A powerful, razor-sharp culinary and coming-of-age memoir

MEMOIR
Hunger Like a Thirst
Besha Rodell
Hardie Grant, $35

There is a lot to learn from this book. Besha Rodell has led a pretty fractured life. As a child in the 1980s, she lived in a tumbledown house in Melbourne’s Brunswick with her father, a historian and former minister, and her American mother, the daughter of a Hollywood scriptwriter. Her mother started having affairs and her father moved into another house, sharing with the man who was to become Besha’s stepfather.

Before long, Besha’s life was divided between the USA and Australia. Within the states, she was a nomad, circulating around North Carolina, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, Colorado and other places. She found jobs in restaurant kitchens and began working obscene hours with curious colleagues.

The restaurant industry hardly leaves time for its practitioners to eat. Part of this razor-sharp memoir campaigns for change in the destructive habits of a trade whose virtues Rodell fully appreciates. Yet, many cafes eat their staff. Rodell shares her story with brio, and it is a dizzying sequence of events. She has so many unforgettable experiences that she can hardly remember them all. She and her partner, Ryan, and before long their child, Felix, sail close to the wind financially.

Eventually, Rodell found her way into reviewing restaurants and, for many years, this has been her stock-in-trade; at present, she’s the chief restaurant critic for The Age. As she starts to unpack the intricacies and demands of writing about food with integrity, Hunger Like a Thirst becomes a sorbet in a culture that is so spiced with hype that it has no flavour of its own.

Rodell has worked against the tide in a world where influencers and other minor celebrities are cajoled into providing all the flattery any business could want. If you have posted even lukewarm reviews of restaurants, you may know what it is like to be contacted by the establishment and offered inducements to change your tune. Whom can you trust?

She has her roots in an earlier time, when reviewing was a form of genuine engagement, not mindless barracking. She inherited excellent rules from a gentleman called Craig Claiborne who became the food critic of The New York Times in 1957. Claiborne was a pioneer in several ways, not least in establishing a food section of the paper that dealt with more than domestic housekeeping. His rules could well be adapted to reviewing anything, from books to cruises. They advocate a standard of consistency and objectivity.

1. Weekly reviews should be done by the same person.
2. The reviewer will dine anonymously.
3. The reviewer will visit the restaurant at least three times, eat widely from the menu and order some dishes more than once.
4. Absolutely no freebies of any kind.

Rodell brought these maxims to the career she began with an alternative newspaper called Creative Loafing. However inconvenient they have sometimes been, she has stuck to them as she has travelled long distances in search of out-of-the-way eateries.

Over the years, I have seldom felt inclined to fuss much about food or fashion. There are too many people starving to worry about the freshness of truffles. But what Besha Rodell is talking about is not fussiness but quality: she and her husband could have had an easier life by settling for the same old. There are plenty of expensive restaurants that don’t do anything special.

Rodell has spent decades trying to find the others and, in so doing, has stood up against the homogenisation and commodification of our basic appetites. She knows the difference between image and substance.

Michael McGirr is the mission director of Caritas Australia.

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