Eating My Words: An Appetite For Life

Front Cover
Harper Collins, May 4, 2004 - Biography & Autobiography - 240 pages

What's it like to be a food writer? What's it like dining at some of the world's best restaurants, as well as some of the worst? What's it like to share your opinion about food and restaurants with readers around the world?

Mimi Sheraton is one of the most renowned food writers and restaurant reviewers in the country. And perhaps the most frequently asked question is, How did she do it? Her response is simple: "Live my life." Now, in this entertaining and candid memoir, the doyenne of food critics provides a heartfelt and poignant look at the events of her extraordinary life.

A devoted journalist, Mimi's engaging style and meticulous research have made her the standard by which restaurant reviewing and food criticism in the United States is measured. In Eating My Words, she describes how she developed her passion for writing about food and travel. Witty and straightforward, Mimi takes you on an engrossing journey of memorable meals, unforgettable people and outrageous experiences. Travel with Mimi from her childhood growing up in a food-loving Brooklyn family with a very demanding mother ("You call that a chicken?") and a father in the wholesale fruit and vegetable business, through her college years in Manhattan and her rise to fame.

Best known for her work as the restaurant critic at the New York Times, Mimi relates her experiences from how she landed the job there to why she left eight years later. As a journalist, she has tasted and reported on some of the world's finest cuisine, including three-starred French restaurants, and on some of the most dismal food imaginable, from hospital and public school meals to the often unrecognizable fare served in airplanes and fast food chains.

Forthright and never afraid to be controversial, Mimi talks about the importance of a reviewer's anonymity and the excitement of making a new culinary discovery like the now notorious Rao's, and then sharing it through her writing. She reveals some of her most challenging moments, right down to a masked appearance on French television with several well-known French chefs that ended in a mini-brawl.

Fueled by her passion for food, wine and travel, Mimi Sheraton's memoir is a degustation that is as engaging as it is enlightening. A true reflection of this bon vivant's voracious appetite for life, Eating My Words is an irresistible treat you will savor word by word ... and will feel utterly satisfied.

From inside the book

Contents

Like Mother Like Daughter
11
A Taste of New York
27
Nibbling Around the Edges
41
A Table Before
55
xi
87
Dont Call Me Mimi
104
Operation Otto
128
What Makes a Restaurant Tick?
138
The Care and Feeding of Passengers
158
Eat Hot
183
We Eat What We
199
Season to Taste
210
Eating My Words
224
Copyright

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About the author (2004)

Mimi Sheraton is a former New York Times restaurant critic who now free-lances for The New York Times, Travel & Leisure, and other magazines. Her cookbook The Whole World Loves chicken Soup won both the IACP Julia Child Award and the James Beard Award. She lives in New York City.

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