Thought for Food

Mimi Sheraton's Taste is but one of two new food newsletters. Another, also called Taste, actually came first and is published by an enterprising young socialite named E. Alexandra Stafford ("Can I sue?"). Her Taste focuses on inexpensive, fun-filled restaurants for "the Young at Heart" (Ivan Boesky is one of her subscribers), but there's no confusing its simple, straightforward style with that of Sheraton's Taste.

It's unequivocal and generously larded with Sheraton's now patented Miss Moffat-like culinary didacticism. It's also plain as the raisins in rice pudding that, while not naming names, the main point of her newsletter is that no other New York food critic knows beans about soup to nuts.

Relinquishing her former weekly place setting at The New York Times for Time magazine has evidently not satiated "the Meems," so she has set out to prove not only that there is accounting for taste (though it will cost you, at forty-eight dollars for ten eight-page issues) but that, like a bottle of balsamic vinegar, Ms. Sheraton does not mellow with age. She now revels in being recognized, chides the gourmet establishment for the infiltration of "cholesterol-watchers," and characteristically, though unfashionably, cites the world's best tartar sauce (the Tadich Grill in San Francisco). About Arizona 206, one of her fellow foodists' favorite kitchens, however, there's fightin' words: "If I had to test the abilities of aspiring food critics with a review of a single restaurant, this would be the proving ground. Those aspirants who loved it would be shown the door. Those who saw it for the culinary con that it is would be high up in the running." Gael Greene's response in her "Ask Gael" guide in New York magazine: "The only dedicated food lovers I know who don't adore Arizona 206 are those whose bottoms don't quite fit the admittedly modest wood chairs." Greene didn't name names either. It's too bad Dmitri Tiomkin is no longer around to compose the score to High Tea.

HAL RUBENSTEIN