The Tastemaker

lt all started with tomatoes.

Florence Gertner Fabricant ’58 would spend glorious summers in East Hampton, New York, taking her two young children to the beach, entertaining friends with alfresco feasts, and wondering why in the world people were buying hard, pale tomatoes at the local supermarket when all around them were farm stands loaded with just-picked produce. It was the dawn of the 1970s, and most of Long Island seemed to be sleepwalking through dinner. One day, she couldn’t take it anymore. She went on a mission to wake people up—and the local newspaper seemed like a good place to start.

“It was making me crazy,” she says. “So I suggested a food column to the editor of the East Hampton Star.” Never mind that the paper didn’t publish recipes, or that Fabricant wasn’t a trained chef and had never written for a newspaper before. She knew she could do it, and she knew it needed to be done. “I wasn’t intimidated about doing the column,” she says. “I have a good palate, and I’m a good cook. I’ve always been capable of eyeballing ingredients and saying to myself, ‘Hmm, what would I do with that?’ and then going into the kitchen and pulling together a dinner that’s really pretty damn good.”

Aptly titled In Season, her recipe column launched in 1972 and quickly caught the attention of editors at The New York Times. With her research and writing skills, cooking prowess, and proximity to local farms, Fabricant had her finger on the pulse of the burgeoning farm-to-table movement before anyone knew to call it that. “Her timing was perfect: She came along when the food revolution was just beginning,” says longtime New York Times editor and columnist James Barron. “In a way she was an eyewitness to history, as journalists always are. She was also passionate, and journalism let her channel that passion as a guide for us all—as a guide to trends, to restaurants, to recipes, to ingredients.”

Her first article for The New York Times, published on December 17, 1972, highlighted what was then called Yugoslav fare in Queens. “The article was about more than food, as Florence’s work so often is,” says Barron, who at the time was the acting editor of The Living Section, where Fabricant’s articles appeared. “It was about how food reflected Yugoslavia’s different cultures and how the different ‘nationalities’ had their own specialties. This was 30 years before the Yugoslav states broke apart and became independent countries.”

By 1980, she had earned her role as a regular columnist for the Times. Five decades and some 11,328 articles and 2,000 recipes later, 87-year-old Fabricant (aka “FloFab” to her legions of fans and “Florrie” to her Smith classmates) is still at it, writing the newsy Off the Menu column every other week since 1988, tracking the myriad ins, outs, openings, and closings of the fast-paced New York restaurant scene. She wrote the wine-focused Pairings column from 1998 until the onset of COVID-19 made wine-tasting panels untenable. Only this past March did she retire from writing her hugely popular Front Burner column after almost 40 years highlighting the tastiest food news and best new products and books.

Think about that: Fabricant has spent half a century as a journalist on the food beat for arguably the most prestigious and high-profile newspaper in the country, in one of the most dynamic food cities in the world. That’s not just stamina, that’s grit—something the octogenarian has in spades.

“When I know what I want, I get it done,” she says. “I’m sort of intrinsically shy, but I’m willing to put myself out there, and I’m pretty determined. I’ve always been like that.”

She’s not exaggerating. At the age of 12, Fabricant would take the train from her home in Westchester County to Manhattan—on her own—each weekend, taking classes and dining solo like a tween foodie version of Eloise. “I was going to the Art Students League on Saturdays. I’d take the train to Grand Central, then take the subway or walk up to 57th Street, do my classes, then find a place to have a bite to eat. I used to go to the Grand Central Oyster Bar. I knew what I liked, and I knew what I wanted.”

She had an early role model in her mother, who demonstrated an individual and uncompromising sense of taste in and out of the kitchen. “My mother was a woman of great style. She was not a follower of fads. She had a level of sophistication—and my father to an extent as well—that was not common among their siblings or their friends.”

While most of her peers sat down to predictable dinners built around the canned and frozen foods deemed so modern at the time, “that was not my experience,” Fabricant says. Her mother was an exceptional cook who took no shortcuts and cut no corners, and her parents loved dining out. “I grew up in a house where we ate extremely well.”

