Posted by Lia Bulaong, May 2, 2007 at 12:30 PM
Alison Arnett has left her job as the Boston Globe's restaurant critic after an incredible fifteen year run and over 700 reviews tucked under her belt. Her farewell post on the trial tribulations of a restaurant critic is a fantastic read, but here's my favorite part of it, what she says is a critic's job requirement:
A thick skin. Early in my reviewing career (I had a respectable editing job at the Globe before this), I overheard a woman at the table next to ours discussing me. "You know, she's a vegetarian. Isn't that awful? How can she write about meat when she doesn't even eat it? That's so dishonest." Of course, I wanted to jump up and throttle her. After all, there I was about to dip into my juicy entree of beef. I soon learned that the job combines celebrity with anonymity -- everyone knows you and no one knows you. Over the years, I've had many doppelgangers, some of whom reportedly dined well by pretending to be me. I've heard myself described as tall, black-haired, and heavyset (I'm none of those); I've been told by chefs in phone conversations that they've met me at a recent benefit (I never attend any); and I have been chided for liking only expensive restaurants, large portions, noisy rooms (false!).
I really love the idea of doppelgangers in the restaurant world, dining on the reputation of someone meant to be semi-anonymous—I'm pretty sure there's a novel waiting to be written in there somewhere, something like the first half of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke.
Posted by Ed Levine, November 6, 2006 at 6:46 AM
Food Glossies Trumped by a "T"
I'm a compulsive reader of the food glossies: Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and Saveur. Aren't you? Each has its virtues, though I can't say that any one of them really speaks to me. I like Gourmet's food politics stories and some of its writers (Jane and Michael Stern, John T. Edge, Calvin Trillin), but I don't share Ruth Reichl's enthusiasm for hiring as many novelists as she can to write stories for her. I used to look forward to reading Pete Wells' column in Food & Wine, but now that he's gone I'm sure I'm going to find Food & Wine's penchant for celebritizing everything (It's the In Style of food magazines) a little hard to take. I wish Bon Appetit had a funkier, more real voice and take on everything, but I don't want it to become Saveur, which takes realness to unnecessary, unusaable heights.
This obsession I have with the food glossies makes it all the more surprising that the Times magazine supplement, "T," this past Sunday put out an issue that was essentially another food glossy, albeit with a stylish and stylized bent, that was compulsively, pleasurably readable in a way that the food glossies rarely are.
The highlights of the issue: Sara Lyall's piece on London restaurant critics, Heidi Julavits' (yes I know she's an acclaimed young novelist)
funny and wise story on the groundbreaking year-round greenhouse growers in Maine, Toby Cecchini's piece of Schaller & Weber's double-amoked bacon (he thinks it's so good it should be declared a controlled substance), and a funny piece about breakfast in Los Angeles. Of course the LA breakfast piece would have been a lot better without the two Hollywood types telling us they eat at the Beverly Hills every morning. Now there's a breaking bit of news. In fact Los Angeles is a very good breakfast town, and would it have killed someone to call Irene (Sherry) Virbila of the LA Times to ask her for her five favorite breakfast spots in LA.
I haven't even mentioned the best part of yesterday's issue of "T."
There are contributions by two first rate food bloggers, Graham Holliday of Noodle Pie, and Clotide Dusoulier of chocolateandzucchini Of course the Times doesn't even print the urls of their blogs, but that's another story.
What's your favorite food glossy? Tell me why.
Posted by Ed Levine, October 30, 2006 at 5:50 AM
KEEP THE FAVORITE FOOD WRITER ENTRIES COMING
I've been blown away by the quality of the entries for the Win A Dinner with Jeffrey Steingarten and Me contest. The breadth of candidates offered up by entrants (To enter you have to tell me in a hundred words or less who your favorite food critic is and why) has been impressive indeed: Frank Bruni, John T. Edge of Oxford, Mississippi, Robb Walsh of Houston, Texas, Calvin Trillin, the late R.W. Apple, Ruth Reichl, Peter Meehan (current $25 and under critic at the NY Times, Jonathan Kauffman (formerly of the East Bay Express), blogger Clotide Dusoulier, Roy Andries de Groot, A.A. Gill, Anthony Bourdain, and Jane and Michael Stern.
But we still need about 25 more entries before ending the entry process. Remember, this is not an election. You can write about one of the above-mentioned writers or someone brand new. So enter right here. Steingarten and I await the pleasure of your company.
Posted by Ed Levine, October 18, 2006 at 7:11 AM
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
Posted by Ed Levine, September 14, 2006 at 8:45 AM
To me, there are two national treasures in the world of writers who sometimes write about food, and then there are the rest of us. I'm not going to talk about food's poet laureate Calvin Trillin, though I hope Gourmet's new Restaurant issue will have something by him. No, I'm here to celebrate Nora Ephron.
She may be best known to some people as a screenwriter (Silkwood) and director (Sleepless in Seattle), but anyone who doesn't know that Nora Ephron is a seemingless effortless, inordinately graceful, and laugh-out-loud-funny essayist should not only read her current best-seller, "I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts About Being a Woman, but also seek out Crazy Salad, a much earlier but just as stellar book of essays about food and many other things.
I was reminded once again of her genius when I read yesterday's NY Times Op-Ed page, which had a great Ephron piece titled "What to Expect When You're Expecting Dinner." In the vignette about her dislike of dessert spoons, Ephron writes "One of the greatest things about this land of ours, as far as I'm concerned, is that we never fell into the dessert-spoon trap. If you needed a spoon for dessert, you were given a teaspoon. But those days are over, and it's a shame."
Then she takes the piece into another gear: "Here's the thing about dessert--you want it to last. You want to savor it. Dessert is so delicious. It's so sweet. It's so bad for you so much of the time. And as with all bad things, you want it to last as long as possible. But you can't make it last if they give you a breat big spoon to eat it with. You'll gobble up your dessert in two big gulps. Then it will be gone. And the meal with be over."
"Why don't they get this? It's so obvious. It's so obvious."
Posted by Ed Levine, September 8, 2006 at 5:31 AM
"Cooking is the most massive rush. It's like having the most amazing hard on, with Viagra sprinkled on top of it, and it's still there twelve hours later."
From Bill Buford's brilliant, enormously entertaining book Heat, a quote from the irrepressible Gordon Ramsay.
