324: We ❤️ Saveur with Colman Andrews

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0:31I actually wrote a screenplay once many, many years ago, and this kid who was a TV director at that point read it and didn't like it quite rightfully because it wasn't any good, but it was Steven Spielberg. He was a friend of a friend of mine, which would have changed my life, I guess, if it had been a better screenplay.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

0:59Next up on a week-long tribute to Savor is Coleman Andrews, one of the publication's founding editors who also served as editor-in-chief from 1996 to 2001. Coleman's travel writing and recipe-based reporting had him traveling the world in search of the good stuff well before Bourdain coined the term, and he served as the beating heart for the publications for nearly a decade. On this episode, we talk about some of his earliest stories in Savoir and how he and fellow editors really changed the game of food writing forever. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

1:42Coleman Andrews, welcome to This is Taste. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. How about yourself? It's really cool to have you in the studio. and this is part of our Savor Week. You and Dorothy founded Savor with others and we'll get into that. I want to first start, I'm going to ask you, in your memoir, which is great, My Unusual Table, I love that. I've been reading it. Usual Table, not Unusual Table. That's another book I haven't written yet. My God, my notes are wrong. Things are correcting me. That's all right. It's a good title though. Yeah, I feel it could go both ways. Actually, I love it.

2:14It's almost like a Freudian slip because I feel like usual and unusual is how you roll. Yeah, there you go. So, but I've been reading it and you talk a bit about the founding of the magazine as well, your life. But in 1994, when you launched the magazine, you wrote that you weren't reading food magazines. You didn't read any that were being published at the time. Why were you not reading magazines? I went through a period years before that when I was in college and after college and so forth where I read all the classic books of the time on food, M.F.K. Fisher, A.J. Liebling, Joseph Wexberg, all those people.

2:50And I read Gourmet Magazine pretty religiously. That was probably the only one I read, but that was the one that was the most serious, had the most in-depth, a lot of travel-based food stories. And there's really no reason why I stopped reading them except, I don't know, I just kind of lost interest. It's like, yeah, I knew it all. Well, that's obviously not true, but I was getting less and less from them. And I was never that interested in just reading recipes unless it was a recipe for the kind of food I was trying to learn or something. And, you know, there's a lot of the other magazines had a lot of focus on celebrity chefs or just plain celebrities who would invite you over to their house and do this stage dinner party and things like that.

3:37And just, I mean, not to criticize those magazines because they were all doing a pretty good job of what they did. But it just didn't interest me at the time. Well, you know, you write about in your memoir how Savur rejected, you know, the recipe test kitchen in some ways. You rejected the idea of the low-fat cassoulet, which is a great note. And really, I take that as well. And you rejected writing recipes without context. And we're going to get into those early meetings with you and Dorothy and the team. But let's get into that just from the jump. Well, we definitely had – we took test kitchen very seriously and tested recipes.

4:13We had a succession of great people running the test kitchens and – test kitchen in different locations. And it was very important to us. What I had said was that there was a kind of test kitchen that would have a large staff and would have almost an assembly line. And they were, you know, doing an article on artichokes and they'd get in, you know, three flats of artichokes and they'd do everything they possibly could to them and develop new recipes and try and, you know, some classic recipes and whatever. And that's fine. And that worked for them. The first article we did on artichokes was by a pretty well-known food historian named Clifford Wright, specialty in the Mediterranean.

4:57And it was about a country where artichokes are perhaps the most important vegetable, that country being Syria. But I would dare say a lot of places, a lot of publications at that time, much less today, will be likely to run any kind of an article about Syria. Yeah, we're talking about the early 90s and seriously politically charged place. Absolutely. But that was a part of the culture. The Arachnuchiks are a major part of the culture there, the culinary culture in that country. So that's the article we did. Yeah. And I'll step back and say, like when I said you rejected the test kitchen, obviously Savor is well known to have a test kitchen.

5:32It was more the traditional test kitchen, which was the assembly line, as you noted. Let's go back to the first time you worked with Dorothy. It was for a roundup of port. And you write about this in your memoir. And you can tell me about it. You had written a typical service piece, which was of the time. Service was a big part of food writing at the time. And that's what you did a lot of it as well as obviously a lot of narrative. But then she kicked it back and said, we need more feeling. It needs to be informed in discovery. Let's talk about that meeting you had with her. Right. I don't honestly know.

6:03I may have written this. I don't know if that was actually the first thing I ever wrote, but it was one of the early ones. And it was for a magazine called Apartment Life, which evolved into Metropolitan Home, which is where I worked most with Dorothy before Sever. And I wrote – I used to do these articles for other publications. And what I do is, OK, I'm writing something about port. So I'd have an expense account and I'd buy, you know, 15 bottles of good port. I'd sit there and I'd taste them all and my neighbors would pass by and say, oh, that poor guy. and then you know I do some history research and and say you know this is the origins of port and this is here are the ones I like the best and here's some tasting notes for them blah and that was it and that formula had worked perfectly well for me for some years as a freelance but Dorothy said well you know you're not in this article and when did you discover port and what did you first think about it what do you think about it now and and what is your you know your personal experience of it.

