer’s Reluctant Gourmet to help ease less adventurous eaters through the transition.

“He made great copy,” Reichl wrote in her farewell column before she left Los Angeles in 1993 for the New York Times. “But as restaurants became more sensible, and the excessively pretentious ones died off, the Reluctant Gourmet became less reluctant.”

He made only one appearance in her New York Times pieces, when she reviewed the restaurant Patroon after Geoffrey Zakarian revamped the menu. Reichl rewarded the place with three stars, and the Reluctant Gourmet ended up liking his clams, Caesar salad and steak with onion rings. But he started the meal, she wrote, with a familiar complaint: “Do I have to wear a jacket?”

Of course, there was more to Singer than his Reluctant Gourmet persona.

He emerged as an investigative reporter in the Bay Area, winning his first of at least four Emmy Awards for news at KRON-TV for an examination of local police corruption. With David Weir, co-founder of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Barbara Newman Canfield, he wrote a deeply reported story for New West and New York magazine about the threat of nuclear extortion, leading with a 1975 blackmail attempt against Union Oil in Los Angeles. During Reichl’s years at the L.A. Times, he was managing editor and then news director of KCBS, where he shared a Peabody Award for the 1988 investigative series “MCA and the Mob,” which, according to an L.A. Times account, explored “alleged ties between MCA/Universal and organized crime syndicates.” In New York, he was a CBS Network News producer and did investigative documentary reports for MSNBC and NBC.

A genuine newshound, he fought hard to uncover uncomfortable truths. And he fought hard for his reporters. When the judge overseeing the 1993 Rodney King civil rights trial threatened to take away the press credentials of KCBS reporter Bob Jimenez over a “technical accident” that led to the judge’s voice being broadcast from the bench, “CBS producer Michael Singer started yelling about a violation of the 1st Amendment,” wrote L.A. Times reporters Greg Braxton and Faye Fiore in a terrific media scrum story. “Then he got on the phone to the lawyers. Then he demanded to see the judge.”

In an L.A. Times magazine cover story on a day in the life of KCBS News, the late reporter-turned-prolific author Dennis McDougal wrote, “Singer is impatient. He wants to get to the main event. … He rocks back and forth in his seat, a 47-year-old hyperkinetic kid with gray at his temples and glee in his eyes.”

“At its best,” Singer told McDougal in a companion piece to the feature, “television news … give[s] people a visceral sense, rather than an intellectual sense, of what the news of the day is. … When TV news is at its best, when it is visually and journalistically on the mark, it has a kind of impact on people that is quite extraordinary. … This country was profoundly changed by the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War, and those events could not have changed this country without television news.”

That passion for news and its ability to change the world for the better when done well is one of the things that drew Reichl to Singer, as she so beautifully wrote in her memoir “Comfort Me With Apples.” Last week, in her newsletter La Briffe, she published an excerpt from the book telling the story of how she took Singer to meet author M.F.K. Fisher. At first glance, Singer and Fisher would seem to have little in common, but the two clicked and he was able to get her to talk about her time teaching at Mississippi’s historic Piney Woods School for Black students in 1964, the year members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. After their talk, Fisher told the couple, “Now I’m going to send you on a walk.”

“She took us to the door,” wrote Reichl, “and pointed up a path winding away from the house. ‘Just follow it until you get to a special place. You’ll know it when you get there. … I won’t expect you back for a few hours.’ …

“It was dark when we got back to Mary Frances’s house, and she looked at us and smiled. ‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’ she said.

“We did not go home that night. Or the next.”

Plantains are for lovers

“It tastes like the sort of thing you’d want to make for someone you’re falling in love with.”

That’s restaurant critic Jenn Harris on the pastelón from Lucia chef Cleophus “Ophus” Hethington, who uses sheets of delicate plantain pasta instead of plain plantains in the classic Puerto Rican and Dominican lasagna-like dish and layers them Wagyu sofrito. In her new review, Harris says that restaurateur Sam Jordan‘s Lucia with Hethington’s Afro-Caribbean cuisine is “poised to help usher in the great revitalization of one of the greatest streets in the city.”

Drawing on napkins and menus is a habit many diners pick up as kids at the table with their restaurant-loving parents and sometimes continue into adulthood. It’s why Jessica Koslow sets out jotting paper as part of the place settings during her recently introduced dinner service at Sqirl.

And this month, artist Gary Baseman centered his most recent solo exhibition, “Off the Menu,” on his practice of drawing on menus. “Featuring about 40 colored pencil drawings — mostly on real menus from L.A. restaurants,” writes reporter Iris Kwok, “the whimsical show is a love letter to his Fairfax neighborhood.”

“This is where the Hasidic Jews and the punks lived side by side together in harmony,” the L.A.-raised Basemen told Kwok in a feature on the artist.

In addition to the menu and paper coffee-cup art displayed on tables, countertops and walls at the classic Googie-styled Johnie’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax, the show includes life-sized versions of some of his characters, who sit in booths that haven’t served real customers since 2000 when the restaurant closed. (It’s mostly been used as a film set in the decades since.) The free exhibit continues Wednesdays through Sundays until June 14.

Get your kicks …

Restaurant critic Bill’s Addison‘s Route 66 mecca is Albuquerque, “the city with the longest continuous urban stretch of Route 66.”

Two places draw his appetite.

Monte Carlo Liquors & Steak House, “a lone brick island in a large asphalt lot … just over 100 feet from the Central Avenue Bridge that stretches over the Rio Grande” is what Addison calls “the platonic ideal of a Midcentury dive.”

“The staff grounds the beef sirloin daily,” he says, for one of New Mexico’s greatest green chile cheeseburgers.

Duran Central Pharmacy, on the other hand, is “the finest destination along Central Avenue for immersion into regional cooking.”

“I start at Monte Carlo for a cheeseburger and martinis,” he writes, “before a second lunch of sopaipillas, ‘Christmas-style,’ at Duran, knowing I can pick up ibuprofen and calcium carbonate for dessert.”

Food reporter Stephanie Breijo‘s Route 66 heart lies at the end of the Mother Road, where “a Googie-architecture marvel of angular windows, rock walls and little cartoons of penguins hanging above swivel stools and an open kitchen” sits “beneath [a] jumbo tuxedoed penguin.”

The former Penguin Coffee Shop, opened in Santa Monica in 1959, is where Breijo would frequently eat with her father, who worked nearby. The Armet & Davis-designed building never lost its penguin sign, but after a time as a dentist office, it’s been a Mel’s Drive-In since 2018.

“It seemed like a no-brainer to make it Mel’s and bring it back to the glory days of being a diner,” said co-owner Colton Weiss. Since then, writes Breijo, “thousands of guests have ended their travels with a meal in the diner.”

As her dad told her, “Ending on a diner is nostalgia.”

Also …