Food Critic

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Palate

A feared anonymous food critic loses her sense of taste and hides it. To protect the secret, she destroys the one chef who trusted her. Her fall is her own doing, not the illness.

A is the city's anonymous food critic.

Her verdict opens restaurants or buries them.

Her power rests on one thing: her palate.

A fever takes her taste and smell.

Nothing returns.

She tells no one.

Without her tongue she is nothing, and pride will not let her admit it.

So she fakes it.

She studies plating, reads kitchens, steals a junior writer's tasting notes, rebuilds flavor from recipes.

Her reviews stay sharp.

Her editor C praises the new cruelty and demands more.

Each clean escape feeds her; she starts to call the fraud a kind of mastery.

Then B reopens.

A made B famous years ago with a single review.

B has mortgaged everything on this room and begs A to christen it.

At the soft opening A is recognized, courted, watched.

She tastes nothing.

To seem fearless and unbought, she guts B's signature dish in print.

The review buries B; the restaurant folds in weeks.

Then a diner is hospitalized by spoilage A praised blind, because she could no longer smell the rot.

The stolen notes surface.

C begins to ask how, exactly, a critic still tastes.

A is cornered: confess and end herself, or bury B's last public appeal to save the lie.

She buries it.

The fall is complete, and it came from her character, not the fever.