Chapter 6

ONE SMALL THING

New York Eats was truly a godsend. It gave me a place at a table I had long fantasized about being at, next to writers and editors like Johnny Apple, Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin. It was so much fun I could barely believe it was happening.

In 1997 I published New York Eats (More), an expanded and updated version of New York Eats. This time I took then–Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl on a multiborough food adventure. She noted admiringly that my itinerary was too ambitious for one day. (It was only ten places!) We managed to hit Badoo International, then the best jerk chicken joint in East Flatbush, Brooklyn; Philip’s Candy, a place in Coney Island (it’s now in Staten Island) where they still made their oversized lollipops by hand; the aforementioned Sullivan Street Bakery; and Esposito’s Pork Store in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, for the porkiest soppressata ever.

Finally, baker Jim Lahey also introduced Ruth to the joys of pizza bianco, a puffy, focaccia-like “pizza” topped with rosemary and sea salt, so good it needs no sauce or cheese, at his original Sullivan Street Bakery location. In the story Ruth called Jim’s bakery a “church of bread.” He also makes dark loaves of pugliese bread that many people think are burned. “That’s the way the bread is supposed to be,” Jim tells any customers who complain. “If you want bullshit, cottony Italian bread, go to the supermarket. They have plenty.”

Her story in the Times called me the “missionary of the delicious.” Ruth described what I did better than I ever could: “Mr. Levine is on a crusade to see that the people who make food get the recognition they deserve. He sees them as creative artists waging a losing battle against mechanization, and he cheers them on.”*

The recognition was a narcotic, and I certainly appreciated Ruth’s turn of phrase, but I still couldn’t afford the drugs. Recognition as the head artisanal food cheerleader may get you an extra bagel in your bag, but it doesn’t pay the rent, and it was no way to make a living.

That was where media consulting came in. Using the skills I’d honed as a marketer, I helped Harriet Seitler, a friend who had been my client at MTV, to define the branding of SportsCenter and ESPN 2. I did similar work for many cable networks: Bravo, SportsChannel, TLC, AMC, and the Travel Channel, to name a few.

I liked the work itself, which was intellectually stimulating and satisfying in its own way. I learned how to sell, how to articulate and defend an original point of view, and how to get my clients to buy in. I liked the problem-solving aspect, and I enjoyed working with super-smart, talented, and focused media executives, but I wasn’t emotionally invested in it the way I wanted to be in my work. I wanted to put this skill to work on something I loved and believed in and had created myself.

Luckily, the New York Eats books had also led to well-paying glossy-magazine work: Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Businessweek, GQ. Alone, those writing fees weren’t quite enough to make a living. But add them to my consulting income, and I was doing okay.

In 1996 I applied for the only CEO job in the world I might have been qualified for—at the Food Network, which was then owned by the Providence Journal-Bulletin Company.

I knew it was a long shot, but I sent my résumé to the white-shoe headhunting firm handling the search. I did streamline it, figuring the hundred or so “jobs” I had had would not serve me well in the pursuit of a CEO position at a media conglomerate.

The headhunters were intrigued by my rather unusual combination of cable television and food media cred and experience. And I was passionate about my mission, to spread the gospel of seriously delicious food on television by telling the stories of the people who make and grow it. I wanted to tell the stories of my favorite peach grower, Art Lange of Honey Crisp Farms outside Fresno, California; Paul Spadacenta, the best (and I’m sure the only) one-armed pie man of the long-gone Paul’s Apizza in East Haven, Connecticut; and my old friends the Cappezzas at the Corona Heights Pork Store.

The finalists were me and a woman with a much more conventional media business résumé. We were both flown up to Providence to meet with the board of directors. I still have the fancy suit and shoes I bought for the occasion.

I articulated my vision for the network, full of confidence and brio, right down to the new show schedule I had devised. Each board member nodded affirmatively at all the appropriate moments. They even laughed at my jokes.

On the way to the airport I stopped at Al Forno for a quick dinner of sublime grilled pizza, rich baked penne made with cream and five cheeses, and a buttery, flaky, baked-to-order crostata. I couldn’t stop telling the chef co-owners, husband and wife George Germon (who tragically died in 2010) and Johanne Killeen how well the interview had gone. George drove me to the airport in the pickup he used to transport produce from the farm he and Johanne maintained; the whole way there, I could barely contain my excitement.

Alas, I found out a few days later that the Journal-Bulletin crew was negotiating with the other finalist. I called the acting CEO to ask what had happened. “Can I be honest here? You scared a lot of people in Providence,” he told me. “You were so sure of yourself. You seemed so confident and had so many ideas.”

