In her best-selling memoir Save Me the Plums, legendary food writer and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl recounts a work trip to Paris in her trademark delectable detail, from the foods she ate to the gorgeous $6,000 black dress she almost bought. “My editor said, ‘I love that chapter so much. Couldn’t you imagine a novel based on that?’” says Reichl.
And thus came her newest work of fiction, The Paris Novel, out now, which combines “all of the things that I love best: fashion and food and art and literature,” and is set in the 1980s. And while Reichl—who just this week was honored with the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award—hits up the City of Lights at least once a year, she made another trip as she was finishing up the book. “I thought, Oh, I better get all the details. Just to make sure,” she says. “It’s great to have an excuse.”
While on the road for her book tour, Ruth Reichl chatted with Condé Nast Traveler about her annual food trips with girlfriends, the East Asian hot spots she wants to travel to next, and under what circumstances she’s thrilled not to make restaurant reservations.
Her priorities when planning a trip for work vs. leisure:
The difference is when I’m doing something for work, it’s pretty much all about the food. It’s trying to get as many meals as you possibly can in a day. When it’s just me, there’s a lot of wandering time. One of my great pleasures in life is not making reservations and just finding places to eat. It’s a really different experience wandering a city and saying, “Oh, that looks good. Let’s go in there.” On my own, there are a lot more museums and theater [performances].
Why she loves to write on the road:
There’s something about being someplace else, being out of your routine, that makes me start thinking in a different way. Especially when you’re [immersed] in another language—your thoughts become more visible to you. One of the reasons I chose to set this book in the 1980s is that before the internet, before iPhones, traveling was so much richer. When you went somewhere, you were gone. The world has gotten so small. You get on a plane, you get off, you’ve got your whole world with you in your pocket. You can talk to your friends anytime you want to. You pay with credit cards.
As an example, I was in Yugoslavia the first year it was open to tourism, 1967, and had a really bad car accident. I was in the hospital, and my parents didn’t know about it for three weeks! To me, that’s always been one of the really fantastic things about traveling. You’d go to Paris and people didn’t speak English, and if they did, they wouldn’t speak it to you anyway. Today, everybody speaks English and you can navigate the city as if it were New York. You put it in Google Maps and you never get lost. Getting lost, to me, is also one of the great joys of traveling.