Her parents were adventurous eaters and travelers, but French cuisine and wines were the mainstays, laying an early foundation that would set the trajectory of Fabricant’s life. “The option of doing my junior year in France was the abiding reason I chose to go to Smith,” she says. “There were far fewer colleges in my day that I could go to as a woman, and only a handful of them offered study abroad. I turned down a New York state scholarship to go to Vassar because of that.”

That year abroad was a life-changing experience, starting with the journey from New York to Paris by ship. “I remember the first dinner we had aboard the SS Liberté in 1956,” she says. “I have what I call palate memory, and I can see that meal in front of me and sort of mentally taste it. It was monkfish, which I’d never had, in a kind of lobster sauce—and it was really good! I have a lot of those kinds of taste memories.”

Then there was the instructor in Aix-en-Provence—an Irish woman, no less—who taught Fabricant her flawless French pronunciation. “It was an extraordinary course. She took apart the language sound by sound, letter by letter, to erase whatever American pronunciation we had. To this day, most French people aren’t sure where I’m from. Even the French consulate in New York has complimented me on my French.” That was back in 2012, when Fabricant was awarded the National Order of Merit by the French government for her dedication to celebrating France in her work. “It was a great honor,” she says. Nine years later, she was awarded the Order of Agricultural Merit for her work championing French cuisine.

Fabricant graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith in 1958, got married two years later, earned a master’s in French from New York University (“So I wouldn’t lose the French,” she says), and found a job in market research for an advertising agency, where she learned the science behind the art of smoke and mirrors. “Those were the days when you’d have a stain in the bathtub and they’d put Comet and talcum powder side by side. I learned an awful lot about how to write a survey questionnaire to get the answer you want, and that how you write the question determines the answer.”

She left the job to stay home with her baby daughter and didn’t have much interest in going back to that line of work. But the peek behind the curtain would prove invaluable in her work as a New York Times food columnist, as would the lessons in critical thinking she learned at Smith. “It was a game changer. What I learned in terms of how to think and question—that is what was so polished in me at Smith.”

Fabricant-the-scholar flourished in college, and she says that side of her has been integral to her approach to food journalism from the get-go. “The academic side of me has never left me. It’s something I treasure and am grateful for and still informs how I think and what I do.”

Every week, publicists flood her inbox with hundreds of pitches. She can easily sort the good stuff, which she then assigns to a pile in her “floor filing system,” from the flash-in-the-pan junk. “I get these pitches about how this water is going to save your life and that snack bar is going to make you win the marathon and improve your brain. Somebody comes out with a turmeric product, and you look at the list of ingredients and it’s listed last. Come on! I can’t stand publicists who parrot what they are told to say and don’t ask any questions or do any research.”

She’s nothing if not critical, and her standards are off-the-charts high. “Having Florence take notice of what we are up to is always a privilege—first and foremost,” says Leetal Arazi, co-founder of NY Shuk, a company Fabricant featured in Front Burner that specializes in Middle Eastern condiments, spices, and pantry goods. “A bump in sales is the icing on the cake. Getting that nod from Florence was always very reassuring that we are doing things right, that we are doing things that are worth paying attention to.”

Every column she writes is the result of hours of research and synthesis, as she pulls from her decades of experience, taps the expertise of her contacts, and puts boots on the ground to see things for herself. “She’s invaluable, and not just because she’s prolific,” Barron says. “She has always heard things before everybody else did, and she has a sense of what is news in her world—when this star chef was leaving that hot restaurant to start his or her own, or when that restaurant was moving to a new location. She also has an amazing memory, so she remembers everything, and because she has an amazingly organized mind, she can marshal what she knows as a serious, persistent questioner when that is called for.”

Publicists know her as tough, but readers know her as trustworthy. And those lucky enough to score a few lines of FloFab’s ink get the satisfaction of knowing it was truly earned. “Florence changes lives. And she knows it,” says Nat Belkov ’16, the design director at Eater. “I believe that’s why she approaches the stories she chooses to tell with such care, often uplifting budding brands and books that might have a hard time opening the door otherwise.” Belkov designed the cookbook Made Here: Recipes & Reflections From New York City’s Asian Communities, which Fabricant included in a December 2023 Front Burner column—though she had no idea a fellow Smithie was involved. “Her decision to celebrate our book—an entirely volunteer-led, self-published labor of love—is something we still pinch ourselves over. That mention was the catalyst for a major uptick in sales, ultimately benefiting the communities the book was written to support. And on a personal level, it’s hard to put into words what such a nod has meant from someone that undeniably played a role in my gravitating toward a career in food journalism.”

