Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All

Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All by Wini Moranville, University of Iowa Press 

A few years ago, while working at a small neighborhood grocery store, I was scheduled to work a shift on my own on St. Patrick’s Day and realized we hadn’t decorated the store for the occasion. For some reason, this didn’t sit right with me, so I looked up a playlist of Irish flute songs to play in the background, a subtle nod that this day was different from the rest. An hour or so later, a customer walked in and paused at the entrance, as if something had caught her attention. 

“You’re playing Celtic music!” she said brightly before rushing to where I sat behind the checkout counter. She pulled her hair back to show me the bright green enamel shamrocks hanging from her earlobes, telling me that she’d recently left a job as a preschool teacher, so this was the first St. Patrick’s Day in a long time where she could finally wear these earrings again without worrying about little hands grabbing at them. It was as if she’d been waiting to tell her story to someone, and my music selection had signaled—inadvertently, I’ll admit—that this was a place where she could do so. I was grateful that she’d chosen me to share in her joy. 

These are the kinds of moments that Wini Moranville celebrates in her memoir, Love Is My Favorite Flavor. Moranville recounts her experiences in the food industry, from her first job carrying trays at the age of thirteen at a family-owned cafeteria to her days waitressing in department store restaurants and through to her career as a food and wine writer and as the dining critic for the Des Moines Register. Her descriptions of food and locations are delightful—I found myself wishing I could reach into the pages, back in time, to pull out the Younkers rarebit burger slathered in cheese she mentions several times, or to be able to actually see (not just imagine) firsthand the desserts she remembers fondly from the patisserie near her coastal French apartment.  

But what this book truly celebrates is the magic of human connection. Dining, after all, is a deeply intimate act. To eat is to fulfill one of our most primal human needs. To provide food in any capacity is to take part in extending another person’s lifespan. I think this is something we all know intuitively, which is why a dining experience can be tinged with such vivid emotion—we are asking to be seen and loved and hoping our humanity is recognized and honored, and in a world where it is far too easy to feel invisible, even the smallest act of kindness can make a difference.  

Moranville’s memories prove as much. She recalls the manager at Baker’s, the first restaurant she worked at, who went out of his way to fulfill a customer’s off-menu request for a slice of apple pie with melted Cheddar cheese on top. She recalls the waitstaff at Bistro 43, one of the first restaurants she reviewed, rushing to open the door for her to welcome her into their dining room and then greeting her with the same warmth during a chance encounter at the grocery store. She recalls her initial frustrations during her waitressing days at the Parkade Pantry towards a repeat customer with a seemingly nitpicky order for a sticky bun and tea served in precisely the same way each time, softening when she realized, one afternoon, how happy the customer looked in that moment.

I must have seized on a beautiful kind of power that I never really understood I had: in spite of all the things that could go wrong in the world, I could actually do something to make someone else’s world just right, if even for a moment. And it took so little to make her happy: hot water in a teapot, tea bag on the side, two packets of honey.

In contrast, Moranville also recounts the rare moments where these opportunities for connection were squandered. In an anecdote that twisted up my insides when I read it—and that continues to haunt Moranville now—she recalls her days working at a vegetarian cafe, the kind of youthful counterculture place that can feel like an exclusive, unapproachable club to the decidedly uncool among us. A middle-aged woman in a “smart houndstooth suit” walks in and struggles to find something suitable to eat, so she asks if, by chance, the cafe serves tuna salad sandwiches. Moranville responds, in an uncharacteristically cold (yet typically teenaged) manner, that they do not: “‘We are a vegetarian restaurant,’ I stated, emphatically.” Disheartened, the woman leaves, and Moranville immediately recognizes her mistake: 

I often think how easy it would have been for me to make her feel welcome. All it would have taken was to suggest a sandwich she might like, grilled cheese or avocado-veggie or egg salad. 

I knew that any of the real adults who worked at the Soup Kitchen would have done just about anything to make the lady in the checkered suit feel at home. Good heavens—they probably would have walked across the street and bought her a steak if she wanted one. For if there was any thread that linked the Soup Kitchen to the other, more square restaurants of its time, it was that nobody mistreated customers. They didn’t even complain about customers, even when well out of earshot. 

Moranville describes her book as “a kind of food and dining history of the past forty-plus years,” which, while accurate, I find to be a bit of an understatement. This book is truly a study of love, about what happens to us in both its absence and its presence. Food, in this case, is just a vehicle for a far more profound form of sustenance. We may think of love as something epic and grandiose, but this collection of stories proves that, in fact, it is most easily found in everyday moments, fostered by the smallest of actions. In the case of that fateful St. Patrick’s Day, my last-minute decision to find just the right playlist seemed to have brightened a customer’s entire day. I never caught the woman’s name, and I don’t recall ever seeing her in the shop again, but that encounter remains one of my fondest memories, a slice of joy I can serve up for myself whenever I need it most. 

These actions add up—they start to form the foundation of who we are as people. When we nurture, as Moranville puts it, the “pieces of bitterness” inside ourselves, we risk becoming jaded and disaffected. Yet when we opt to act out of love, the effects can be transformative.  If there is just one thing to take away from Moranville’s book, it is that when we choose to nourish others, we also nourish ourselves.