More is more

Betty Fussell reports.

Stop and smell your dinner

Where old meets new

Let's do le lunch

Gourmet to grow

Everyone's a critic

How does your garden grow?

Women who wear toques

New York City—Lather Samantha of Sex and the City with foie gras, cover with caviar, and lick. Excess is the name of the gastroporn game, but 350 pages of Gael Greene's orgasmic prose in her memoir Insatiable may leave readers gasping for breath. Not, however, the author, who is inexhaustible. With Greene's first restaurant review in 1968 in New York magazine, "The Insatiable Critic" became the Deep Throat of the New York food world, and food writing in America, especially about restaurants, has never been the same since. She continues unabated in the magazine's "Ask Gael" column.

After all, the girl from Detroit created a literary voice as American as Dreiser's Sister Carrie and a lot funnier, as Greene in the guise of Midwestern bumpkin rapidly succeeds in her quest for big city power, sex, money, and fame. She succeeds so early, in fact, that she's stuck plot-wise with the quest of a later Carrie for Mr. Right. Meanwhile, Greene's conquests are on the epic scale of a Fanny Hill, no slouch in the Deep Throat department. The first notch in Greene's garter belt is the King himself, Elvis Presley. From then on it's all downhill, with movie stars like Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds, chefs like Jean Troisgros and Gilbert LeCoze, and a porn star I've never heard of who was the Prince of Porn. Marriage, her own and other peoples', merely pricked the royal appetite, until it failed—marriage, never appetite.

That appetite stood her in good stead when she added food to sex and became seductively intimate with America's food revolution of the 1970s in restaurants and in prose. As food critics began to put on airs and as food police became ever preachier, Greene was anti-pompous, anti-puritan and anti-patriarchal. She was a rebel at heart and mouth. As a writer, she flouted the genteel tradition of the Woman's Page. As a sensualist, she broke with the home-ec tradition of women like Fannie Farmer, who preached nutrition and thrift. As a woman, she flouted the male tradition that only a guy, like Lucius Beebe or Joseph Wechsberg, could be a serious epicure. As a critic, she added chefs as an essential ingredient to the restaurant experience and became a boundless enthusiast of good tables, whether or not they turned into beds.

By combining work with play, she created, in fact, a new genre of restaurant reviewing by making everything up-close and personal, relentlessly sexy, socially observant, and exuberantly fun. As one of her colleagues said, "Gael was the first reviewer to pick her head up off the plate and ask, ' Where am I? Who else is here? What's going on around this room?'" For three decades, a lot of us saw the swiftly changing fashions of food on both sides of the Atlantic, moving at jet speed between Paris and New York, through her eyes. She put us inside, way inside, places we might never have had money or time or—most importantly—reservations to get into. She turned the overblown into a personal and rhetorical style of flamboyance that matched precisely the explosion of theatrical styles of dining out that joined Manhattan's Upper East Side to Paris' Right Bank. Grimod de la Reynière would have applauded both the writer and the restaurants.

She even devised a way to pay conscience money for the excesses of affluence by creating that important charitable organization for the food industry, Citymeals-on-Wheels. If her appetite for sensuosity has sometimes led to an overload of fabric metaphors from Women's Wear Daily and of sexual metaphors from Boogie Nights, her lust for life has been as unflagging as for foie gras. This girl from Detroit is fully aware that she's had one long glorious ride on the road of excess, and if it should lead to the palace of wisdom, it'll be an American palace in Las Vegas in a restaurant with a lot of flash.