Announcing: "Love Is My Favorite Flavor."
For the past five years or so, I’ve been working on a memoir about my life (so far) as a food and wine writer, cookbook author, and restaurant critic. While doing so, I also looked back to my teens and early 20s working in restaurants, and how those experiences shaped so many of my sensibilities later in my later career.
The result is Love Is My Favorite Flavor: A Midwestern Dining Critic Tells All, which will be published by the University of Iowa Press this coming July 17th.
I know this French-food focused blog has readers from across the country and even the world. Will non-Midwesterners care about my life as a Midwestern-based food critic and writer?
I think you might. My stories of working both as a server and a food critic offer a microcosm into American food—and how it’s changed, for better or worse (mostly for better), throughout the past 40-plus years. (And there’s plenty about France, by the way. How could there not be? I wrote it!).
The kind of street-level coffee-shop that you’d find all over any city once-upon-a-time. I worked at one and learned so much about humanity in the process.
A Personal Look at Long-Gone American Restaurants
I had the great luck to work in the kinds of long-gone restaurants we’ll never see again: a downtown street-level diner, a beloved family-run cafeteria, two seriously good department-store restaurants (before the food courts drove them out), including a venerable old department store tea room. I also worked at the last of the hippie-run restaurants in town in the late 1970s—and learned that the ethos of this counter-cultural spot wasn’t all that different from what I’d found at the more traditional places I worked: those who sit at your table deserve your best.
Starkly contrasting my days at these trusted venues was my brief but comical stint in a miserable chain restaurant. Then, after college, I worked in a private dining club, where I felt no connection, whatsoever, with the diners. One chapter explores the disheartening reasons behind that.
My France Problem
Frankly, I think my favorite chapter in the book is “My France Problem.” In it, I get to the heart of what I found and loved about food in France during my 25-plus years of summer stays there.
So, what was my France problem? The problem wasn’t France—it was coming home to review restaurants in Des Moines after spending so much time eating in France and writing fairly and honestly about Des Moines restaurants, while avoiding feeling like an annoying, over-privileged snob.
Thing is, it was never about comparing French gastronomy to what we had in Des Moines, because French gastronomy isn’t necessarily what I loved most about France. Rather, I discovered early on that it wasn’t the Michelin-starred extravaganzas that moved me. Rather, I was rarely more happy than when I was tucking into one of those thoughtful three-course meals that are affordable for schoolteachers, secretaries, bus drivers, plumbers, and postal workers alike.
The care I found at such humble places always touched me—and it was that kind of care that I often found lacking in the restaurants back home. While I certainly kept a razor-sharp focus on what Des Moines did best, I thought Des Moines diners deserved better. And that was, essentially, my France problem.
Other Chapters You Might Enjoy
I also devote chapters to, among other things:
• The weirdness of wine-writing press junkets. While it might sound like some kind of heaven to go on all-expense paid trips put on by wineries and wine consortiums, these trips—to places like Portugal, Italy, Argentina, and Spain, and France—were surprisingly much less glamorous than they sounded. I’ll tell you why.
• The perils of reviewing restaurants in a mid-sized city: From the mishaps that occurred when I was recognized in restaurants, to my getting cornered again and again (and again!) by readers who disagreed with my reviews, reviewing could be a true minefield.
• Nastygrams and social media bullies: In letters to the editor, some readers would fixate on peculiar details. And things got really strange with the intrusion of social media.
There’s more, of course, including insights on just how far American restaurants have come during the 20 years I reviewed them. But I also look at what our food-obsessed nation has lost along the way.
Available for Pre-Order
That’s a brief overview of the book—if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask! And, by the way, the book is available for pre-order on Amazon. The nice thing about pre-ordering is that if the price goes down between now an the shipping date, you’ll get the lowest price during this stretch of time.
Thank you—as always—for reading!
