news

Does Food Writing Matter?

[Photo credit, Dallas Observer]

By this point it’s old news that Sam Sifton, restaurant critic for The New York Times, has stepped down from his job after only two years. It’s a pretty short run for a restaurant critic, and his reasons for stepping down have been explained matter-of-factly: he’s going to become the Times’s national editor. That means instead of covering Parmesan flan and celery leaf sorbet he’ll be focusing his energies on issues such as the debt crisis, the job crisis and any other crisis that creeps up before the next Presidential election.

Big News: The Next Book!

A few weeks ago, something extraordinary happened.

To understand the extraordinariness of this extraordinary thing, we have to rewind a month or two. I’d been working with an excellent agent, Alison Fargis of The Stonesong Press (who I was introduced to by Matt & Renato of Baked) on a new book proposal. This was a different direction for me; my first book was a book of essays, this proposal was for a cookbook. After eight months of revisions and back-and-forth, the proposal was ready to go out. And a few weeks after it went out, Alison called me and asked if I was sitting down.

“Artisan wants to meet with you,” she said, the excitement obvious in her voice. “This is a really big deal!”

Scroll to Top