Mimi Sheraton and Me

April 10, 2023
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mimi Sheraton, long-time food critic for the New York Times, died last week.

It may be difficult now to appreciate just how big a deal Mimi Sheraton was.  In the late 1970s and early 80s, food and restaurants had become an important part of the cultural landscape. Huge steaks and the like were for men with a lot of money and not much of a palate. On the rise were nouvelle cuisine and authentic ethnic restaurants. More important, information about these places was highly centralized. In 1975 when Mimi Sheraton started at the Times, there was no Zagat’s and of course no Yelp or the  dozens of online restaurant review sites today. There was Mimi, and everybody knew who she was.

Our paths crossed once, briefly many years ago. I was on jury duty one morning in early January back in the early 80s – civil court, downtown Manhattan. A woman was suing the movie theater where she had fallen or tripped, presumably suffering some injury. Civil court judges, to make more efficient use of their time, were not present for voir dire, at least not in this case. The lawyers conducted voir dire themselves. If some dispute arose, they would pause the proceeding and walk down the hall to see the judge.

Even to non-attorney eyes, these lawyers did not seem like the brightest lights in the room. One of my fellow jurors, a philosophy professor (it was Winter Break for him too) said to me, “If my students asked such questions, I would fail them.” It also seemed they weren’t listening closely to the answers.

The plaintiff’s lawyer was questioning a prospective juror, one Mimi Falcone. “And what do you do Miss Falcone – is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“I’m a food critic. I write a column under the name . . .”

But the lawyer wasn’t listening. As soon as she said she said “food critic,” he started speaking over her.  “Where do you write your reviews. I mean if you were someone like Mimi Sheraton. . . .”

She interrupted him firmly. “I am Mimi Sheraton.”
 

From there, things went even further south. “Are you familiar with the Coronet Theater?”

“I’m not sure which it is,” she said, ‘The Coronet or the Baronet” (the two theaters stood side by side on the Upper East Side), “but one of them has this terrible staircase.”

Ms. Falcone was not selected for the jury.

But I was.. Go to lunch, we six jurors were told, and after lunch we’ll begin the trial. But before we left, we approached Mimi Sheraton and asked her to recommend a restaurant in Chinatown. She did, and we went. It was more expensive than most Chinatown lunch places, but most of us could afford it, and for the one who might have chosen a more modest place — an underpaid secretary as I recall – the rest of us shared her part of the bill.  The food was great, and different from much Chinatown fare. Mimi had not steered us wrong.

We returned to the courtroom ready to hear the case only to be told that the parties had reached a settlement. That’s often happens in civil cases. But most civil court juries don’t get a personal recommendation from Mimi Sheraton.