Mimi Sheraton, the meals author and restaurant critic who chronicled culinary scenes in New York and world wide with a discriminating palate and deft prose that captured the nuances of haute delicacies and plumbed the mysteries of rooster soup, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 97.

Her demise, at NYU Langone Medical Heart, was confirmed by her son, Marc Falcone.

In a six-decade profession, Ms. Sheraton was The New York Occasions’s meals and restaurant critic from 1976 to 1983; labored for Self-importance Truthful, Time, New York, Condé Nast Traveler and different magazines; and wrote 16 books, together with restaurant guides, cookbooks, a memoir and a farewell of kinds, “1,000 Meals to Eat Earlier than You Die” (2015). She calculated in 2013 that she had eaten 21,170 restaurant meals professionally in 49 international locations.

An adventurer with a ardour for offbeat experiences, an eclectic style for meals and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the primary lady to assessment eating places for The Occasions. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, eating in wigs and tinted glasses and utilizing aliases for reservations, principally in high-end locations the place individuals would have in any other case identified her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.

“The longer I reviewed eating places, the extra I grew to become satisfied that the unknown buyer has a totally completely different expertise from both a valued patron or a acknowledged meals critic,” she wrote in her 2004 memoir, “Consuming My Phrases: An Urge for food for Life.” “For all sensible functions, they could as properly be in several eating places.”

Colleagues and different restaurant critics described her evaluations as robust however truthful and scrupulously researched. The Occasions required three visits to a restaurant earlier than publishing a assessment; she dined six to eight occasions earlier than passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in in the future to guage the meat and sandwich-building methods.

Ms. Sheraton wrote a assessment for New York journal in 1972 after tasting all 1,196 gadgets being offered within the Bloomingdale’s meals division. The duty took 11 months. “I brewed 97 pots of tea and turned over one bathtub simply to the jars of jellies and jams,” she recalled.

One other of her evaluations, primarily based on blind tastings by a number of Occasions workers members, favored private-label liquors over standard model names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The assessment ran weeks earlier than Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.

“I heard that two million {dollars}’ value of promoting had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the manager editor. “I requested Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He mentioned, ‘That’s none of your small business. It was an amazing story.’”

Adverse evaluations by Ms. Sheraton generated some lawsuits, and she or he often acquired indignant letters from restaurateurs and diners. However they have been far outnumbered by missives from those that favored her simple judgments. Some mentioned her vivid culinary descriptions evoked childhood recollections of kitchens and vacation dinner tables, or of travels to unique lands.

For Occasions readers on Nov. 15, 1981, Ms. Sheraton caught the moods of open markets from Africa to Asia:

“In Calcutta, sleek ladies in silken saris are colourful competitors for the pyramided cones of earth-toned spices they promote within the markets. The Indian ladies present a pointy distinction to the workmen within the Tsukiji wholesale fish market in Tokyo, who may be seen taking naps on the concrete platforms at 2 or 3 within the morning, curled up towards big sharks that look no much less menacing for being lifeless. Distributors within the souks of Marrakesh, promoting lemons, mint, coriander, grilled meat and nougat sweet, look as if that they had stepped out of biblical occasions.”

Ms. Sheraton typically ate 4 meals a day, at venues starting from pushcarts to palatial eating places. However she normally selected little-known locations with good meals and dined with just a few shortly recruited colleagues or buddies. She paid for meals in money.

She by no means took notes in a restaurant however had a outstanding reminiscence for flavors, aromas, service and atmosphere. After years of utilizing a typewriter, she resisted computer systems for a time, dictating evaluations by telephone, as her civilized world turned digital.

Ms. Sheraton additionally reviewed meals served in faculties, hospitals and prisons, and she or he consulted with these establishments to enhance their menus. Her frequent journeys overseas prompted her to put in writing books and articles on the cuisines of Germany, France, Italy, China, Russia and Vietnam, and on markets and specialty meals.

For her guide “The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Misplaced World” (2000), she scoured Europe, Israel and Argentina for genuine variations of the Jewish spherical breads sprinkled with onions and spices. She discovered they have been now not made in Bialystok, Poland, the place the Nazis had burned 2,000 Jews to demise in a synagogue in 1941. However among the many diaspora of bakers, she discovered one of the best bialys on the Decrease East Aspect of Manhattan.

She was born Miriam Solomon in Brooklyn on Feb. 10, 1926, certainly one of two kids of Joseph and Beatrice (Breit) Solomon. Her father offered produce in Manhattan, and her mom was a wonderful prepare dinner. Their non-kosher Jewish household talked avidly of meals and cooking. For Mimi and her brother, Arthur, summers meant Lundy’s seafood in Sheepshead Bay and Nathan’s Well-known sizzling canines in Coney Island.

She graduated from Midwood Excessive College in 1943 and from New York College in 1947.

Her marriage in 1945 to William Schlifman, who had modified his surname to Sheraton, led to divorce in 1954. In 1955 she married Richard Falcone, a retailing govt and importer. That they had one son, Marc. Along with him, she is survived by a granddaughter.

Richard Falcone died in 2014. Ms. Sheraton’s brother died in 2004.

Ms. Sheraton wrote about house furnishings for an promoting company and for Good Housekeeping journal. She additionally labored as an inside decorator, a furnishings and meals editor for Seventeen, a globe-trotting analysis advisor for the meals companies firm Restaurant Associates and a contract author. Her early books included “The Seducer’s Cookbook” (1963) and “The German Cookbook” (1965).

She grew to become a restaurant critic first for Cue journal, then for The Village Voice and different publications. For 5 years she was a contributing editor and critic for New York journal. She joined The Occasions in 1975 as a reporter and have become a critic a 12 months later. Lately, she wrote for The Occasions and different publications about New York neighborhoods, meals in China and different topics.

Her later books embrace “Is Salami and Eggs Higher Than Intercourse?” (1985, with Alan King), “The Entire World Loves Rooster Soup: Recipes and Lore to Consolation Physique and Soul” (1995) and “The New York Occasions Jewish Cookbook” (2002, with Linda Amster).

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, Ms. Sheraton had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a yard the place she grew chives, tarragon, mint, sage, rosemary and basil. And he or she learn different restaurant critics, with whom she typically disagreed.

“Effectively, whether or not they’re proper or not, which suggests they agree with me,” she advised The Occasions wryly in 2004, “meals writers typically dedicate an excessive amount of area to cooks’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, in spite of everything — that is supper. So I don’t need to hear a couple of chef’s intentions. Name me when it’s good.”