Phyllis Richman - Queen of Washington restaurant reviews

RAMMYs honor longtime Post restaurant critic Richman

Phyllis Richman pads barefoot across her front porch and curls up on the porch swing, tucking her red-painted toes beneath her. She smiles and rocks there like a very gentle version of the Cheshire Cat. She has good reason to smile. Retired now from years as The Washington Post’s restaurant reviewer and food writer, she’s been honored with the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington’s Duke Zeibert Capital Achievement Award. The RAMMYs, as the awards are called, are as sought-after and vied-for within the industry as the Oscars.

For 23 years Richman, who lived in Dupont Circle until moving to Takoma Park late last year, introduced Washington Post readers to the best — and worst — of the capital-area dining experience, in the Post Magazine. She found it pretty easy to keep herself anonymous as a food reviewer, albeit with some effort. She tried — and abandoned — a wig (very uncomfortable, she says with a grimace) and large glasses. She would arrive with friends and slip off to the restroom while they were being seated. She used credit cards with false names. “Over a period of time, waiters who know you move around,” she says. “But for the first five, 10 years, I wasn’t recognized.”

But restaurant reviewing in the 1970s was a man’s job, not a woman’s. So it occurred to few restaurateurs that a frequent woman diner might be assessing their performance professionally. At one point, a photograph of her got into circulation after a photographer for Washingtonian caught her at the airport as part of a food group leaving for China. Even then, though, she’d go into restaurant kitchens, spot her picture stuck up on the wall and still not be identified.

Then from 1980 to 1988, she took on the additional role of food editor, with twice-weekly pages in the Style section. That, she says, was when her cover was blown. Even so, it was a gradual process. As the food editor, “I was doing more reporting and it is generally a more public job, even though I tried to maintain my anonymity. I met with freelance writers, sometimes at lunch, and interviewed food people on the phone if I didn’t want to be face-to-face, and attended some food events. So the bits of exposure added up.”

A native of Greenbelt, Md., Richman joined The Post in 1976. She had been writing food reviews as a freelancer, having started at a small newspaper in Indiana, where she was living at the time and raising three small children. The position at The Post was her dream job, she says, though the capital dining scene back then was limited to only a handful of fine restaurants. “More restaurants then were not worth reviewing,” she says.

She probably knows more about the growth of Washington-area restaurants than anyone else. “One big change was the Italians,” she says. “When they saw how well French restaurants were doing in America, they decided to do a big promotional push to encourage people to see Italian as fine food of high quality.” She calls Roberto Donna of Galileo and Bebo Trattoria “the father of all of that,” crediting him for demonstrating Italian food as serious dining, and for “breaking the logjam” of French restaurants.

She particularly remembers the Chinese government-backed Sichuan Garden in the late 1980s on 19th Street NW for being “as good a Chinese restaurant as I have been to — a revelation!” And Richman has logged thousands of miles in search of good food. “The Post was very generous,” she says. “I got to travel a lot. I was able to discover what was going on in the rest of the world and compare.” Before the 1987 stock market downturn restricted her travel budget, she went twice a year on food trips to France, the Middle East or China and traveled widely in the United States. It was during the 1980s, Richman says, that American restaurants began to develop more ambitious standards. “They became serious competitors in the world market,” their food and wines attracting attention from global players in the industry.

These days, she’s glad to see more women in the business. “When I first started, I wanted to work in a French restaurant in the dining room for a fresh perspective [on running a restaurant]. Only two fancy restaurants in Washington had women in the dining room. Women could not get jobs in kitchens. A lot of restaurants wouldn’t hire anyone but handsome white men. Now women are commonplace, and the service field has expanded to include everybody ...”

Richman approves, too, of the recent expansion of the bar and lounge scene. “Washington hasn’t been until recently the kind of place where the young and single might look for entertainment when they got off work at night.” She’s less happy about the proliferation of sushi: “It’s so widespread, so available. Yet it’s a potentially dangerous food. It’s treated more casually than is safe. Kids take it in lunch boxes, but it should be refrigerated.”

She relishes cooking food as well as writing about it. Her mother was an inventive cook who created what became the family cake by combining two recipes for toasted coconut cake; but with a full-time job and four children, she just didn’t have the time. So Richman became the family cook as a teenager. “That’s when I started my career,” she says with a smile. “I’ve had the ideal career. I loved being able to get to know chefs.” The job, though, does take a toll on one’s health, she says. Once, in New Orleans, she ate at 18 restaurants in a day. Writing The Washington Post’s Dining Guide required eating out twice a day.

Now she’s writing mystery novels around an amateur sleuth, Chas Wheatley, who is the restaurant critic for The Washington Examiner. (There was no Examiner in the area when she started the series.) She has three under her belt so far — “The Butter Did It,” for which she had an Agatha nomination, “Murder on the Gravy Train” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Ham?”

If someone put $500 and a plane ticket in her hand, where would she go to eat? She barely reflects before she says, “Alinea,” the Chicago restaurant of Grant Achatz. And if it’s only $20? “Oh, the Shake Shack in New York. It’s a New York burger and milkshake place in Madison Square Park.”

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers. Photo of Phyllis Richman and her husband Bob Burton by Bill Petros/The Current.