EXCERPT FROM IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY:

        "Limp raddichio."
        "Sorry fugu."
        "A blasphemy of baby lamb's lettuce, frisee, endive."
        "A coulibiac made in hell."
        For six months he knew her only by her by-line, Willa Frank--and by the sting of her adjectives, the derisive thrust of her metaphors, the cold precision of her substantives.  Regardless of the dish, despite the sincerity and ingenuity of the chef and the freshness or rarity of the ingredients, she seemed always to find it wanting.  "The duck had been reduced to the state of the residue one might expect to find in the nether depths of a funerary urn"; "For all its rather testy piquancy, the orange sauce might just as well have been citron preserved in pickling brine"; "Paste and pasta.  Are they synomous?  Hardly.  But one wouldn't have known the difference at Udolpho's.  The 'fresh' angel hair had all the taste and consistency of mucilage."
        Albert quailed before those caustic pronouncements, he shuddered and blanched and felt his stomach drop like a croquette into a vat of hot grease.  On the morning she skewered Udolpho's, he was sitting over a cup of reheated espresso and nibbling at a wedge of hazelnut dacquoise that had survived the previous night's crush.  As was his habit on Fridays, he'd retrieved the paper from the mat, got himself a bite, and then, with the reckless abandon of a diver plunging into an icy lake, turned to the "Dining Out" column.  On alternate weeks, Willa Frank yielded to the paper's other regular reviewer, a big-hearted, appreciative woman by the name of Leonora Merganser, who approached every restaurant like a mother of eight feted by her children on Mother's Day, and whose praise gushed forth in a breathless salivating stream that washed the reader out of his chair and up against the telephone stand, where he would dial frantically for a reservation.  But this was Willa Frank's week.  And Willa Frank never liked anything.
        With trembling fingers--it was only a matter of time before she slipped like a spy, like a murderess, into D'Angelo's and filleted him like all the others--he smoothed out the paper and focused on the bold black letters of the headline:

He read on, heart in mouth.  She'd visited the restaurant on three occasions, once in the company of an abstract artist from Detroit, and twice with her regular companion, a young man so discerning she referred to him only as "The Palate."  On all three occasions, she'd been--sniff--disappointed.  The turn-of-the-century gas lamps Udolpho's grandfather had brought over from Naples hadn't appealed to her ("so dark we joked that it was like dining among Neanderthals in the sub-basement of their cave"), nor had the open fire in the massive stone fireplace that dominated the room ("smoky, and stinking of incinerated chestnuts").  And then there was the food.  When Albert got to the line about the pasta, he couldn't go on.  He folded the paper as carefully as he might have folded the winding sheet over Udolpho's broken body and set it aside.

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