7:01And I had sort of been discouraged from doing that kind of thing by other publications. Well, don't use a first person pronoun. You know, nobody cares what you think. They want to know whatever. And Dorothy said, no, no, we do care what you think. That's why we're asking you to write it rather than somebody else. And then started your relation with Dorothy. And I really wanted to focus on that moment because, you know, things changed after that. And that the idea of the narrative, like narrative food writing, using I, using first person and explaining not just, it's not about authority, it's about discovery.

7:31And that's really what Savore was founded on. Absolutely. Yeah, the idea was we don't know everything. We're going to do our research so we don't just go in blind. And then as we discover it, we're going to tell you what we discover and how we discovered it. It's amazing. Take you along with us. And the reason we're dedicating this week to your magazine, the founding of it, is this is the start of what informs what we do in food media and what we do in cookbooks. It's such an important moment in history and I'm so happy you're here to tell me about it. I'm glad you feel that way. I really do. And I think many people share my opinion how the early savoir and later savoir just informed what we do.

8:05Let's talk about those early meetings, those first editorial meetings when it's you. Dorothy had been successful and you can listen to her episode previously about her career with apartment life. But then you guys all came together and said, we need to do a different food magazine. What are those first meetings like? Well, sitting around in a conference room and really making it up as we went along. We should do this. No, I don't know about that. Everyone does that. Well, what if we do this? Well, let's do that, but do it a different way. And really key to the discussions, it wasn't myself and Dorothy.

8:35It was the two of us, Christopher Hirshheimer. I'd like to talk a little more about her involvement and her development too. And Michael Grossman, who was the creative director, in effect, the designer, among other things. And he had other kinds of input. but even actually before he was really involved, the three of us were sort of sitting around saying, you know, what kind of things would we like to read? What would make us want to read food magazines? And we kept coming back to food in context, the story behind the food, the people that made it. And, you know, my point, you mentioned the low-fat cassoulet.

9:13There had been a recipe in the New York Times for low-fat cassoulet, and I think it was turkey sausage and whatever, whatever. And I said, you know, it's fine. You could probably make if you're a decent cook, you can make a very nice tasting dish with turkey sausage and beans and, you know, olive oil instead of duck fat or whatever. But don't call it cassoulet because cassoulet has a hundreds of year old history and it means a lot to the places that it came from and the traditions. And it's made a certain way in different different parts of the region for different reasons. Let's honor that and let's try to we can't do it exactly like they do it because we're not them.

9:50But let's try to make it as close as we can. And just to add to that, it's not just the recipes, but photography and the art direction. And Shooting Institute, which is a big part of food media now, my cookbook work and many of ours are around. That's like the North Star is like in the on location shooting. And but you decided early that you needed to do that. Well, and I mean, I'm sure Dorothy talked about the origins of the magazine with the French sever. But that was one of the things, you know, the idea was we would use their photography and translate their stories and so forth, which turned out not to be a good idea.

10:27Not a great idea, no. But their food photography would be they'd do something about a fisherman in the Gironde and they'd have an old dilapidated fishing boat. And then it would be set with fine crystal and a candelabra. And I'd say, no, that's not what we want to do. We want to make the food look the way it should look and the surroundings look the way they should look. I did an episode of one of Robin Leach's shows once. Wow. Robin Leach. I love that reference. Oh, my God. If you don't know who Robin Leach is, friends, Google that shit. Yeah. He was a piece of work. But there was a food stylist from I don't remember where she worked.

11:09And she was saying things like, well, you know, when he said, well, what are some of the secrets of food styling? And, well, one of them is, you know, when you cook, when you show pasta, you can't have any ends of the noodle sticking out. You have to tuck them all in. And I said, oh, my God, let me call Christopher right away and tell her to tuck those. I mean, it was just the silliest thing. And one of the things, whether or not this is obvious to people, with at least the era when Christopher was and Dorothy and I were there, all the food photography that she did and most of what other people did was all done with natural light.

11:43There was not a single light that came in. I mean, and when you're talking about shooting reportage, you can't lug lights around with you. And that's just, it's not a necessity. But also when shooting natural light, it's beautiful. It's just a certain energy to that. Yeah, we did take a lot of – would you mind if we take this plate outside and put it on a chair under the oak tree? We still do that today. It's required. Let's go back to that issue one, meetings and just like – I have a couple questions about issue one. Let's first talk editorial. I'll also talk about business. But do you remember some of the ideas that were floating around, what you needed to do for issue one?

