Annabelle Tometich spent 15 years pretending to be a Frenchman.
A Frenchman of “odious pretentiousness” who dined at restaurants across Fort Myers writing reviews for The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida.
The pretending was part of her job. For 41 years, more than a dozen critics wrote reviews under the nom de plume “Jean Le Boeuf.” Tometich was one of those writers, until one day she revealed herself to be a 40-year-old, half-Filipino former chef.
“It’s taken me a decade and a half to figure myself out, to be confident enough in my credentials, and my skin, to shed the veil of white-maleness I’ve clung to for more than a third of my life,” she wrote on Feb. 4 unveiling herself as one of two staff food critics writing under the pseudonym.