Quotes from Ruth Reichl

My kitchen was built for my body. It forms a 'U' in the middle of the living room and dining room. It's not huge, because I don't like huge kitchens.

The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.

Sharing food has always had a central place in civilized societies; it's no accident that so many of our cultural, religious and patriotic rituals are involved with eating.

Let's face it: my life tends to revolve around food, and I love feeding people.

The way we allow children to be advertised to is shocking. Eating is a learned behavior, and we've made these kids sitting ducks for all the bad messages about industrialized food. The fact that we allow that to go on is horrifying.

Don't make a big to-do about the turkey; brine it, put it in the oven, and don't think about it again.

I'm not a big turkey fan, but my husband loves it. Thanksgiving is his favorite meal.

One of the things I really love about restaurants is that in many ways, they are the ultimate democratic institutions, where you get to walk in the door, plunk down your money, and for however long that you're there, you can be anyone you want to be.

My idea of good living is not about eating high on the hog. Rather, to me, good living means understanding how food connects us to the earth.

One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don't know how to do, to keep learning.

When I came to 'Gourmet,' I had no clue how to run a magazine; for television, I am fascinated to learn about editing.

Anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they're talking about.

American food is the food of immigrants. You go back a couple of hundred years, and we were all immigrants, unless we're going to talk about Native American cuisine.

Anyone who has ever been an ugly adolescent - and we are legion - knows that the feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never goes away; it is always there, lurking just beneath the surface.

My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called 'Everything Stew,' where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.

Ask people to pitch in - hand them a spoon and ask them to stir. Doing things together, having everyone help, makes for a nicer party.

I don't care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

What I always do in times of trouble or stress is to try and do something I don't know how to do.

I've always hated Zagat. If I'm going to listen to someone else's opinions on restaurants, I don't care if I agree or not. I just want to know who they are.

Some magazines are run from the top down, where the editor-in-chief decides what every article is going to be and who's going to write them, and then they're doled out. My idea is to do it the opposite way, to do it from the bottom up.

It takes a great deal of strength to be an optimist.

The hardest part of cooking is shopping, and if you organize yourself and shop once a week, you're halfway there.

I bake bread nearly every day; I use Jim Lahey's no-knead method and leave it to rise overnight.

I'm convinced that the main reason we've become so obsessed with restaurants is due to our basic need to get out of virtual space and into a real one. We're not going out to eat merely to share food; we're there to sit at the same table together, slow down, breathe the same air.