12:21Well, I think at that point we were still considering translating articles from the French original. I think we ended up publishing maybe three or four articles. I don't know if there were any in the first issue. I don't remember that were translations of the French. But I know we wanted to do probably – it may well have been the idea of the writer Peggy Knickerbocker. But we really wanted to do something about Oaxaca, which now is kind of commonplace. Now there's Oaxacan restaurants in every other block. And, you know, everybody, there's millions of mezcals out there. And at that point, there was almost none.

13:01And we wanted to do something about the different moles of Oaxaca. And so we did this article and we did, I think, one of my favorite covers ever of this wonderful woman with holding a bowl of squash blossom soup. And not the kind of thing you would see on other food magazines at that point. Yeah, real people and real objects and no prop styling. But, you know, we – I mean, it obviously took us a while to get up and running and refine what we did, I think. But I think that first issue was great and it had a lot of – I don't have it in front of me. I can't unfortunately tell you everything else that was in it.

13:44But one of the things that we did, which we established from the first issue, was we had this roster of contributing editors, which was a combination of the people I knew and Christopher knew and Dorothy knew. And I mean, it was Marian Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ken Hom, Sheila Lukens, Paula Wolford, Jonathan Waxman, Deborah Madison, Daryl Corti from Sacramento that really were some of the top people in food and wine at the time. But also it's a blend of working chefs, cookbook authors and journalists. Exactly. Exactly. And I think that instinct was radical in a way that actual chefs could write food editorial.

14:33Yep, yep. And some of them wrote, some of them didn't write, but they were available if we had questions. And, you know, Paula Wolford actually wrote some very good pieces for us. Yeah, let's talk about the business case because I really want to get a sense. Was there a market for this magazine? Did you feel that from issue one you were successful financially? You know, that's really not my side of things. And it's hard for me to say. I know that in the early years, we did get a lot of very impressive advertising, a lot of big names in not just in food and wine. In fact, less than food and wine, but in, you know, in cars and travel and cosmetics and all kinds of other really blue chip advertisers.

15:22I was never involved on the business side. Bless you for not having to. Yeah, well, exactly. And Dorothy was much more of a liaison between the two sides, was a liaison between the two sides. But she kind of, it was kind of a point of pride that she, which we much appreciated, that she insulated the rest of us from having to worry about that. A good editor-in-chief does that. Yeah, exactly. And lets you cook, essentially. But let's talk about budgets, though. I'd just like to reminisce a little bit about how, you know, back then, you know, you had some budget. You could travel a little bit in the magazine.

15:53Let's talk a little bit about where you were going and maybe like a little bit of what the expense account was looking like. It was pretty nice back then, right? I mean, it's a wonderful situation, which was basically Christopher and I did many, many stories together. We traveled together. And she would not only be the photographer, but she'd kind of be the, I won't say recipe, But, I mean, she'd be the food mind from the test kitchen side, too, saying, well, that might be a little difficult, but we can, you know, whatever. Let's try this. Get them to do that. Ask her. They'll do that. But, yeah, we could pretty much decide where we wanted to go.

16:34And it would be, you know, let's go. I mean, I think one of the things that stands out is we did, because of current situations, we did a story in Israel. There was a writer named Ehud Yonet who I had known when I worked at New West magazine in Los Angeles. He was a writer there. He was the one that wrote the original story that Top Gun is based on. Oh, wow. And anyway, he had an olive oil business from the Galilee where his family farm was. And he said people used to say, oh, I didn't know they had olive oil in Israel. And he'd say, read your Bible, man. Exactly. Read some older books, older texts.

17:14But he moved back to Israel and was engaged to be married to a Moroccan Jewish woman who lived next door. And they invited us to the wedding. And so we went. And it was a wedding where his father had been very involved with the local Arab community. And so he had these Bedouins were friends who came and they cooked their food, this big lamb. And, you know, they made coffee from scratch, you know, grinding the beans and roasting them. And then they had the Moroccan Jewish table, which was very elaborate and, you know, a different kind of food. And we did this great story. And we happened to be there in a quiet period, luckily.

17:58But that's the kind of thing we could just go off and do that. But you probably traveled light. And the budget, even though you were traveling and you had budget, it still wasn't like a gourmet or even like a food and wine budget. No, it certainly wasn't the glory days of gourmet kind of budget. But – and we flew economy class unless – at one point we had a trade deal with Lufthansa so we could fly over there and then connect from Frankfurt or something. But no, but yeah, we – we weren't profligate, let's say. But we didn't – it wasn't backpacking either. It wasn't backpacking. Fair enough. And I appreciate the saying it wasn't backpacking.

