>From his NY Times (www.nytimes.com) obituary:

As a food and restaurant critic, he loathed the term "gourmet" because
he thought everything should taste better. He once gave all of
Chinatown four stars.

He and his wife, Karen Hess, a culinary historian, collaborated on "The
Taste of America" (Grossman, 1977), a book that began with the
question, "How shall we tell our fellow Americans that our palates have
been ravaged, that our food is awful, and that our most respected
authorities on cookery are poseurs?"

The answer is 336 withering pages, not a few of them efforts to deflate
the eminent food writers Julia Child and Craig Claiborne.