That was difficult to swallow. I had no idea that being confident and having a lot of ideas were disqualifying characteristics when it came to a CEO job.

They were right, of course. I was a loose cannon who had no idea how to get anything done in a corporate environment. I would have had no interest in creating programming just for the sake of ratings, which would have meant weekly if not daily clashes with my board of directors in Providence. I would have flamed out fast.

A year later, they called asking if I would consult for the network. I demurred, the old cliché in my mind: “Why buy the cow when you could have the milk for free?” Or, in this case, for cheap.

I did get some food-consulting assignments, which were interesting at the very least and more remunerative than my writing gigs. In 1997, for Northwest Airlines/KLM, I sampled more than a hundred coach airline chicken entrées in one sitting, searching for the two or three the airline would ultimately serve. I would fly to Amsterdam on an overnight flight, shower at the Amsterdam airport, sample the entrées at the KLM catering kitchens at the airport, and then jump on the two o’clock flight back to the States. Mike, who was then working at Northwest Airlines, had put me up for the job.

I created a consulting chef team for Northwest Airlines, which meant eating my way through all of NWA’s hub cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Minneapolis, and Detroit) and finding chefs to work on all classes of airplane food. I am still friends with many of those chefs today, including Nancy Silverton of Pizzeria Mozza in LA (if you go, and you should, make sure you finish your meal with the butterscotch budino—it will change your life) and Seattle’s Tom Douglas.

For ten years that was my life: slaloming back and forth between food and media consulting and my writing. I loved what I did—I just needed to figure out how to make it pay.

In 1998 I did a local cable TV show loosely based on New York Eats. Its producer, Ron Fried, had come up with the idea of pairing me with then–Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten and actress and comedian Susie Essman (later of Curb Your Enthusiasm). Ron figured that Jeffrey’s knowledge of high-end food would play nicely off my egalitarian approach, and Susie would handle the hosting responsibilities, since it was going to be shot live to tape.

Before we shot the pilot, we all had lunch, and Jeffrey, whom I didn’t know very well, seemed even more nervous than usual. I tried to calm him down. “Jeffrey,” I said soothingly, “I find that the people who succeed on TV are the ones that come across as likable and believable. It’s as simple as that.” Jeffrey, without missing a beat, replied, “You take care of the likable and I’ll take care of the believable.”

The show lasted two seasons, which was about the normal shelf life of one of my gigs.

It was a sublime two seasons. We interviewed chefs like Gabrielle Hamilton, Tom Colicchio, and Alice Waters, and had them cook for us; we reviewed restaurants; and we did rigorous taste tests in search of everything from the best ketchup to the best bagel.

In 2001 I created Dish, a radio show on the public radio affiliate in New York, WNYC. Dish was my dream show. I took a few interesting people to lunch and miked each one of them.

At a Chinese banquet, surrounded by Ruth Reichl and Calvin Trillin, Nora Ephron explained that she loved location scouting because she got to sample local specialties at each place she went. At Lombardi’s, Joel Coen explained that experienced moviemakers knew that the place to go on movie sets for the best cup of coffee was craft services and not the catering truck. Over short ribs at Craft, Wynton Marsalis and Gabrielle Hamilton had the following exchange: “Man, when I meet a young trumpet player I can tell by the way he or she holds her horn whether she can play or not.” Gabrielle chuckled knowingly and replied, “For me it’s the same thing with young cooks. I can tell by the way they hold a knife if they can cook or not.” In the end Dish was canceled, even though I did everything—raised the money, booked the guests, wrote the show, and coproduced it. To this day I don’t know why.

Then I got lucky again. Another dream came true when I started writing regularly about food for the Times. Sam Sifton, then the Dining section editor (now the food editor for the entire Times operation, the founding editor of NYT Cooking, and a columnist for the New York Times Magazine), was a big fan of the New York Eats books. So in 2002 we developed a format for front-page food-section stories that sent me in search of the best iconic American and New York foods: hamburgers, hot dogs, cheesecake, pastrami, pizza, ice cream. I was getting prominent bylines and loads of space in the greatest newspaper in the world. And my late, great mother-in-law could finally tell her friends what I did all day.

I often think about the month the Times sent me all over New York in search of the best burger. I hipped folks to the burger Peter Luger’s served at lunch using dry-aged steak trimmings; the great bar burger at the Union Square Cafe, which still has a perfectly charred and seared exterior that gives way to juicy innards in each bite; and the burger at the now-shuttered Prime Burger, where for seventy-four years the properly sized four-ounce burgers were made out of prime meat in a huge salamander broiler.

