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Wellness
Patricia Wells on living a foodie's dream life
by Diana Fischer
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 Patricia Wells not only lives every Francophile foodie's dream life, she helps others do it, too. In her incomparable book, The Food Lover's Guide to Paris (now in its fourth edition), Wells offers intimate, chatty descriptions of restaurants, bistros, cafés, wine bars, boulangeries, patisseries, markets, tea salons, and kitchenware shops, as well as invaluable secrets and recipes coaxed from her favorite chefs. In short, as she puts it, she aims to satisfy "our endless craving for all that is Paris."
And she is eminently qualified to do so. Wells, a Wisconsin native, has spent the last 20 years reviewing the restaurants of Paris, as well as those of other top destinations, for the International Herald Tribune. She's also served as the only non-French food critic at the weekly news & culture magazine L'Express, and written numerous cookbooks, including Patricia Wells at Home in Provence, Bistro Cooking, and the James Beard award-winning Simply French: Patricia Wells Presents the Cuisine of Joel Robuchon.
Writing and testing recipes at her Paris home for two decades ("I used to work in my pajamas until 8PM, when I would go out for dinner," she noted in a recent Boston Globe interview), she just renovated a small office/studio space in the 6th arrondissement to include a full kitchen with an American-sized refrigerator and custom La Cornue range. To gather information, Wells spends much of her days wandering through different quartiers, or neighborhoods, of the city, speaking with chefs and sampling wares.
When not in Paris, Wells and husband Walter (Managing Editor at the International Herald Tribune) can often be found at their stone farmhouse in Vaison-la-Romaine, in the Vaucluse region of Provence. Here, in an ocher-colored kitchen, also impeccably equipped, Wells adds cooking classes to her list of offerings to the food world (see www.patriciawells.com for schedule). The grounds reflect her great interest in fresh, local produce: Wells' garden boasts eleven kinds of tomatoes and twelve kinds of thyme, among other Provençal staples.
I met with Wells in Vaison on a beautiful spring day, where we sat overlooking her vineyard and the Roman ruins of the Medieval village below. As Walter worked on the grounds, Wells recounted how a girl from Wisconsin who spoke no French made the kitchens of France her own, and then offered them up to the world.
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Meet legendary food writer Patricia Wells in this video clip.
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Patricia Wells
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