On being recognized

Should I invest in some wigs? (Yes.)

A few months ago, I performed a live reading of a piece I wrote about being recognized while out reviewing restaurants, which started happening to me after I moved back to Chicago from New Mexico last year. I told it at Between Bites, a charitable event started in Chicago that features live storytelling by food industry folks, a la “The Moth.”

I was the last of five to read, which proved more formidable than I’d anticipated. About halfway through the reading, I had an out-of-body experience in which I became convinced I had skipped a page of my three-page piece (I hadn’t). I then said, right into the mic, “Shit! Did I skip the middle?” Later, my friend Danielle told me she thought it was a comedic bit. This is what I’ve decided to stick with from now on.

The thing is, sharing a story aloud is quite different from written voice. Words flow differently, and they’re digested differently. Still, I’ve decided to share the written version of this piece with you all with only a few compulsively Type A changes. Thank you to my friend Carleigh Connelly, for getting a photo of the big reveal at the end.

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On being recognized

“Dean, I think I have to quit being a restaurant critic.” 

I was hovering in the doorway of the TV room in our Lincoln Square apartment, my shoulders slumped in defeat like Charlie Brown after he realizes no one sent him a Christmas card. 

“What?” replied my husband, reaching for the remote to pause the season one finale of Traitors. 

I lowered my voice to a harsh whisper. “I was recognized!”

It was December. Earlier that evening, a friend and I had walked in without a reservation to a small, buzzy new restaurant I was reviewing for Time Out. It took about four minutes into our first round of drinks for the chef and co-owner to spot me and immediately walk over. 

“Oh, hey Maggie!”  

About 15 minutes later, the other owner popped by for a chat, in a flannel shirt and jeans no less! “I heard you were here!” she said breathlessly. “I came from home!”

By this point, I’d sweated all the way through my shirt, as I casually tried to slip in comments to detract attention from my critic’s status like, “Yeah, I’d been meaning to check you all out, but you know–life!” 

Internally, I began composing my resignation letter to my editor, with the subject line: “COVER BLOWN” with seventy-five exclamation points. 

Turns out, the owners had no idea I was there to review the restaurant. In fact, they seemed barely aware I’d moved back to Chicago from New Mexico eight months earlier. But things got much worse in February while I was dining at a three-year-old tasting menu restaurant with a chef friend. 

“It’s so nice to finally meet you!” our server said, after introducing himself. “I remember walking by your picture all the time when I worked at Porto.” 

I laughed awkwardly, as my heart began to race. My picture? I’d heard that restaurants often post photos of critics and local food writers so they can roll out the red carpet when they come in, but it didn’t really sink in until that young server in futuristic pilgrim garb told me so. 

A decade before becoming a critic myself, I read Ruth Reichl’s 2005 memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, about her tenure as the New York Times restaurant critic. I remember positively relishing the tales she shared about showing up to review restaurants in all different wigs and fake glasses for fear of being recognized.

But that was different. She was, like, famous. 

Nobody knows little me. Nobody knows what I look like. No one even cares about critics anymore. I get told over and over that this gig is basically redundant in the era of TikTok reviewers and Instagram influencers who apparently get far more butts in seats these days than my outdated written words. 

Even so, that night when I got home, I told Dean I was quitting, “like for real this time. I mean it.” Unfortunately, this didn’t get quite the reaction I’d hoped for. I guess Traitors is, like, a really good show. 

The fact is, I don’t go to any lengths to hide my face—partly because it’s kind of my brand as a full-time freelance writer. My face is on social media. It’s on my website. My face also likes to go eat at the same six restaurants over and over and over, where it sometimes consumes too much wine. But I had successfully flown under the radar for pretty long, slinking into new spots unannounced, using fake names for reservations. Plus, in the years before the pandemic, it seemed like a new chef was opening a new place every week. Who could be sure that that regular white woman with the brown fringe was really Maggie Hennessy? 

I think what made this especially hard to internalize was the fact that I had just spent the past two years living in a place that reinforced my anonymity like nowhere else I’d ever been.

Living in the desert is good for anyone who wants to remember how insignificant they are. First of all, you’re alone, like almost all the time. Especially if you’re a couple of middle-aged, interloping city slickers who do a panic move to a rural town in the New Mexican borderlands without really knowing anyone.

And those nights, boy are they quiet. Like thick, deep, vast, infinite quiet.

What’s more, the landscape is so obviously set against human survival to the point of being laughable. The Rio Grande is basically dried up in southern New Mexico, did you know that? In March aka windy season, 60-mile-per-hour gusts kick up so much dust that it causes brownout days that make it dangerous to breathe outside. Between June and August, the sun beats down a relentless, poisonous beam. The things that thrive here include: prickly plants, roadrunners, coyotes, feral cows, tarantulas, and desert foxes—a.k.a. things that only require drinking water like once a month. I, on the other hand, acted like a vampire for most of the year, only coming outside at night. I might be the only person in the history of desert living to get a Vitamin D deficiency. 

And don’t get me started on how little food writing matters here. Here you call up a restaurant and announce that you want to write about their chile relleno burrito for Bon Appetit magazine, your voice probably dripping with smug self-satisfaction. 

“Where?” the employee replies. “Is that a website? The owner doesn’t come in until 3.” 

Then you proceed to call back every day at 3 for the next four days, leaving your name again and again with the same bored cashier until you give up and write the story based solely on your extensive knowledge of the burrito—the airiness of the egg white chile batter, the grassy fruitiness of the pepper, kissed in roasty char, the perfect ooze of the muenster cheese, the stretch of the flour tortilla edged in crunch—because you’ve eaten it at least twice a week for six months straight. 

The truth is, I liked being alone most of the time. After all, I’m a writer. We’re pretty solitary creatures. But I acutely felt the loss of community, even despite the regular visits we’d get from hummingbirds and a desert fox I named Carol. 

Moving back to Chicago in 2023 was a homecoming in the sense of being back among my dearest friends and family in my beloved built environment, but also in the sense of a food community who valued me, and to whom I felt beholden, for better or worse. They’d come to rely on my face to tell them where to get a really good breakfast sandwich or late-night snack, or whether the two-hour wait is worth it at the chicest new restaurant in town. 

I still book restaurants under an assumed name, or two. I still routinely threaten to quit reviewing them, I fret over whether I’m too entrenched or maybe too known to do this job justice anymore. But then I think about the beauty in finding a familiar voice, a familiar face, to depend on, to remind you of what’s so great about your hometown in a time when many of us don’t feel anchored to much at all anymore. 

Anyway, I haven’t really exercised all my options yet. Maybe I just need a really good disguise.