Prime Burger was right across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so when it was open twenty-four hours a day, a sign above the door read, “The Gates of Heaven—Never Closed.” The burgers were brought to your table for one (they looked like grade-school desks, with swivel tops) in the most elegant fashion by dignified servers in spiffy white coats. I always skipped the mediocre frozen french fries and opted for the far superior onion rings, a tangle of sweet fried onions battered ever so lightly. It was de rigueur to finish with a piece of apple crumb pie made by Eddie Adams, Prime Burger’s octogenarian pie baker, who is unfortunately no longer with us.

Sam also sent me looking for New York’s best ice cream, a quest that led me to Greenwich Village’s Siracusa, helmed by an eccentric Sicilian gelato master, Gino Cammarata. His pistachio gelato was so good, and tasted so purely of the finest Sicilian pistachios, that one bite reduced me to tears. Alas, Siracusa closed, and Gino ended up making his transcendent gelato in a tanning salon in Bensonhurst. Tans are not permanent, and neither was Gino’s stay there. I do hope he’s out there, making gelato somewhere.

What could be better than all this? Perhaps more money and maybe some health insurance? That almost happened. In 2003, after a couple of years of blissfully writing for the Times as a freelancer, I heard that they were looking for a staff writer and reporter. I told Sam that I was definitely interested.

Sam and I went out to lunch. “I’m not going to give you the job,” Sam told me. “If you were on staff, I would have to send you out on stories that you didn’t care about to fill space in the section. You would hate it, and you would end up hating me. I know you’re going to be pissed at me for not giving the gig to you now, but believe me, you’ll thank me in the end.” He was right on both counts, but I thought, Hey, it was worth a shot.

Life was good. Vicky and I were beating the system, my brother Mike would often say admiringly. We were doing (mostly) what we loved without the encumbrances and constraints of working for a single corporate entity, dealing with a boss, or having an office to show up at every day. In my case, New York City was my office. How sweet it was.

But Mike also used to say we were operating without a net. And no matter how many risks he took in his work life, Mike always had a plan B, namely a tenured position at a major law school. There was no plan B, no version of tenure, in my universe. Anyway, I think I had convinced myself that the net, the relative safety and security a corporate gig offered, was an ephemeral one.

Though I did have some inkling of what was coming. As the digital age descended on the world of food media, I tried to adapt. Right after the first book came out, I created a New York Eats content area for AOL’s Digital City online city magazine venture. Big fun, not big money. Then for the early online service Prodigy in 1996, I developed an all-encompassing food content area—a mix of reviews and recipes—called Yum. That seemed like a dream gig: Prodigy was to supply the startup capital (the company was a joint venture among CBS, Sears, and IBM, so money was not a problem), and I was going to earn a handsome salary and own a pretty significant chunk for creating and maintaining it.

It was exhilarating to be ahead of the curve, to be innovating and leading the pack. Weeks of expensive negotiations produced an agreement, except that the agreement in principle failed to become an agreement in fact.

In the meantime, the freelance fun continued unabated. And people were—unbelievably, it felt—taking note. Nora Ephron, another one of my writing heroes, turned out to be a fan. In December of 2005 she wrote in a New York Times op-ed about how she turned to me in her search for cabbage strudel, a story that was included in her bestselling collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck. Nora wrote, “I dropped Ed Levine’s name so hard they heard it in New Jersey.” The idea of Nora Ephron dropping my name instead of the other way around still makes me laugh. (But if you read the essay, notice that she didn’t initially get the cabbage strudel.)

Years later, after Serious Eats launched, Nora would show up to participate in our pastrami and store-bought-biscuit taste tests. She appreciated the fact that I asked a friend to be my pastrami “mule,” smuggling Montreal smoked beef into the United States for said pastrami taste test. She also asked me to be an extra in Julie & Julia. If you freeze a certain frame in the film, you can catch the back of my head when Amy Adams is shopping at Dean & DeLuca. On second thought, don’t bother.

I spent one glorious weekend hanging out with the New York Times’s legendary political reporter and food explorer R. W. Apple Jr. (“Johnny” to his legion of friends all over the world) and my own fressing and food-writing hero Calvin Trillin at the Southern Foodways conference in Oxford, Mississippi.

I loved every second of that weekend: eating incomparable catfish and hush puppies at the Taylor Grocery; chowing down on an all-pie breakfast made by one of our greatest pie bakers, Karen Barker of the dearly departed Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina; sampling Ed Mitchell’s whole-hog barbecue and Big Bob Gibson’s barbecued chicken, the only barbecued chicken I have ever loved.

