A Food Lover Tours Los Angeles : Critic Patricia Wells leaves her turf for a visit to the Big Orange and likes what she finds

“You’ve changed my life.” The woman speaking looks breathlessly at Patricia Wells. She touches Wells’ arm, tentatively, as if to make sure that Wells is solid. “I can’t believe I’m actually meeting you. Wait until I tell my friends.”

The fan places well-worn copies of “The Food Lover’s Guide to France” and “The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris” in front of Wells. “You can’t imagine how much pleasure you’ve given me,” she says. “I wouldn’t dream of getting on a plane for Europe without your books.”

“In fact,” the fan continues, “my friends and I love your books so much that even though we all live in different parts of the country, we cook together from them. We call each other up and decide on what recipe to cook. Then we call again. ‘Wait,’ one friend will say from New York, ‘Steven is just walking into the kitchen. He’s putting the Alsatian bacon tart into his mouth. He says it’s the best thing he’s ever eaten.’ ” She places another book before Wells. “Will you please sign this book for Steven?”

Patricia Wells pulls out her pen without the slightest sign of surprise. And no wonder. Although her name is not a household word in America, her guidebooks have made Wells famous among Francophile travelers. Not nearly as famous, however, as they have made her in her adopted country, France. When the French translation of the “Food Lover’s Guide to France” hit the bookstores a year and a half ago, it became the No. 1 bestseller in France, and Patricia Wells became an instant celebrity. “I was on ‘Apostrophe,’ the French television show, the day the book came out. My editor said I would probably just be ‘le petit cote petillant’-- the one who comes on for a minute at the end. But he took me first, and I was on for 20 minutes. The French press kept talking about how I seduced the host.”

Within a very short time the woman from Milwaukee had seduced all of France. “What they liked was my enthusiasm and my love for France. The French attitude is that here is this person who took all this time traveling around our country because we’re so wonderful. They were ready to rediscover their little restaurants, and I helped them do that.”

And she continues to do it. Right after her book came out, L’Express, the French equivalent of Time magazine, made the unprecedented move of asking Wells to be its restaurant critic. “When my husband, Walter, told me they’d called, I thought he was playing a practical joke on me. I couldn’t believe they really wanted me. I told them I didn’t write in French. They said it didn’t matter.”

Not bad for a woman who was once told by an editor (at the New York Times where she worked during the mid-70’s) “You can’t write-- you’ll never be able to write. You’re not authoritative enough.” What Wells wrote in those days was actually much the sort of thing she writes now. “I went upstate and found people who did their own cheese, made their own maple syrup. I tried to do reporting about people who were growing things.”

In 1979 Wells’ husband was offered a job at the International Herald Tribune, and the couple moved to Paris. “I didn’t speak French. I knew so little about the food there. I had to start from scratch. I was working for $75 an article; My first piece was on the bakers of Paris. But I always had the idea of the book in the back of my mind.”

Wells’ first book (the guide to Paris), published in 1984, was a success. So was her second (on all of France), in 1987. Still, she says, until the books were translated into French her work was not profitable. “I ended up making $350 for something that might have cost $5,000. Walter would wake up and say, ‘We have no money.’ And I’d say, ‘But I have to do this.’ Now, for the first time I have a serious steady income.”

Working for L’Express, says Wells, “is like a reward. They let me cover anything I want to, anywhere I go. What I try to find are things that nobody else has written about. Young people who are starting up in the middle of nowhere. . . . You know, the old-fashioned places are disappearing; there’s a rapid erosion of old ways. I tend to look at things romantically, but things are changing very fast in France.”

Now Wells is discovering that things are changing pretty fast in America, too. For the past month she has been traveling around the country promoting a new cookbook, and she’s discovered so much about her native land that it is, she says, “like going back to grade school. I’m starting to have a clue about what’s going on in America.”

“You can’t believe what I found in my room,” says Wells as she leaves her hotel. “It’s like a junk food supermarket. They’ve put more food in my room than I’ve got in my Paris kitchen and my Provence kitchen combined.”

