The food served at Brown University in the late seventies and early eighties was not memorable. Pizza at the Gate. Falafel at the Ivy. Scrod at the Ratty. Because that food was so distinctly unremarkable, so broadly unappealing, I ate out frequently, energetically, and curiously for the first time ever.
I wasn’t on the lookout for amazing meals; I was unconsciously hunting out exciting experiences. As the editor in chief of Food & Wine, that turned out to have been an important lesson. It’s so easy for me to get caught up trying to identify the most original eighteen-course tasting menu in the world or obsessing over where my dinner grazed and died that I can lose sight of some of the reasons that people want to go out in the first place—to have fun, to be part of a scene, to feel included, to go on an adventure. I learned the value of all this when I was in college.
At Brown, I’d often start my day with breakfast at a diner. I’d head to Louis’s on Brook Street for perfectly ordinary, somewhat greasy scrambled eggs and buttered toast. And I loved it! With heavy plates and paper napkins, it was such a real diner that it almost felt ersatz, like a movie set. There were students, professors, locals all around me ordering “the usual.” My friend Barbara achieved that vaunted “regular” status and was rewarded by having her photo pinned on the wall.
Lessons: The atmosphere of a place can be more important than the food. And becoming an insider has its privileges!
After some classes, like new journalism with Roger Henkle or twentieth-century architecture with William Jordy, I’d drop into one of the student lounges, get a tea, and sink into a seat and watch the people slink past. I was also well trained in eavesdropping by my mother, who was a pro (often to the detriment of dinner table conversation), so I listened in, catching the drift of intense conversations. I went to the lounges where the people were way cooler than I was: Big Mother, the subterranean spot near the mailroom. Or the Blue Room. Or, my favorite, Carr House. Carr House was (and still is) on the RISD campus in an imposing Queen Anne–style building with two wonderful, bowed bay windows overlooking Waterman Street. My friend Bob described it as his Café de Flor, a place “to watch the artsy poseur world go by.” Clearly my affection for this place had nothing to do with the tea. All the lounges essentially had the same tea bags, but they each had a different clique or culture. Though today I will often search out spots with ultrapremium artisanal ingredients (if it’s tea it has to be the first flush picked by the nimblest fingers on the highest mountains to be interesting), it’s important to remember, sometimes going to a restaurant is great just for the scene.
In search of lunch, I came across the unfamiliar world of the really big sandwich. Growing up, I had come to know the holy trinity of classic little paper-bag sandwiches—PB & J, tuna, and egg salad—but during college I was dazzled by the far more exotic possibilities of what could be put between two pieces of bread. And the sex appeal that could be brought to a dish simply by giving it a person’s name. At Geoff’s on Benefit Street, I had gigantic sandwiches named for politicians, actors, locals. Geoff’s continues the tradition today. You can order a Judy Garland (roast beef and coleslaw) or a Groucho (hot corned beef, melted cheddar, Shedd’s sauce, lettuce, and tomato) or the Will Rogers (hot kosher salami, melted Muenster). There’s an unprecedented trend in high-quality, huge sandwiches today, and I guess Providence was thirty years ahead of the curve!
At Penguin’s on Thayer Street, I discovered the hippie combo of sprouts and Muenster poked into a mustard-slathered pita, then microwaved to gooey perfection. Even now, on the odd winter night, I still crave that salty, stretchy, chewy sandwich. For most people, food nostalgia is rooted in childhood. For me, it all started in college.
In the afternoon, if I didn’t have classes, I’d set out for an adventure, with food as the final destination. My first discovery was Faria’s Bakery on Wickenden Street. Inside the dimly lit, spare shop, they sold a couple of different kinds of Portuguese sweet bread with smooth, rounded tops. If cotton candy were a bread, it would be Faria’s sweet breads. Light, sweet, delicious. I’d eat the loaf as I walked around the nearby vintage clothing and antiques shops, before getting back to my dorm room almost empty-handed. The bread came with a history lesson: I learned that the store thrived because of the large Portuguese population that had landed in Fox Point in the early twentieth century and had stayed on.
An even bigger adventure was going to the Italian enclave on Federal Hill. It wasn’t the restaurants I fell in love with there (I’m not sure the pasta with red sauce was much better than that offered by the Ratty) but the poultry shop off Atwells Avenue called Antonelli’s. You’d walk through the shop into a back room and choose a live bird, and they’d kill it on the spot, so you could bring it home still warm. Admittedly, this is something I never did, but it was a spectacle: it felt tinglingly exotic and foreign even though it was just twenty minutes from campus.
Going on food adventures is one of the most exciting things I do for my job, looking for trends or new talent. Now, though, it isn’t always by foot. A couple of years ago, I flew to Copenhagen just to try the number one restaurant in the world, the fanatically naturalistic Noma. Or just this past winter, I went to India on a food safari. I ate in a palace restaurant that celebrated maharaja cuisine, but also took crazy rickshaw rides to street-food vendors—the most memorable of which was the fried chicken stall where the coated chicken was hacked with a machete and then tossed in a huge vat of boiling oil.
Dinner out during my Brown years was a big treat, sometimes requiring someone else’s car and checkbook. Each semester my dry-witted, indulgent grandmother would send me a check with a simple note: “Please go get yourself a decent meal.” I’d find a friend with a car and a big appetite and head to the Old Grist Mill Tavern in Seekonk, Massachusetts, for a juicy, medium-rare prime rib, queen’s cut, a meal reminiscent of those I would have had with my grandmother back home. It was a primal experience at the Mill—a Paleolithic feast before the Paleolithic diet was born. Other dinners introduced me to entirely new foods that are now as common as the pizza slice was back then, such as the oysters at Blue Point and cheesy French onion soup at Rue de l’Espoir.
My eating experiences never went much past midnight. I was (and still am) an early-to-bed person. But I always had a huge amount of curiosity about late-night expeditions. The place I longed to go was the Silver Top Diner. I’d heard about the huge bran muffins, split, slathered with butter, then griddled. I wanted a taste of the muffin, sure, but what I really wanted was the experience of being there late, under the moon, near the shiny diner, with a group of friends, cool.
If I ever get too pretentious about food, I can look back to my time at Brown, the time before I became a judge on Top Chef, before I began eating out for a living, before I began choosing the best new chefs in the country, and remember that, at the end of the day, sometimes all you want from food is an amazing experience.