Voices on Writing

Ed Levine Eats

By Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

For the last 13 or so years, Ed Levine has focused on writing about food, a specialty that arrived accidentally. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he covered the music business—in particular, pop, jazz and rock and roll—for Rolling Stone and for Rolling Stone and the New York Times—then he stopped, got an MBA at Columbia University, and went into advertising and for four years ran a small agency specializing in media clients.

And then inspiration arrived in the form of Patricia Wells' Food Lovers Guide to Paris. Levine loved it and thought to do a similar guide for New York. He began spending his weekends attacking food establishments in different neighborhoods, filling paper bags full of apple turnovers and pizza, looking for the shops that offered the best foods. Then, during the week between seven and nine, before going to work as an ad man, he wrote. In 1992, St. Martin's Press published New York Eats and Levine quit advertising to write fullt ime. In 1997, he published a follow-up book, New York Eats More, which was a finalist for a Julia Child Cookbook Award. In Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl's review of the book for the New York Times, she called Levine "a missionary of the delicious."

Since then Levine has covered the food scene for Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Business Week, GQ, Travel + Leisure, Fox News, and the New York Times. His radio show on WNYC, "Dish," was nominated twice for James Beard Electronic Media awards. On TV, Levine was also creator and co-host of "New York Eats" on the Metro Channel.

He recently co-authored Tom's Big Dinners (William Morrow, 2003) and is currently writing A Slice of Heaven: A Pizza Companion (forthcoming this fall from Rizzoli) and The Young Man and the Sea with David Pasternack, fisherman and chef of New York's famous seafood restaurant, Esca, due out in 2006.

He lives on New York's Upper West Side with wife and literary agent, Vicky Bijur, and their son William.

BDB: Food writing seems to have come into its own. Do you see it this way?

EL: It used to be filler so newspapers could sell ads to grocery stores. We've moved beyond that. Yet, people still make the distinction between food writers É and writers. It's an interesting distinction I'm not sure I understand. I guess what it says is if people are food writers, they're not literary in their approach, but food writers can be just as writerly as novelists.

Whatever you call it, food writing or just writing, it's become such a big part of everyone's life in that food is a source of pleasure and a means of forming a community. And it's a social lubricant—people love to talk about food, about what they're going to eat, what they're eating and what they've eaten. Thank god for that! Food is a metaphor for life in the best possible way .

BDB: What's the best thing about food writing?

ED:I know what I like and why I like it. I hope I articulate that in my writing. When I write these stories for the Times, when I go out on the streets É six of us might be stopped in front of Zabar's and we're talking about bagels. That's great. That's part of the fun. To a certain kind of writer, that wouldn't be fun. For me, I got into food writing because I was as interested in the people and the stories behind the food as I was in the food itself. The food is of paramount importance, but the people and the stories are a big part of the enjoyment I derive.

BDB: What's the worst thing about it?

EL: The relative insecurity. That could be a reason to go on staff somewhere, although there aren't that many staff jobs. The first food writing I did was a book, which was unusual, because I wasn't a food writer. When I wrote New York Eats, I had no idea what would happen. The Times wrote a piece about me and that was how it all started. Then a lot of other people wrote about New York Eats and this crazy guy—me—who looks for the best pizza and tacos. And it ended up taking over my life.

BDB: Did you intend to specialize?

EL: I don't know É Here's the one thing I do know: When I wrote about music—and I was a very competent music writer—mostly I was imitating. I was influenced by my favorite music writers and never discovered my voice as a music writer. But as soon as I started writing about food, people read my book and said, "It's like talking to you," and to me, that's the highest compliment you can pay a writer.

A former editor at St. Martin's Press, Barbara Andersen, taught me a lot about my voice and how to make it better. Any writer wants someone to help them make their work better, more you. She made my stuff more Ed Levine. That's the best thing that can be bestowed upon you as a writer. That's it! If someone makes my stuff more Ed Levine, I can't be happier. If they make it less Ed Levine or more in the style of the publication's voice, it's not as good.

So I felt like I was home somehow. I didn't know I was going to make my living doing this, but this felt right and I was perfectly happy to engage people and tell them my opinion and articulate why I felt that way and somehow I had the confidence to make these pronouncements. I wasn't a cook—I just loved to eat.

BDB: What's better: writing books or articles?

EL: If you can get decent advances, books are better. They allow you to spend more time writing and less time selling. Freelance writing is inherently about selling. If you're working on a book or two, you don't have to sell ten stories to Gourmet or Bon Appetit. On the other hand, it can be like staring down the muzzle of a gun that looks like a book.

BDB: Food writing is such a hard area to break into. Any tips?

EL: If you're wanting to make your living as a food writer, initially it's going to take a while, although there's value to the weekly deadline. Food writing is a difficult way to make a living. Newspapers don't pay well. I'm lucky because I've learned how to tell my stories in different media. I have a television show, radio show, magazines, newspapers, books. The key is in finding things that you can do that you can be proud of—if you're going to collaborate on a cookbook with a chef, that's one way to do it, or if you're going to do a column, you'll learn to write on deadline and use it as a stepping stone. You just have to know the variety of things that are out there. In New York, people start out writing for Time Out New York which is a fun, energetic beat. They're not paid as much as they could be but they're getting experience.

BDB: Do you have an audience in mind as you write?

EL: Mostly I just write and try to fix on one thing. Calvin Trillin says he discovers the thing in every piece, that bit of eternal logic, that carries you forward as a writer. I look for that, too. I love to tell stories and give voice to people who don't normally get to express themselves in this world.

BDB: Do you have a favorite food magazine?

EL: I actually believe you should read all of them. When I finally wrote for the New York Times, I'd been fanatical; I had read the paper when I was six. I had internalized what it took to write a story even though I'd never taken a journalism class. It's a simplistic way to look at it. I was a newspaper and magazine junkie. Still am.

If food writing is what you want to do, you need to figure out a way to read everything that's out there—for the mundane reason that you know the point of view of the magazine. So if you're going to write a story about who's making the best cupcake in America, it probably won't be up Gourmet's alley, but how will you know unless you read Gourmet? So read it all, not just so your pitching gets smarter but so you get better and learn structurally, so you can reconstruct a story.

BDB: What are your writing habits?

EL: I'm a morning writer. I'm one of these people who wakes up and 15 minutes later I'm at the computer screen. I tend to write best when my mind is uncluttered with the events of the day. If the phone starts ringing and you have to deal with this and that, the clarity you need to write is gone and all of a sudden the blackboard of your brain that was blank is now filled with words and you have no idea how they got there. I cannot write after six p.m.

BDB: Anything else?

EL: I never thought of myself as a writer with a capital W. I was someone who wrote and had something to say and I never got involved with whether that made me a writer or not. It's not good or bad. It just is.

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BARBARA DEMARCO-BARRETT, editor of The ASJA Monthly, is Southern California chapter president. Her radio show, "Writers on Writing," airs weekly on KUCI-FM in Southern California and on the Web at www.kuci.org. Her first book, Pen on Fire, will be released by Harcourt in the fall of 2004. Visit her Web site at www.writersonwriting.com.