How Do You Know Who to Believe?
I devour writing about food much the same way a rescued frostbitten mountainclimber tears into his first meal on terra firma. And because I read many of the same publications over and over again I've come to know which writers I can trust about food. Adam Platt, Frank Bruni, Gael Greene, Ruth Reichl, and Alan Richman are all writers I read or have read regularly over the last ten years, so I know where they are coming from. I don't always agree with them, but I have come to know where they stand vis a vis my own point of view about food.
I read the Times Travel Section with relish this past Sunday from cover to cover. Mark Bittman is a writer, colleague, and casual friend whom I have eaten with a few times over the years, but I didn't find my experiences eating with Bittman necessary to know that I wanted to get on a plane immediately to eat the ham sandwich in Barcelona at Cafe Viena he described in his short piece. And if Bittman's decription wasn't enough to get me on the plane, the photo of all that beautiful patenegro tumbling out of that baguette did the trick.
Then I read Gregory's Dicum's piece on cheap eats in San Francisco. I have never heard of Dicum, but his writing made me pretty hungry. Then again almost anything makes me hungry. But since there was no little bio on Dicum, I had no way to make a judgement about whether I could trust his eating advice. So I googled Dicum, and it turned out he's written three books (one on coffee) and writes an online column for SF Gate. Dicum wrote about Delfina Pizzeria, one of the new chef-driven pizzerias that have cropped up in SF in the past year or two. My SF foodwriter friends have told me that Delfina is the least impressive (though by no means bad) of these new pizzerias (the others being Picco in Larkspur and Pizzaiola in Oakland). So I wondered just how reliable Dicum's eating advice is.
Finally, there was an interesting piece about Istanbul restaurants by Henry Shukman. His piece was very well written, and it once again made me hungry
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