Jeanne McManus

Bad restaurants close, good restaurants close, bad restaurants thrive, good restaurants thrive. I'm not sure what the survivor rate is here in D.C., but it seems that a lot of restaurants with a lot of promise are opening in downtown D.C., which is very exciting.

Oh, let me correct a verrrrry wrong impression. I'm not going to Paris. 1) Our budget can't afford it. 2)It would be one of those stories that says "I'm eating in a fabulous place and YOU'RE NOT," and you know how I hate those stories. But we are going to do a piece soon, before the events, that will set the stage and give readers recipes from the Paris dinner. And thanks for the nice comments about this chat. I'll try to keep dropping in. It would just be a lot easier and I'd have a lot more time.... if I didn't have to put out the Food section every week!

We did for a while, when the online chats first started, but we were asked to speak on specific topics each week, i.e., baking cakes, softshell crabs, and after about 10 minutes it seemed like all we were saying was huminnna hummmina, you know? But this brings up a good point, and one I liked to hear more about from you. How many of you use online sources for recipes? During our chats we would often have people sending in recipes. I'm a stickler for never running a recipe that hasn't been tested and it just made me extremely wary to look as if, in any way, I was endorsing or approving a recipe that had been sent to our chat, when I wasn't sure it would work. The only place I really head online is epicurious.com. What about the rest of you?

Good point. But I think he's really the exception and in his prime he really cornered the market on humor writing. Maybe someone has to do that for "food writing."

And the National Desk doesn't make you warm up their leftovers??? Sorry Russ! Didn't mean to impugn your work. Maybe I really just have test kitchen envy!

The Relais Gourmands 30th anniversary gala is June 20 for more than 200 guests at Pavillon Gabriel, Champs Elysees. Sorry! Invitation only. On June 21 and 22 there are collaborative dinners, in which 15 American-based chefs will cook at 15 Relais Gourmands restaurants in France and SPain.

This is a tough question. Yes, yes, yes, I could say, of course the work of a writer who writes about food could be considered for a Pulitzer. But let's be honest. The Pulitzer Prize winners I know are enormous talents, writing and thinking. Say, for example, Michael Dirda, who won the Pulitzer for book criticism, and Henry Allen, who won it for photography criticism. Does food generate the kind of complex criticism that wins prizes? Does food cause a writer to think big thoughts, does it act as a springboard for a mind like Dirda's, does it have a history, a sort of intellectual archive that a writer like Henry Allen can draw on? I just don't think so. You can write about food, as Tony Horowitz did about the chicken processing plants (I think I'm remembering this correctly) and win about the Pulitzer, but that was investigative reporting, not food criticism

I really like to write, but I really like to edit too, and come up with ideas and get them in the paper. To get the section out, my first job is the editing part. And I try to fill in the little holes in the section, by writing short stuff. When I have time, I write. But I never resent having to edit first.

Sorry, I don't have details in front of me at the moment. Let me see if I can find them. It begins on June 20 or 21, I think.

It's so hard to give a quick list, but here's just some random thoughts and these are by NO MEANS my definitive favorites. I turn to Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything and Joy of Cooking for basics and for research. I really like the Rose Pistola Cookbook, for some reason (chicken under a brick, chopped salad--argula, endive, radicchio and blue cheese), I like Blue Ginger by Ming Tsai. I really had fun exploring Elizabeth Schneiders' Vegetables: From Amaranth to Zucchini. I've got Deborah Madison's Local Favorites on my desk and I'm eager to try it. I guess, thanks to the nature of my work, I don't and can't dwell on one cookbook too long. Maybe in time some real solid favorites will emerge, when I'm back to cooking for myself, not for the section. I will say I've grown very tired of the Silver Palate girls, even Basics. For kicks, I get out my old copies of Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas, from the 1970s. I know this list sounds like I don't each much meat, but I actually do.

You know, it sounds like a great job, recipe testing. But when you're standing at your stove at 11:30 at night waiting for your 10th attempt at brining a Thanksgiving turkey to come out of the oven... well, it's not so great. But I'm really not complaining. I've learned a lot. And I've learned a lot about what to do with leftovers. P.s. At 8:50 a.m. on Sept. 11, I was taking a Thanksgiving turkey recipe out of the oven. I'll never forget it.

No, but I'll try that. And at the Inn at Little Washington I just had deviled eggs... quail eggs, part of the menu for the Relais Chateaux events in Paris in a few weeks.

I really am not sure that embassy, government, etc. influence the ethnic restaurant scene. I feel that it's much more grass roots than that, though I have no scientific evidence to support that notion. The first notion I got that the D.C. restaurant scene was changing was in the late 1970s, with the arrival of Vietnamese in Arlington, Clarendon, etc. I had eaten Vietnamese food in Paris in 1970 and loved it. And, all of a sudden, locally we had Queen Bee and other Vietnamese restaurants. I think Salvadoran and Central American restaurants also started to spring up at that time. As someone whose notion of "ethnic" was the Yenching Palace at Porter and Conn. I found it very exciting.

