'I was one of the last anonymous critics in the world'

Besha Rodell turned her obsession into a career, becoming a James Beard Award winning food critic for LA Weekly, The Age, and The New York Times.

Rodell's new memoir goes beyond restaurant reviews. It's an unflinching account of navigating a high-pressure world of hospitality - as a worker and later a critic.

It's called Hunger Like a Thirst: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, A Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table.

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The chocolate soufflé she had at Stephanie’s in Melbourne remains in her memory she told RNZ’s Afternoons.

‘As you can imagine, for an eight-year-old child, that's just like heaven on Earth. Somebody had proven to me that God existed.

“But the main thing for me was really the fanciness of it. I grew up with hippies. We didn't have a whole lot of money. And so just the act of turning something as quotidian as dinner into this stylised, really shiny thing, it just blew my mind.”

She grew up on a lifestyle block in rural Victoria, before her family relocated to the US, it was there she found herself in hospitality, and immediately felt at home, she says.

“It just clicked really quickly for me, I had moved around a lot. I went to five high schools. I was kind of this punk rock kid.

“And I struggled to understand how I would find my place in any workplace, working retail or in an office job just didn't fit me. I didn't know how to behave I think, or dress or any of that.

“And when I first got into a restaurant that was pretty cool and really took the food and drink seriously and everybody liked good music and the banter was great. I just immediately felt at home in that environment, definitely.”

Moving from the heat of the restaurant to criticism helped in her new career, she says.

“Working on the floor probably helped the most. The last job I had before I became a full-time critic was as the manager of an upscale steakhouse in North Carolina.

“And that kind of sixth sense that you get when you are running the floor, where you can kind of tell if one of the waiters is stroppy, if one of the tables is having a bad night, if the kitchen is backed up, all of that stuff that you kind of have to manage. It becomes very ingrained in you, and I've never lost it.”

With the publication of her book, her anonymity is now a thing of the past, something, she says, she will miss.

“I was one of the last anonymous critics in the world, there's only two or three people left who are still doing it and have never had their photo online.

“I only got to do it for as long as I did, because I became a critic right before the advent of Facebook being everywhere, and people putting their photos online everywhere. Somebody asked me the other day, 'why did you decide to be anonymous?' And I said, 'you know, everybody used to be anonymous'.”

Readers enjoy a negative review, Rodell says, more than a glowing one, but she rarely lays into a restaurant for the sake of it.

“These days, I don't generally do it unless I feel that the restaurant itself is a cynical exercise.

“Maybe it's a big restaurant group in a hotel chain or something like that, somebody who has a ton of money to throw at PR, that there's all this hype about it, and then you go and it's just disappointing. I don't feel bad about at all.”

If it’s a “labour of love”, but not quite working she sees herself as an unpaid consultant.

“These are the things that you really need help with, rather than to be mean and cast it as a negative review, more of a helpful thing.

“If it's just hopeless, usually I leave it alone, because those restaurants tend to go away on their own. I feel like sometimes I don't need to be a nail in that particular coffin.”