Gael Greene

Who is Gael Greene?

Gael Greene is an American restaurant critic, author and novelist. Ms. Greene is a graduate of the University of Michigan. She became New York magazine's restaurant critic in fall 1968, at a time when most New Yorkers were unsophisticated about food and there were few chefs anyone knew by name. She was a passionate early "foodie" before that word was used. Indeed, the American edition of The Foodie Handbook credited her with first using the word.

Given the spotlight of New York, the first city magazine, her writing gave New Yorkers a new way to think about dining out—as theater, as seduction, as social competition—and documented the city's growing interest in food and dining out. Articles like "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ice Cream But Were Too Fat To Ask", "The Mafia Guide to Dining Out" and "Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen" were early pieces in the four decades she documented the city's growing obsession with food.

Greene famously went to great lengths to conceal her identity from restaurateurs, reserving and using credit cards under other names, and wearing hats that covered her eyes in photographs, on television, and in public appearances. Her writing inspired and documented the city's growing interest in food and dining out.