Patricia Wells signing her latest oeuvre, The French Kitchen Cookbook, at Café Presse; with Walter Wells in 2008.
Like an expat Energizer Bunny, Patricia Wells slices & dices her way across the world's culinary landscape, turning out a string of guides and cookbooks. She's been a international restaurant critic for decades (the first American to write reviews for the French newsmagazine l'Express), decades too at the International Herald Tribune in Paris). But so perceptive is her insight, so keen her judgment, so gentle her pen that the world's great chefs, the world's best restaurants, welcome her not as an adversary but as a wise friend.
Her husband, Walter, retired recently after a quarter century as an editor at the Trib, and their "golden years" are now spent in the golden sunshine of Provence, where they bought and completely restored a farmhouse and vineyard. They turned the property, Chanteduc, into a cooking school, for which my travel company, France In Your Glass, back in those pre-internet days, was an early sales agent. They also bought an apartment on the rue Jacob in Paris, where, beneath skies the color of salmon skins, Patricia set up a second cooking school.
She got her start in the book world with The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (1984), a "transformative" volume for almost everyone who bought it, following up with The Food Lover's Guide to France (1987).. Nowadays, every burg worth its burger joints has a food-lover's guide, but these were the very first curl in the wave of foodie books. Cookbooks and memoirs followed apace, a total of 14 at last count, with a new Paris guide scheduled for next year.
The last time Patricia and Walter visited Seattle, she had just published We'll Always Have Paris...And Provence, a warm-hearted memoir. Now comes the French Kitchen Cookbook, described as a Master-Class in French-inspired cooking. Don't look for Julia Child's detailed instructions; this book assumes you already know how to boil water. The most important question, for Patricia, is: what do you like to eat? Then break it down. Read the recipe, measure the ingredients ahead of time, taste as you go. Once you get the hang of it, plan your menus, use the best ingredients, add wine, and take the trouble to set a good table. ("The table setting alone can add twenty percent to the enjoyment of a meal.")
Her takeaway from years of globetrotting reviews? "The best of the best are still there, at least 80 percent of them, like Jiro in Tokyo, like Joel Robuchon who has so many restaurants all over the world that he travels with nine cellphones."
And Patricia? At the age of 67, she's just taken up tennis.
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