Stop the presses! The greatest Twitter parody phenomenon of our time has—maybe—been revealed! The Star Tribune is claiming that the person behind Ruth Bourdain, the potty-mouthed online culinary mashup of Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain, is none other than Village Voice food critic Robert Sietsema. Could it possibly be true?! And why does the Tribune have to go and ruin a perfectly good time?
"How do I know who Ruth Bourdain is? He was tweeting while listening to the same speaker I was, in a closed room in Charleston, SC, at a conference with the Association of Food Journalists," explains Tribune writer Lee Svitak Dean. RuBo, as she's been nicknamed, won a James Beard Award for humor this year (though s/he didn't accept in-person) and was even given her own advice column on Chow.com, "Ask RuBo." (Sample advice: "Let's say you want to be the next Rachael Ray (which is, frankly, a very fucking disturbing goal); adding an extra and unnecessary vowel to your first name is just too obvious, not to mention completely unnecessary and way too hard for food writers to remember.")
We're still awaiting comment from Sietsema, who denied the whole shebang to Eater, saying, "I could do better humor wise. And don't forget Ruth was my patrón." (Sietsema was a former contributor to Gourmet.) He told Grub Street that he thinks it could be "Ben Leventhal or somebody like that. Somebody who never has to worry about working for Ruth." We did speak to his Voice food critic colleague Lauren Shockey, who said "I honestly have no idea, it wouldn't surprise me but I'm just as clueless!"
