Slow Down? Hardly!

In 1985, she became the restaurant critic at the Times Ledger, a local paper. She wrote weekly reviews and a few feature stories. At the same time, she became culinary arts coordinator at the Great Neck Adult Education Center, which “has the oldest and finest adult education program in the country. . . . I was able to pull in people of great prestige because I knew them on a personal basis. Some of the classes were really quite phenomenal.”

She left the Ledger in 1998, after her son told her she had “too many pots boiling.” Since then, she’s hardly sat still. She swims mornings and evenings daily in the summer and does water aerobics four days a week. She attends Les Dames events in Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia; attends most every event held by her New York chapter; and has missed only one national Les Dames conference in 30 years. “I try to keep up with what’s going on,” she says, which extends beyond Les Dames and into other organizations involving women in the food industry. She’s again coordinating a few special events at the adult ed center.

And she’s contemplating writing her memoirs. From my brief experience with her, she’ll need an enormous spreadsheet and a couple of secretaries to keep track of it all. Maybe she’ll write about some of the tangents we went down.

Like her observations on the current crop of women chefs, whom she can name without skipping a beat.

Or about recipes. “I was told there are seven basic recipes and everything has evolved from them,” she said. What are those seven? She doesn’t recall. “That’s what I was told and that’s what I believe from experience.”

She might bemoan the lost art of service, which she remembers as being so polished in the past. “We’ve done so well (today) as far as cooking is concerned,” she said. “The chefs. The ambiance. But service is very, very poor.”

And maybe she’d say more about food shows popular on television today. She hesitates to criticize but frankly finds them “a little boring. I think they seem repetitive.” That said, she quickly adds, “I’m thrilled that people do have the programs to watch, because I think one of the many problems is that people didn’t have role models (for cooking).”

I think I’d most like the stories she would tell about not only the culinary stars she encountered along the way, but also the way the industry changed during her watch.