From My Mother's Kitchen by Mimi Sheraton

How have you managed to keep your identity as protected as it's been, though, to tell you the truth, I imagine a lot of New York restaurants really do know who you are? You're never photographed with your face shown. I mean, that's one of the things that is legendary about you. GROSS: You are always very careful about protecting your identity. I never review in fewer than three visits and rarely in fewer than four or five. If there's an important lunch scene as well as dinner, I make sure that half of my visits are at lunch and the other half at dinner. I like to see a restaurant at a slow meal and at a very busy meal. I want to see, if they have them, how classic dishes are rendered, and I want to know how the house creations are rendered. I want to see obviously different foods, how they do veal and chicken and fish and beef, but I also want to see how they fry and broil and saute and poach. But what I try for is an across-the-board sampling of the menu. And I ask people to order what I want to see, and as the visits progress, the choices narrow. My husband and I usually go first to see if it's going to be worth reviewing, but then it's usually four people. MIMI SHERATON: Well, usually we're four people. TERRY GROSS: When you're reviewing a restaurant, what's your method of ordering so that you can really judge how the food is prepared? Terry Gross spoke to Mimi Sheraton in 1987.

But she continued to cover the New York restaurant scene with her subscription-only newsletter, 'Mimi Sheraton's Tastes' (ph). When she became food critic for Time magazine in 1984, she broadened her focus to national and international eating trends. Sheraton wrote 16 books, including cookbooks and a memoir. It was the subject of one of her best-known articles.

Over one 11-month period, she tasted everything in the Bloomingdale's food department, 1,961 items. Her verdicts were reputed to have the power to make or break new restaurants, and she often dressed in disguise to make sure she got the treatment of a regular diner. She was the first woman to review restaurants for that paper. Then from 1976 to 1983, she was the food and restaurant critic for The New York Times. She wrote about food for New York Magazine for five years. She went on to dine in many of the finest restaurants in the world. When she was a child, one of her favorite dishes was her mother's chicken a la king.

Today we're going to remember restaurant critic and food writer Mimi Sheraton, who died last week at the age of 97.

From My Mother's Kitchen by Mimi Sheraton