In her best-selling autobiography, Save Me the Plums, legendary food writer and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl recounts her business trip to Paris in mouth-watering detail, from the food she ate to the gorgeous $6,000 black dress she almost bought. “My editor said, 'I loved that chapter. Why don't you write a novel based on it?'” Reichl says.
Thus was born her latest novel, A Paris Novel, out now. It combines “everything I love most: fashion, food, art and literature” and is set in the 1980s. Reichl, who was just awarded a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award this week, visits the City of Lights at least once a year, but made another trip by the time she finished writing the book. “I thought I might as well go over all the details, just to be safe,” she says. “It's nice to have an excuse.”
Ruth Reichl spoke to Condé Nast Traveler while on her book tour about her annual food trip with her girlfriends, her next East Asian hotspot, and the last thing she wants to do is make restaurant reservations.
Her priorities when planning work and leisure travel:
The difference is that when I'm doing something for work, it's pretty much all about food. I try to get as many meals as possible in a day. When I'm alone, I have a lot of time to walk around. One of the great pleasures in my life is just finding a place to eat without making a reservation. It's a really different experience to walk around a city and say, “Oh, that place looks nice. Let's go there.” When I'm alone, there are a lot of museums and theaters. [performances].
Why she loves writing on the road:
When you get away from your normal routine and are somewhere else, you start to think differently. [immersed] Reading in another language makes your ideas more visible. One of the reasons I set this book in the 1980s is because before the internet and iPhones, travel was much more abundant than it is now. Once you go somewhere, you're not there anymore. The world has become so small. You get on a plane, you get off, and you have your whole world in your pocket. You can talk to your friends whenever you want. You can pay with a credit card.
For example, I was there in 1967, the year Yugoslavia first opened up to tourism, and I got into a terrible car accident. I was in the hospital, and my parents didn't know about it for three weeks. For me, that was one of the really great things about traveling. You go to Paris, and people don't speak English, and even if they did, they wouldn't talk to you in English anyway. Today, everyone speaks English, and you can get around the city as if you were in New York. You type it into Google Maps, and you won't get lost. For me, getting lost is one of the great joys of traveling.