Sorry if I sounded snarly. Every once in a while we get an angry message from a reader who didn't like all the "foreign" recipes we've been running. ....

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about what I refer to as our "gleaming, space age test kitchen": That would be a toaster oven, a 15-year-old microwave and a couple of mini-fridges. No, we have no test kitchen at The Post. And, frankly, that's fine with me. Apparently, there's a fabulous one at the LATimes. We test all of our recipes in.... our home kitchens. And, as you may have read in another of my responses, I have a lousy electric oven that I inherited from the previous owner of our house. The Food staff or friends in the newsroom help us test recipes. We reimburse them for expenses, but not their time, and it sometimes really is a labor of love. Why no test kitchen? First, because we're journalists, not cooks. Second, because we want to test recipes under the same conditions as our readers, whether it's an efficiency apartment or a kitchen with a HORRIBLE white LINOLEUM floor and a LOUSY ELECTRIC OVEN (have you guessed that's me?) Oh, another reason? If we had a test kitchen the Style writers would probably ask us to warm up their lunch for them.... :)

That DOES help, thanks. I've had oysters and pearls and macaroni and cheese by Keller. They were out of this world, of the planet. Would I have felt differently if they had different names, no. But I think someone like Thomas Keller and the others you mention can pull it off. But please I can't stand too many cutesy things on the menu. Egg dishes... I've been living the wrong life. Those all sound great. I've been settling for over easy with bacon at the Tastee Diner. In my next life, I'll come back and have all those egg dishes you mention. (I have low cholesterol in this life.)

We have a software package, the name of which I can't remember at the moment, and I'm at home answering this. I'll get it for you tomorrow, okay?

I hope everyone in PR reads your response. Thanks. Yes, I should mention that there are 5 or 6 local PR folks who are extremely helpful to me, if I need to track down one of their clients. We did a story last summer about "restaurant rage" that was the result of a lunch I had with a very good local PR person. So I don't want to brand them all. Re caller ID: I have it. But, as a journalist, I have to tell you: I think I have an obligation to pick up my phone when it rings. Because, you know what? You never know where your next great story may come from. And if it's a PR person on the end, I try to be polite and brief. I was a waitress and bartender once. It was a formative experience.

These are all very helpful responses and I thank you for them. I had a feeling that the best-seller list was NOT the way to go and, as one of you suggested, shorter reviews, even if they didn't include a recipe, have been part of my plans for a while. Sometimes, too, if we don't have the space, we run a Dinner in XX Minutes from a cookbook we like, in the hope that readers will make note, but that may be too subtle a flag. Steve: Re Yardley's review: we didn't know it was coming. Sometimes sections coordinate with us and sometimes they don't. In a perfect world, they do. But it's not a perfect world. And weekly sections often get overlooked when the daily is working on a project that tracks over what we are doing or might be doing. It's just a fact of life. But we actually are doing a small piece about Barbara Haber, that mentions some of the strengths of the book (the Roosevelt White House, for example) that we think our readers might be interested in. Re coordination in the newsroom: Tom Sietsema and I always let each other know what we're doing, and Eve Zibart too.

Apple, Trillin and Gopnick are excellent reporters and writers. From where their "gourmandness" sprang, I can't say. Can "gourmandness" be learned or acquired? Maybe. Can a mediocre writer learn to be an excellent one? Or learn to think bigger thoughts? I'm not inclined to think so. So in short: I like to start with a good writer and a good thinker. The rest, whether it's writing about food or F15s, seems to come naturally after that. We don't write to attract good advertising. We hope that we are an interesting vital section, and that advertisers will recognize that. Re the immigrant community: who, exactly, would that be?

