Steven Shaw

Skoaling

A few weeks ago, Steven Shaw of eGullet invited me, along with Adam Kuban and Deb Perelman, to speak to his food blogging class at the French Culinary Institute. After we answered his student’s questions about traffic and advertising (quick tip: if you want to make money, don’t go into food blogging!), we were ushered into a secret room where we were asked to skoal on camera. “Skoal?” we asked. “Skoal!” they answered and we all looked at each other, wondering if our reputations would ever recover. And then they explained skoaling and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Lunch With Steven Shaw at Ippudo & Momofuku Milk Bar

On October 3rd, 2003, I shared my very first piece of food writing ever on a forum called eGullet. The post was called Charlie Trotter Superdud and it set off a storm of comments from hundreds of subscribers, some of whom were well known entities in the food world (Anthony Bourdain among them.)

After that happened, my friends told me I should start a food blog and that’s why this blog exists. So it’s quite clear that I owe something to eGullet and, more specifically, to its creator Steven Shaw. And yet we’d never met or had any contact until, years later, I met him at an offal tasting dinner at the Astor Center. Then we became Facebook friends. And, most recently, we met for lunch to talk about his new book, Asian Dining Rules.

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