Todd Kliman

Prof. Kliman – no need to be so formal. Call me “sir.” Let’s see … I like Jeffrey Steingarten, I like Ruth Reichl, and I grew up on Phyllis Richman (her columns, which were not just evocative but also personal, were required reading every Sunday morning). I’ve always thought Joyce was a great food writer (check out the vivid, almost voluptuous, descriptions of the meal in “The Dead." And one of my favorite moments in Ulysses is when Leopold Bloom, great relisher that he is, cooks breakfast).

JPW, I wouldn’t say the boutiquing of pizza is new, unless by new you mean in the last decade or so. But I do think that as restaurants become ever more casual places, and as they attempt to woo the kind of youngish, well-heeled people who like to eat out and often, something as versatile and simple and affordable as pizza begins to look awfully attractive as a menu item. Problem is, it’s one thing to install a wood-burning oven, quite another to turn out consistently great pies. That takes know-how and dedication and obsessive attention to detail, all of which are in relatively short supply. As they are, generally, in any creative field.

Re: burgers. First of all, I don’t like lists. Why five? Why not three? Or 10? Why not 17? But even as lists go, I think it’s lacking. Philosophically lacking, I mean. There are some nice burgers on that list, don’t get me wrong, but on the whole it’s reflective of a top-down, expense-account sensibility. The places you mention all do a really, really good burger. RTS has, unfortunately, jettisoned its wonderfully charred, multiple-topping version. Too bad – it was one of the things I loved about Ray’s when I first wrote about it a couple of years ago. It was a sloppy burger, too – a good thing, to my mind. Celebrate the technically-perfect Palena burger, by all means, but we should also make room for a burger as messy and big and juicy and loveable as the Five Guys version at its best.

I’m not sure I can fully appreciate the advantages, bilrus, because, aside from a little food writing for magazines, I've never done criticism for a daily paper. I do know that, thanks to my editors (shameless plug) I enjoy a great deal of freedom. I choose what I want to write about, and I’m free to pursue whatever interests me, be that voyeuristic bathrooms or the frustrations of Restaurant Week. It’s a vast, complex world out there, and it appealed to me that I would be given the keys to write whatever I wanted. Not every column is a straight-on review. Some are a kind of review-essays. Some are reported pieces. Some are reported essays. Some are reported reviews. I don’t like pigeonholing, generally speaking, but if you were looking for a term for some of my work – not all, but some -- it would probably be investigative food writing. Which basically circles back to what I was saying up top a few posts ago: that food, that restaurants, that dishes, are often, for me, the vehicle for an exploration. If anyone saw my column on Colorado Kitchen, they’ll know what I’m talking about. It has always seemed to me, as an eater -- not as a critic, necessarily, but as an eater – that to really capture the place it was imperative to go beyond the usual constrictive form of a review, the usual food writer’s vocabulary. And I wanted very much to try to capture that place, because in doing so I would be capturing something larger about this city and its assumptions. That said, I don’t think you can have a food column without also reviewing restaurants. So I try, as best I can, to strike a balance between the two. I love doing both, and love being able to switch off and (I hope) refresh the writing brain as a result. As to feeling a greater freedom to be more critical … It’s a good question. I’m not conscious of being more critical when I sit down to write, and I don’t believe in simply being critical for the sake of being different or edgy, whatever that is. Nor am I much of a fan of the sort of reflexive, knee-jerk sneering that people tend to associate with weeklies. I’d like to think that I’m writing the sort of column that I myself would like to read – a column that’s engaging, opinionated, honest, thoughtful, witty, personal, passionate. And as much as the subject matter might appeal to foodies, I’d like to think I’m roping in the sort of people who are only casually interested in food, who are interested in exploring a restaurant or a dish along with me.

Ah – stump the band. So let’s see if I’ve got this right: in town, jeans, bar, good wine, great pasta, reasonable, come as you are, and someplace that a bunch of up-to-the-second gastronomes has never heard of. Oh, and without scooping myself. How about this? My house. Everything checks out – I make a terrific plate of pasta, fresh and otherwise – and you can even sally up to the bar, which amounts, in this case, to a chair in front of the etagere.

My apologies for the delay, everyone. I had to get past this week's deadline. And thank you, morela, for all your energy and enthusiasm and for agreeing to conduct this chat ... I'll start with the question that your intro ended with -- how on earth did I get into food journalism? It would seem unlikely, wouldn't it -- given all that's in the brief bio up above. If, for some, that stamps me as an outsider, I don't mind. In fact, I think that's a plus. I’m not a former chef, or a culinary school grad, or someone with any kind of restaurant background. And I am very well aware that there are those in the industry who are dismissive of critics without a quote-unquote food background. And it’s interesting to note that, more and more these days, you’re seeing food critics who have spent their entire careers writing about food. But I actually think that’s a limitation, and that the more you can bring to your writing, the better, the richer the writing. And writing about food is, first of all, writing. Look at Jeffrey Steingarten, who was a lawyer before he wrote about food, or Frank Bruni, who covered politics. They bring a breadth, a perspective, to their work that I think enlivens the form. Writing about food looks easy; I know it looked easy to me, before I got started. I’d eaten widely, traveled widely, I could write. But how to make an experience come alive without lapsing into the tired or the familiar and without merely giving readers a consumer guide? How to convey something as particular and as evanescent as taste in a couple of paragraphs or sentences or even a single phrase? I found myself drawing, of necessity, on everything else I’d done – the book reviews, the long, leisurely essays, the even longer narrative magazine pieces with their wealth of scenes and character development. Every writer looks for that one subject, that one vehicle that will enable them to use all the parts of themselves. For me, it wasn’t politics, or the media, or even books, that allowed me to bring all that I’ve seen and heard and felt to bear on my work. I’m grateful I was given this opportunity. And a rare, rare opportunity it is. My earlier work taught me to be dogged, and I pursued this post as relentlessly – no, more relentlessly – than just about anything else in my life.