Why I'm Writing Again

In the fall of 2009, my wife Karen, her best friend Katherine and I had dinner at The French Laundry — Thomas Keller’s restaurant in Yountville, California — and it rearranged something in how I thought about food.

At the time it was the only three-Michelin-star restaurant on the west coast of the United States. Michelin’s own wording for that third star is exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.

So that is what Katherine and I did. We made a special journey of it, flying down to meet Karen, who was just finishing a mini fellowship at Stanford; the dinner was how we marked it. Karen got us the reservation, and to this day I don’t know how she managed it.

It wasn’t the food alone — though the food was extraordinary, and I still dream about the sweet butter-poached Maine lobster tail, one of their signatures at the time. It was the formality I wasn’t expecting, the choreography of the service, the sheer intentionality of every course landing in a room built for exactly that meal. I remember being a little taken aback by it, and then completely won over. That night I understood, for the first time, that dining could be an experience in its own right — not sustenance with better plating, but something closer to theatre, or ritual, or art, depending on the night.

A few years later, in 2012, I started a food blog called Premeditated Gluttony. For five years I ate my way through dining rooms — locally, then increasingly further afield — and wrote about what I found. There were stretches where I ate four or five meals a day just to keep up with the writing. It was a strange, wonderful kind of obsession, and I have never quite managed to be embarrassed about it.

I built the whole thing on one rule: I never accepted a free meal in exchange for writing about, recommending or endorsing a restaurant. Not because chefs and owners weren’t generous — they often were, sending out a dish that wasn’t on the menu, or spending twenty minutes at the table talking through a tasting menu — but because I wanted the writing to be trustworthy in a way that has only gotten harder to find since. Premeditated Gluttony was never a review site and never an awards site. It was a recommendation site. Here’s where you should go and here is what you need to eat.

Which meant I had to decide what to do about the places that weren’t very good.

My answer was to write them up exactly as though I were going to publish, and then not publish. I’d send the piece privately, by email, to the chef or the owner instead. I wasn’t there to damage anyone’s business. I was there because I loved the industry, and a private, honest note did more good than a public takedown ever would.

That turned out to be the most consequential decision I made. More than once, a restaurant I’d quietly critiqued wrote back asking for more of my thinking. That’s how I ended up with a genuine network of chefs, bartenders and owners rather than just a readership — and it is, years later, still the reason I get to eat the way I do.

The instinct hasn’t changed, and if anything I believe it harder now. Experience is subjective, and I don’t think everyone has to agree on it. The best restaurant in the world can have an off night; a modest one can catch every condition going right and shine. That’s part of why I’ve always been a little uneasy with ranking-style lists — the World’s 50 Best format and its many imitators — even though I sit on the other side of that world too, as COO of the Chinese Restaurant Awards. I’m drawn more to recognition than to ranking, closer to how Michelin works than to a numbered countdown, because recognition can hold more than one truth at a time and a ranking has to pretend it can’t.

I never tried to monetize any of it. It was a hobby, and the network it built was reward enough. Eventually work and a growing family caught up with me and I let it go quiet — though the readers never quite did. For years, people have been asking me when I was going to start writing again.

What made this the moment rather than some other year is simpler than any of it: I’ve semi-retired. Stepping back from full-time work didn’t only free up time to write. It freed up time to go back out and live the things worth writing about in the first place, which is where all of this actually starts.

Just Savour Life is the answer, and it’s a wider idea than Premeditated Gluttony ever was — mostly because I’m a wider, older version of the person who wrote that.

Premeditated Gluttony was a site about restaurants. This one is about tables.

That sounds like a small distinction and it isn’t. Years of writing about meals taught me that almost nothing I actually remember about a great dinner is on the plate. It’s who I was sitting across from. It’s what the room was doing that night. It’s the cook who came out at the end because someone had finally ordered the dish he’d been arguing for. The food is what gets you in the door and gives everyone something to talk about — but it’s rarely the thing you carry home.

So the food is still the way in here. It just isn’t the destination any more. Which is why the subjects run wider than dining rooms: what I’m eating and drinking, where the travelling takes me, the gatherings worth clearing a whole day for, where I come from and what that keeps explaining to me, and every so often something pulled back out of the archives.

None of which makes me an expert without blind spots, and I’d rather say so plainly than have you work it out yourself. I can navigate almost anywhere with a map in hand and then get spectacularly, hopelessly lost inside a single train station — Seoul does it to me, and so does Tokyo, where Shinjuku and Shibuya have both beaten me more than once. I barely ever get jet lag, maybe once every five or seven years, and when it finally catches up with me it puts me down for a week. Nobody is immune to the parts of travel that refuse to cooperate, and I don’t think a writer should pretend otherwise.

My grandfather’s generation didn’t really have hobbies. He worked, and worked, and worked, and the one thing he let himself genuinely enjoy was a good meal. I don’t offer that as a criticism of him — it was a different era, with different permissions. Just Savour Life is my attempt at a different one: taking the time to actually notice what’s in front of me, while still chasing the harder things worth working for.

I don’t know exactly who’s going to read this. I only know I want it to stay honest — an unswayed account of the meals, places and people worth your time. That was true in 2012 and it’s true now. And underneath all of it: I don’t expect I’ll ever know everything, and I fully expect to learn more from the people I write about than anyone reading will learn from me.

Call it lifelong learning, dressed up as a food blog.