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New York’s best-known foodie, Ruth Reichl, can’t get enough of Pearl Oyster Bar, one of her favorite restaurants in the Village.
The best places to ...
BE PAMPERED
Babbo
110 Waverly Place; 212-353-
8064 • “They have great
pasta dishes, a wonderful
two-minute diver squid
cooked the way it’s done in
Italy, an amazing beef dish
braised in wine and a som-
melier you can truly trust,”
Reichl says.
Why I Love ...
Greenwich Village
FIND ‘PERFECT’
SEAFOOD
Pearl Oyster Bar
18 Cornelia St.; 212-691-
8211 • “I eat here most
often,” Reichl says. “What
I love is it’s a very small
menu and everything is
perfect, whether it’s fried
oysters or clam chowder.
They steam a lobster gor-
geously and the clams on
the half-shell are pristine.”
BROWSE FOR
VINTAGE COOKBOOKS
Bonnie Slotnick
Cookbooks
163 W. 10th St.; 212-989-
8962 • “It’s a great place
to go and poke around for
an afternoon.”
Perhaps the cliché is unavoidable, but Ruth Reichl’s plate is overflowing these days: with television projects, a book about motherhood (which published in April) and the whirlwind list of duties that orbit her daily calendar as editor in chief of Gourmet magazine. Also, the third television season of Gourmet’s culinary travelogue Diary of a Foodie, which Reichl executive produces for PBS, recently debuted. And she just finished overseeing the compilation of more than 1,200 recipes for the second volume of Gourmet’s cookbook, due out in September.
Reichl’s love a air with food, which
began before she could see over a stove top,
is famously chronicled in her 1999 memoir
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table.
As it turns out, a childhood in New York’s
Greenwich Village, with its cornucopia of bakeries, cheese shops and butchers, was the perfect place for her epicurean curiosities to flourish.
She may live uptown these days, but Reichl (pronounced RYE-shul) returns to her native neighborhood as often as possible to soak in the ambience of its winding side streets, specialty markets, kitschy stands and world-class restaurants.
“It’s the first place I go when I return to the city from traveling,” she says. “The Village has always been a great walking neighborhood. And some of the places have been there forever, like the Strand Bookstore, Faicco’s Pork Store—even the shoemaker I went to as a kid is still on University Place. It’s the part of New York that has my heart.”— STACE Y MORRIS
BUY COOKING
INGREDIENTS
Union Square
Greenmarket
14th Street and Broadway;
212-788-7476 • “One of
the great resources in New
York City—and it just gets
better and better. It’s filled
with great farmers and has
expanded to include meat
and fish.”
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