At this point, Fabricant is not just a columnist, she’s an inspiration and an icon. But she says she’s just doing her job. “I never, for one minute, disabused myself of the notion that a big part of what I can do and why it gets the attention is not me, it’s The New York Times. I’m always conscious of the standards and what it means and the huge responsibility it entails, and I’m very lucky that I have a publication that believes in journalism behind me. It’s so important to me and has been so critical to my career, and I never, ever lose sight of that. If my byline was not in The New York Times, if I was writing for some magazine, I might feel differently about it and be less wed to this career.”

WHEN FABRICANT STARTED, THE FOOD DEPARTMENT was a small team and “the laughingstock of the foreign desk,” she says. “The attitude was, ‘What do we need this for?’ Now the foreign desk wants to know how to write more about food. It’s taken over the world, and it’s critical on so many different levels.”

Today there are more than 100 staffers in the food department—just one of the incalculable changes she’s witnessed over the course of her 50-year career as a food journalist. She saw firsthand how airline travel created new appetites for ingredients and cuisines that completely remade the restaurant landscape. She watched as TV taught people how to cook like a chef and the impact that had on kitchenware and cookbooks. She was instrumental in pushing farmers markets from fringe to fundamental. She can even pinpoint the year artisan cheesemaking in America exploded.

“I’ll never forget, back in 1979 or so I did a piece on goat cheese and went to every cheese store in New York and bought every goat cheese I could find, and not one was made in the U.S. Four years later, there were over 100 goat cheeses being made in the U.S.”

She’s had a hand in shaping the landscape too. There are the innumerable products and restaurants she’s vetted, written about, and thereby ushered into the mainstream.

Near the start of her career, she rescued Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso from almost making a fateful mistake: They were going to name their Upper West Side gourmet shop The Blue Onion until she suggested The Silver Palate instead. National fame and a series of bestselling cookbooks soon followed.

In 1986, she was the first journalist to write about the New York opening of Le Bernardin, a three-star Michelin restaurant consistently named one of the best in the world. She was also the first to write about a rising star chef named Thomas Keller who was making truly exciting dishes at a Midtown restaurant called Rakel, years before he swapped coasts to revamp The French Laundry in Napa Valley to worldwide acclaim. And in the early 1990s, when famed chef and veteran restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten was struggling to name his splashy new Southeast Asian restaurant, he asked Fabricant what she would call it. “I said, ‘Well, the obvious idea is ‘Vong.’”

She’s not done making her mark, though the work is shifting. She has 13 cookbooks under her belt but no plans for a 14th. However, she recently signed a contract to write her memoir. She still hosts Stirring the Pot, the summertime culinary conversation series that brings celebrity chefs to East Hampton’s venerable Guild Hall, but she doesn’t lead European travel tours anymore. An avid traveler who has visited corners of the globe most of us only dream of, she’s now staying stateside as her husband of 64 years requires more care at home.

She’s covering less ground around the city too, now that subway stairs aren’t just a nuisance—they’re a falling hazard. But she still insists on visiting places in person before she writes about them. “Without having really eyeballed these places, I don’t feel comfortable writing about them. I don’t trust anyone else to do that for me because they may not see things that I would see.”

By this point, you’d think Fabricant has seen it all, but she knows the food world is still full of surprises. “The late Warren Hoge, a Times editor and bureau chief—he was the one that started me doing Off the Menu. He said to me, ‘You seem to have a nose for news,’ and that sums it up for me. I’ve always been interested in something new and different. When I look at a menu and see something I’ve never tried before or heard of, I’m there, I want to try it. As long as I’m able to keep doing this, and as long as I’m learning stuff—which I still am—then I’m going to keep doing it. There’s always still something new to discover.”

Danielle Centoni ’97 is a longtime food editor, food writer, and cookbook author based in Portland, Oregon.