She had already established herself as a chef-restaurateur (the Swallow restaurant-collective) and cookbook prodigy (“Mmmmm: A Feastiary”) when she auditioned for restaurant critic of New West magazine. It’s a story enhanced by it being easy to imagine the young woman she was, her still striking long dark hair casually pulled back in a profusion of curls. She opens up the question-and-answer period with a funny story from her acclaimed memoir, “Tender at the Bone,” about how she became a restaurant critic while living with her first husband, the sculptor Douglas Hollis, in Berkeley, Calif., in the early 1970s. The palate is accompanied by the storyteller’s gift - on the page, at the table and in front of an audience. Jean-Georges (Vongerichten) grows the saffron on his (Waccabuc) property and takes it out with a tweezer after it’s dried in the sun.” We had halibut yesterday, too, but we did not have it in this saffron sauce. “Yesterday’s lunch was great,” she says to the ladies, and gentlemen, who lunch. Part of what makes Ruth a star is that authoritative palate, honed during her tenure as restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and then The New York Times. “It’s fitting that the first guest is Ruth Reichl, who is such a food star,” Carey tells the sold-out gathering on the second day. She’s just finished two days of lunches at The Inn to promote “Delicious” - now in paperback - the first events in the Literary Luncheon Series there established by actor-ceramicist (and former WAG cover subject) Carey Lowell and Holly Parmelee. Ruth is sitting downstairs at The Inn at Pound Ridge by Jean-Georges on a lovely warm day, discussing the gain in loss - a theme that’s not only explored in her debut novel “Delicious” and forthcoming cookbook “My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Changed My Life” (both Random House) but exemplified by their very presence. “I felt the magazine belonged to the readers.

This can’t be true,’” she recalls thinking. Gourmet - the 68-year-old magazine that she had nurtured for 10 years and that was as much a way of life as a publication - had folded. Not only was she gone, but so was the close-knit, creative staff. The news from the meeting was worse than her being fired. But relief soon gave way to uneasiness: Ruth had to return immediately to New York for a staff meeting the next morning. It turned out the call was from the office. “I thought something happened to my family.” In 2009, Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine, was in a Seattle restaurant while on tour with “The Gourmet Cookbook” - the one with the green cover, foodies, not the yellow-covered one, which is from 2004 - when the manager came over to say that there was a phone call for her.

Gourmet today by ruth reichl