But mostly I loved listening in while Johnny and “Bud,” as Trillin is known to his friends, swapped Kansas City barbecue lore and war stories from their reporting days (Apple had, in fact, covered the Vietnam War). To give you an idea: they’d both last been in Oxford when they were covering James Meredith desegregating the University of Mississippi in 1962. On the trip back to the Memphis airport from the conference, I convinced Trillin, New York über-restaurateur Danny Meyer and one of his chefs, Michael Romano, to make what I told them would be a quick stop at the original Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken in Mason, Tennessee.

Romano, who’d made his reputation at Meyers’s Union Square Cafe, made the mistake of going back to the kitchen at Gus’s to see how Gus made his chicken. “Stand back; don’t take one more step” were the words he was greeted with. “I’m not kiddin’,” Gus continued. “Nobody outside the family gets to see how I make my chicken.” Michael was escorted back to the tiny dining room.

And although we almost missed our flight home waiting for our chicken (worth it, I thought, although Danny Meyer seemed less sure), it was a miracle. Somehow, in his talented, floured hands, Gus manages to achieve what I call the “cosmic oneness” between the batter and the skin in every burnished-brown piece of chicken he sells. We sped to the Memphis airport. I tossed the keys to the rental car onto the Avis desk with Gus’s grease still on my fingers. But we made it onto the plane with seconds to spare.

My pieces for the Times allowed me to really dig into a subject, like cheesecake or burgers. But some topics deserved more—and so in 2004 I researched and wrote an entire book on pizza, A Slice of Heaven, for which I ate a thousand slices of pizza, all over the country, in a year. On one call home, my ever-wise (or do I mean wiseass?) fifteen-year-old son Will asked me, “How’s the ‘work’ going, Dad?”

Of course, he was right. It was hard to believe this was a job.

When the book came out, I got pizza-related hate mail. I had written: “At best Chicago pizza is a good casserole,” and Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown urged his readers to defend their native pies. A freelance food writer collects no hazardous-duty pay, but when it comes to pizza I can take the heat. No bodily harm came to anyone in the end.

Italophiles were equally dismayed when I declared in the same book that the best pizza in the world could be found in Phoenix, Arizona, at Pizzeria Bianco. It was pizza blasphemy to not bow at the altar of Neapolitan pizza greatness. Even after eating at more than fifteen Naples pizzerias in a week doing research for the book, I still stand by my review. Chris Bianco’s crust is just thin enough, puffy and crisp on the outside and softer and chewy on the inside, with hole structure like great bread. His mozzarella, made in-house every morning, is creamy and slightly tart. The sauce, made from his own brand of canned tomatoes, tastes like the ripest tomato in concentrated form. His sausage tastes of fennel and pig, with just the right meat-to-fat ratio.

When I went out to Phoenix to try his pizza for the first time, Chris and I ended up hanging out 24-7 for three days, eating pizza, meeting the farmers who supplied the restaurants, and talking about food and life nonstop. We both loved music, sports, and, yes, pizza. More important, I realized that we both had the same missionary impulse to spread the gospel of great handcrafted food.

One night, after the pizzeria had closed, we were sitting at the counter facing the domed pizza oven sharing Chris’s transcendent “Rosa” pizza, made with red onion, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Arizona pistachios, and fresh rosemary.

As usual, our conversation was far-reaching and filled with laughter, but all of a sudden it took a serious turn. Chris told me, “My menu might be small, but to me it’s the biggest thing in the world. Pizza inspires me, fascinates me, and gives me hope.”

This was obviously something he’d thought long and hard about. He took a bite of pizza before continuing, “I have invented nothing, but I’m on a mission. I have a responsibility to do something with integrity and dignity. I’m just trying to do something—one small thing—right.”

Chris’s words landed with me, and I’ve thought about them countless times over the years. That same statement could have come from almost any of the dedicated, obsessive food makers I talked to in the course of writing the two New York Eats books. At the same time, I could also have said them about myself.

I’d gone from being a disillusioned ad exec with a weekend lard-bread habit to someone who got paid—handsomely, for a freelancer—to chronicle the food stories I cared about most deeply. But for all my hustling, for all the accolades and pizza hate mail, I still couldn’t make the money work, so that I could do what I loved and make a New York living.

“You’re like a kid in a candy store,” one of my editors teased me as I pitched him a deep dive on my passion of the week. She was right, but for the first time I wondered: was that really where I want to be at fifty-two years old, with a kid in college? I was no longer ten years old drinking chocolate malts at Harry’s.