Wells is off to take a food lover’s tour of Los Angeles. It turns out to be fairly short; Los Angeles is a wonderful town for restaurant goers, a difficult one for cooks. She wanders into the La Brea bakery, looks approvingly at the bread, and is accosted by the fan. “Bread in America has really improved,” says Wells, walking out with a big bag.

She is less impressed by the cheese she encounters. “You can’t really sell cheese in America,” she says, looking around the Cheese Shop in Beverly Hills. She is horrified to discover all the cheese wrapped up in plastic, but manages to find a couple of hard cheeses that appeal to her.

“The problem is, you need a public that knows cheese. Most people think it’s like any other product, but it’s not; cheese is a living, breathing thing. It has to be taken care of. Even in Paris, getting good cheese is difficult. Wells stops, thinks a moment and adds, “Maybe in Los Angeles it doesn’t matter; this isn’t the climate for cheese.”

Wells believes strongly in food being appropriate to its place; it is the thing that impressed her most on this trip to Los Angeles. “My overall feeling about L.A. is that I can really see how the food connects to the city. I went to St. Estephe the other night, and the food was architectural, intellectual. It was wonderful, but I’m not sure it would work in other places.”

At the same time, Wells isn’t at all sure that French food works here. Her lunch at Fennel, on a warm Saturday afternoon, was a flop. Wells ate warm baby artichokes in anchovy sauce, and sauteed skate still on the bone. The first dish, she said, lacked sparkle. The second tasted more of lemon than of fish. She found all the food too heavy. “You can’t serve this kind of food in this kind of setting. It’s wrong. The French have such big egos. But you can’t implant yourself somewhere and think because you have many centuries of cuisine everyone loves that you can just come over here and turn on the stove. The chefs who own this restaurant aren’t sun cooks. This is not the food for this weather.”

Back in the car she makes a few notes. “People in France are interested in this restaurant. And my editors at L’Express are going to be so happy. They like it when I’m a little negative.”

But for the most part Wells has only positive things to say about what she’s eaten in Los Angeles. Walking into Mrs. Gooch’s (“I’ve heard that movie stars shop here”), she talks about the food she’s eaten in restaurants. “I’m so used to eating food from classically trained chefs, but here in L.A. it’s a whole other vision. The food reflects the way people live today. The chefs haven’t come up the traditional way. And they are cooking for people who haven’t, either--for self-made men and women. The food fits into the culture.” Wells looks around, sees the organic dog food, and laughs. “Sort of like this,” she says.

Watching Wells move up and down the aisles of Mrs. Gooch’s is a revelation. Take her to a market in France and her face glows; she pinches fruit, talks to vendors, interviews each item as if it were about to join her family. Here she looks at the food, seems genuinely impressed by the quality of the produce, but keeps her distance. She looks at the peppers (“brown ones?” she says, “purple ones?”) but never reaches out to touch them. At the fish counter she wrinkles her nose. “The only whole fish are those salmon,” she complains.

Wells had dinners at Patina, Chinois on Main, Campanile; lunch at Citrus. She loved every one of them. “There is nothing like any of these places anywhere in France. The food is really very original.” At Patina, Wells was particularly taken with the salade Nicoise (“it’s like a little essay on the plate”), the potato lasagna (“what a great idea!”) and the wild duck. “When I read the menu I had an ideal version of what the dishes would be, and everything I ate fulfilled it. The food really appealed to me.”

Chinois, she said, was “like fireworks.” At Citrus, “I liked the feel of the restaurant. And I liked that they’ve taken classic dishes and made them look good again.” But what particularly impressed her about Citrus was the way the food managed to both look and taste good. “Take that eggplant and tomato terrine. It was beautiful and complex to look at. But it’s so rare that food that’s travaille , worked over, really tastes good.”

Wells ate her last meal in Los Angeles at Campanile. “I like the idea of saying goodby in Charlie Chaplin’s old studio.” She nibbled on bread. She savored warm mozzarella. But when a dish of potato ravioli with white truffles and lemon sauce was set before her, the food lover really emerged. “Have you tasted this?” she asked, her eyes glowing. “This dish is brilliant!”

Wells sat back and looked around. She took another bite of ravioli. “You know, you’ve got a pretty great life here,” she was saying when another fan walked up, cleared his throat and said, “Excuse me--aren’t you Patricia Wells?”