Writing about food since 2004.
Category
essays
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In Praise of the Two Fat Ladies
Mr. Game Show was a Hanukkah gift that my parents bought me one year in the 1980s. It looked like a regular board game (small tokens that you moved around a large, printed board) except there, in the middle, was a plastic figurine that talked. “Hello!” it announced in a Guy Smiley voice, “I’m Mr.…
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Three Great Pieces of Food Writing
“By the time the intercom buzzes, I am assembling the greatest grilled cheese sandwiches of all time and the fridge is filled with seriously good Champagne, so packed that the bottles that can’t stand up on the top shelf lie on their sides like stockpiled ammo down below. This is not the day I want…
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Tweeting vs. Blogging
On February 5th, 2004, I wrote my first Tweet. This was before Twitter, so it wasn’t an actual Tweet, but it may as well have been: I’d just gotten the news that CNN was coming over to my apartment to do a segment about my Janet Jackson Breast Cupcakes. I wrote a post called BREAKING…
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What Makes A Great Steakhouse
1. It must be dark, like you’re underground. The consumption of red meat is such a primal, bodily act that darkness–like darkness in the bedroom–opens one up to experience pleasure with reckless abandon. 2. There must be a piano player with a bad toupee singing Neil Diamond songs or a cheesy duo of guitar player…
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The Food World & The Theater World
The James Beard Awards were last week, this week the Tonys. It’s often occurred to me that theater geeks have much in common with foodies and now I’d like to make a list of how the theater world is similar to the food world and vice-versa: * The food world and the theater world are…
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Food Tastes Better When It Has a Good Story
We ask many things of our food. We ask that our food is clearly identifiable (anything strange and murky immediately turns us off); we ask that our food is reasonably healthy–even if that means laying a redemptive tomato on a greasy, heart-crushing 5-pound burger. We ask that our food is prepared in a clean kitchen,…
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The Night I Let Friends Cook For Me
Psychologically speaking, I’m a Jewish mother. I smother those I love with attention, worry, enthusiasm, judgment and, most of all, food. The food bit is a relatively recent development–I wasn’t smothering my high school friends with food–but now that I do cook and cook quite regularly, I have an almost compulsive need to feed others.…
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Food Negation Theory
I have a theory. If you make spaghetti cacio e peppe for dinner, inspired by “Lidia’s Italy” on PBS–a dish of what is, essentially, spaghetti, pecorino cheese and pepper–you can undo whatever nutritional damage this does to your physique and/or health by eating a tub of green beans at the same time, as illustrated by…
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People Who Eat In
Yesterday on Grub Street, Josh Ozersky called Bon Appétit magazine “the most boring” of the food rags, “an ad-packed Nembutal calling to mind the ‘women’s pages’ where newspapers used to publish their party recipes.” It was his ultimate conclusion, though, that really caught my attention: “Once a magazine is a repository for recipes, it stops…
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Bagelworks, Boca Raton
Comfort of comforts–the white fluorescent lights, the angry senior citizens shoving in line–is there a taste more sweet than the taste of a Bagelworks bagel, shmeared with lox spread and whitefish salad, topped with sliced tomato and onion and washed down with a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice? Welcome to Bagelworks in Boca Raton,…
