Risk Large

Is Alexandra Gill the best food writer now at work? She is until the adventurous eater sometimes known as Manny Goodman of the Jazzmanian Devils publishes "The Peripatetic Palate."

Ms. Gill, Vancouver restaurant critic for The Globe and Mail, is a writer in the quick-witted, prickly and entirely original manner of M.F.K. Fisher, Jim Quinn and Denny Boyd. Consider her opening to a review of a restaurant she visits only for its patio: "The food is awful. Seriously, it's shockingly terrible. The last time I went, I had fried Humboldt squid that tasted as though it had been dredged through a salt lick. And yet, I keep going back."

Her review of Mott 32, the high-end eatery in the city's new Trump International Hotel and Tower, included an argument with the manager over a lobster that "tasted like it had started crawling down the highway from Maine sometime early last summer."

She did, on a subsequent visit, have lobster that passed the test, but complained about the condition of the Unisex bathrooms: "I just paid $300, without wine, for dinner, and now I have to mop up the bathroom floor?"

Many, probably most, restaurant reviewers make a fetish of being unrecognizable. Not Alexandra Gill. Google her name, and there she is, smiling out at you and at restaurateurs everywhere. When they see her coming through the door and taking a table, they probably experience a frisson of both excitement and fear.

Recently, Ms. Gill wrote in a sensuous burst of Fayuca, a new Mexican restaurant where the delicacies included roasted heads of sablefish and the bar mixes an "aphrodisiacal damiana leaf-infused margarita." She concluded, "As with love, it's better to risk large and lose everything than to be boring and settle for ordinary."

There are lots of good reasons to pick up The Globe and Mail, but it would be worth getting just on the chance of finding a column by Alexandra Gill. Memo to the New York Times: Check her out.