Daily Front Row

2012 February 10

Foodie Talk! With Hal Rubenstein

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Hal Rubenstein
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Getting the dish on the culinary aptitude of  InStyle's Hal Rubenstein! 

Did you really work in restaurants for 12 years?
Yes! I also had a catering business for almost nine years, so that’s actually how I started doing restaurant criticism. I catered for Annie Flanders, who at that time was the style editor of the Soho News when it was really big. So when Annie decided to create Details, she talked me into creating a restaurant column. It launched in ’82 as ‘I’ll Eat Manhattan,’ which I actually still own the rights to. And then I proceeded to write for Interview about food and was the restaurant critic at New York magazine for seven years.

Why do you think food and fashion intersect?
Everyone gets up every morning and asks the same two questions: what to eat and what to wear? Eating is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

Have you used your catering skills at InStyle?
Yes, when Martha Nelson was still at the magazine. Diego Della Valle likes to think of Tod’s as one big family, and when he learned that I could cook...Claudio in Tod’s PR called before the collections in Milan and said, ‘Diego asked me please to call you. Would you cook a dinner?’ The day before I left, I sent a grocery list, and an hour before I got on the plane, I received an email from Claudio saying it’s confirmed—in two days’ time, for 35 people. Diego invited the president of Ferrari, the head of Pirelli, all of his friends, even the publishers of a rival magazine! Talk about no good deed going unpunished! The kitchen was about as big as my desk, with an oven the size of my phone, and nobody understood the ingredients I needed. But they were incredible—Tod’s sent everyone in the building to help me. I went to four shows that day, cooking the night before and in between shows. It was goddamn good!