The first way we modify is to fit our "style." That is, we don't number steps, we write in complete sentences, we don't abbreviate (we spell out tablespoons, cups, etc.). We introduce an action with an action, i.e. "Using a wooden spoon or a standing mixer with the paddle attachment, stir...." with the hope that we are thinking as the recipe maker is thinking: "Oh, let me get out the spoon or the mixer before I begin this process." Renee Schettler, assistant editor, is a genius at fitting many kinds of recipes to our editorial "style." Then comes Bad Recipes: recipes that list ingredients then omit them from the instructions: Hmmmmmmm: wonder what I'm supposed to do with this 3 tablespoons of minced jalapenos? Or minimalist recipes: "enclose ingredients in rice paper." Hmmmm.... would that be DRY rice paper. moistened, covered with a damp towel...." Or insider recipes. "Make a bearnaise sauce." Okay! About restaurant recipes: we often get requests from readers for us to obtain a special recipe from a restaurant or chef. This, believe me, is not as easy as it sounds. First, there's the chef and his creativity and ingenuity, which is not easily codified. Then there's the fact that restaurants make food in larger quantities than does the home cook. Or, at least, restaurants are used to portioning off either their work or their ingredients into a sort of Serves 4 category. By noon they've made a vat of delicious chicken stock, they've trimmed 15 celery roots, etc. Also, chefs often think of recipes in proportions: one part butter, to three parts flour to two parts milk. Okay, let's break that down. But of all the reasons that recipes get killed, never see the light of day, the most common is: they don't taste that great. And they're not worth all that work and expense. There's this whole new genre of cookbooks coming out of Australia that LOOK GREAT. Big color pictures of almost every dish. Very simple instructions across from the pictures.... except, you have to be Dionne Warwick to figure out what it is exactly that they want you to do!

I think gourmandness would be low on the list of qualities I'd look for in a writer/reporter. But that is really a newspaper editor's perspective and not necessarily one that is universally true, I guess. I really want stories to be accessible to readers. And, as in sports, if the stories are filled with insider language it can drive people away. I don't use the word "foodie" in the pages of Food. What's a foodie? Someone who eats San Marzano tomatoes instead of sun-dried tomatoes? Says who? It suggests exclusivity and even elitism when there should be none. Hey: we all EAT FOOD. The universality of that experience and the fact that The Post goes to almost 800,000 homes every day makes "gourmandness" not only unnecessary but almost unwanted. And what does gourmandness mean to the French, as opposed to say, the members of the community from El Salvador. Re writers being celebrities: Sure. I'm all for it. Maybe they'll even get their own TV show like Kornheiser and Wilbon. And Amanda Hesser is an extremely talented writer, very knowledgeable. Clearly the NYT thought she was a personality worth developing.

I'm fortunate to have Kathy Legg as my art director. She has great ideas, and is a great reader too, which is not always the case with art directors. In addition, we have a long and happy relationship with both Renee Comet, photographer, and Lisa Cherkasky, food stylist. They inevitably take an idea we give them and crank it up about five notches. And what comes back from them is so much better than what we had expected. (The same is always true for graphic artist Steve McCracken, who frequently does work for us.) Renee and Lisa handle almost all of our studio work: it's an art form that newspaper photographers don't necessarily get experienced in. But Kathy Legg also has an unerring sense of the various talents of Post staff photographers, and, working with our picture desk, always finds that right match for our assignments. So many of the photographers work hard for the daily newspaper, and the result of a day's work can be a photo that's 2 columns wide and three inches deep and buried on A13. So when they work for us, it's a great opportunity to get more display, and, inevitably color. We also have a studio in the building and staffer Julia Ewan has been extremely helpful photographing our market watches (vegetables and fruit) and the art that you see on page 3. I have ideas for art, and Kathy and I exchange ideas, but generally I just give my suggestions and stand back and get out of the way. I like to plan, too. And planning helps art. Last minute art always looks it.

You know, the newsroom is full of people telling other people what to do. All kinds of people telling all kinds of other people about good ideas, good editing, good writing. Gays don’t own the franchise on coming up with good ideas, having an understanding of food, dance and theater or graphics. I think Hank is a talented writer. But the Richard Hatch thing is sooooooooo last year.

I worked outside of the office one day last week. When I called work to retrieve voice mail at midday, there were 13 messages; 10 of them were from PR companies. I get calls from PR agents asking if we’re going to do any stories for Thanksgiving; I get calls asking if I got press materials I didn’t ask for. I get calls telling me that they want to “share” ideas for the Fourth of July. I get calls asking me how they can “place” a story. I get calls asking if I would share with them my opinions of a product that they sent that I didn’t ask for. I get calls asking if I will be writing about their product and if not why not. I got persistent calls last autumn from people asking if I’d received their letters or products, just a few days after anthrax had killed 5 people. They hadn’t heard about the problem with the mail. I can’t imagine holding down my job if even one percent of the section relied on or was influenced by PR. We get stuff in the mail. We throw it out, or if it’s not perishable we give it to charity. We get packages and bottles and boxes from major food manufacturers. If they looked at the section or our web site even for one month they would know: we NEVER write about such products. We’re reporters. We like to find stuff ourselves. We are not fed information, we do not PLACE stories. We come up with ideas and we get the information ourselves. I would say that the only exceptions, the only time we write about things that have been sent to us, it’s the occasional gizmo or gadget that we think is worthwhile and cost effective, but it just kills me when I then proceed to look at other food sections and see them writing about the same gizmo or gadget. We look like we’re part of a pack, and I never want that to happen.