The chief restaurant critic, Pete Wells, with little to do in New York City due to the pandemic and wholesale restaurant closings, chose to write about a restaurant reviewer from Grand Forks, North Dakota, Marilyn Hagerty. If you can't eat out, review the reviewer, no matter how far away she lives.
Wasn't she the one who became a bit of a sensation years ago (guess how many?) for writing a review on The Olive Garden restaurant in Grand Forks? Yes, the very one.
I'm not all that savvy about newspaper bylines, but Mr. Well's story doesn't have a location attached to it. I'll take than to mean that his editors didn't fork over the expense money for him to actually go to Grand Forks and interview Ms. Hagerty. They did send a photographer from the Midwest bureau though, so we are treated to several photos in what is a delightful story about a 94-year-old woman who has been living alone since her husband passed away in 1997.
Jack Hagerty was her editor at The Grand Forks Herald. Marilyn is once again retired from the paper, but does still submits three stories a week and gets paid the freelance rate. She says they're afraid to get rid of her.
When I came across the Pete Wells story I had to jog my memory and check if I hadn't written about Ms. Hagerty when she came to New York and reviewed a dirty water frank. I had. It was in 2012! And also in that year, James Hagerty, an obituary writer for the WSJ, revealed in an A-Hed piece that Marilyn is his Mom. I wrote about James's obits in the WSJ in 2018. Journalism obviously runs in the family.
Ms. Hagerty is still writing restaurant reviews about the eateries in Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, another city across the Red River.
From my own experience of visiting my Midwest relatives in Illinois, I always got a kick of how easily you'd see license plates from Wisconsin and Indiana, border states. Water doesn't enter the picture that often, so it doesn't separate states and lead to bridges with prohibitive tolls financing mosaic tiles in subway stations. There is a West New York, in New Jersey, and it is across the Hudson River, but few from Manhattan are ever going to cross the Hudson to go to dinner in New Jersey. It ain't happening. It's not practical.
Once a week Marilyn is still devoting one of her three weekly columns to restaurant reviews, although now they are about the quality of the takeout meal rather than the actual indoor dining experience. The pandemic is everywhere, and North Dakota and Minnesota are no exception.
Her son convinced her to stop going to places that were still serving indoors because not many people were wearing masks, even if she was. She has revisited the Olive Garden in Grand Forks and written about their shrimp scampi, takeout style. She concluded things seem to taste better when you could eat them at the restaurant, as in pre-pandemic days.
One of the photos in the Pete Wells story shows Ms. Hagerty getting into her car with her Olive Garden takeout. So at 94 she's still able to drive her own car. Her son says she is still writing reviews in order to keep sane, not to generate income. She refuses "to be an old person."
Marilyn seems very much like the fellow they interviewed in England who was one of the first people to get the Corona virus vaccine. At 91 he was grousing about the lack of parking near the hospital. But he quite gleefully remarked at 91 he was too old to die. "What would be the point now?"
That reminded me of something the sportswriter Red Smith said about finally making it to a New York newspaper and being able to write about the Yankees. "It takes a long time to learn where the press box is at Yankee Stadium is, so why waste it?"
Looking back at the exchange Ms. Hagerty had with the NYT reporter when she sampled a dirty water frank she expressed hope that after 2012 she would be able to come back to New York and review the Olive Garden in Times Square.
She's going to have to wait. We all are.
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