18:41Coleman, let's talk a little bit more about other spots you were traveling and those early issues of support. Do you get a sense – was there adventure? Was there havoc? Was there things that went wrong that you fixed? I mean, from my experience, this happened literally every trip. But tell me. Well, yeah, there were always little glitches and misconnections. And Christopher had a great story. I wasn't involved with this, but we were doing something in New England. And there was a man that writer, whose name I won't mention, but he, very good writer and a good friend of ours. And he had a cousin named Chuck who was known for his clam chowder, I think it was.

19:27And this whole shoot was based around going up to wherever he was in Massachusetts and Christopher and whoever the writer was get there. And our friend says, oh, you're a little late. Chuck just left. And this became a catchphrase like Chuck just left. Just like, OK. But no, I mean, there weren't any great tragedies. I mean, I do remember we were doing a story in Provence and we had to go out to this island, the Ile de Pocahontas, and we missed the ferry. And so how do we get out there? And we actually found a woman that had a boat that would take people out there and we managed it. And she leaves us on this rocky beach and pre-cell phone.

20:16And we have to say, OK, now how do we get to the hotel? And we worked it out. Hitchhiking, you worked it out. And speaking of technology, this is pre-digital. So when you're shooting on location, I mean, protecting the film must have been a big issue. I mean, that film leaves your possession. You have no story. There was a story we did about a once famous, sort of forgotten now French chef, Jacques Maxime in Provence. And he had opened a small restaurant at his home near Vence. And we did this story there. and he was a kind of a difficult person to deal with. And we said, you know, we'd like to shoot this, this, and this.

20:57And he said, no, un entrée, un plat, un dessert. You know, he was going to decide. And we walked around it. But anyway, the film was shot and got home. And Christopher drove home from the airport. Her husband picked her up from the airport back in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And for some reason, she said she never does this, but she left everything in the car, her equipment and everything in the car. And this is rural Pennsylvania. Next morning, it's all gone. Oh, my gosh. So we actually went back and we didn't dare ask him to let us shoot again. So we literally did this thing where we were just having lunch and I'd be sitting there and we'd order some food.

21:45And she'd say, oh, call me. Let me take your picture. And then she'd go, you know, and we got a good story out of it. It worked out, but you guys literally had to go all the way back to Provence to do that. Yeah, that's a terrible burden on us having to go back to Provence. Yeah, there was no, like, no G drive that you could just, like, upload your photos to after shooting. No, no, no, not at all. There weren't no cloud. Only clouds were in the sky. Yeah, and it makes those early issues special to realize that all the effort, especially with pre, I mean, you were using, I'm sure, obviously, Apple was in your world in 94 to layout.

22:19But layouts were trickier, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, that's not something I had to be involved with. But, yeah, sure. I mean, I actually remember when we first got our early days, we did not have external email. Yeah. And I remember when we got that. In fact, or internet. And I remember it was probably three years in or something that suddenly, oh, you mean I can just. You know, really? I can send a message to this person over at this other company or this other, you know, really? It's amazing to think about technology because you write in your memoir about being at New West and being a writer and being you write about being included in the memorandum circulation.

23:02And that's the way you as an outsider got linked into what was happening. Yeah, well, I mean, in New West, they actually bought the newsroom set up from all the president's men to furnish the office at New West. Literally from the set of the film. Yeah, exactly. All the desks and the partitions and all that. And everyone, of course, had typewriters. So you walked in there and it was this cacophony of typewriters. And I remember one of the writers came in one day and he said, I just bought a word processor. I said, what do you mean a word processor? or I'm a word processor and this is my printout mechanism, you know.

23:37And little did I know. Wow. Have you done any screenwriting? Have you thought about getting these stories down? I feel early food media can be rich. My father was a screenwriter. Anything we know? Novelist and screenwriter. If you stay up really late and you like war movies from the 1940s, maybe. Yeah, yeah. But I actually wrote a screenplay once many, many years ago. and this kid who was a TV director at that point read it and didn't like it quite rightfully because it wasn't any good, but it was Steven Spielberg, which would have been a, he was a friend of a friend of mine, which would have changed my life, I guess, if it had been a better screenplay, but no, that's all.

24:22If you've seen that movie about Steven Spielberg's life, you know how eager he was as a young man. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, the thing I always thought, I was never really attracted to running screenplays because as part of being an editor is I like to have control. I like to, you know, I mean, I would have to be the producer, director, whatever, to otherwise, you know, throw a screenplay out there and everybody starts rewriting it and, you know, whatever. I wouldn't like that. No, I'm with you on that. Biggest coup from Savor from those days that you, a story you got in the magazine that, man, looking back, this was a big deal to get this in.

25:02Well, I mean, I would have to say, and again, a chef that was incredibly famous, and if we're talking to your audience 20 years ago, 25 years ago, they do in awe, was Freddy Girardet, who had a restaurant called Girardet in Switzerland. The other chefs called him Le Pape, the Pope. He was that respected and that well-known. He sold his restaurant to his sous chef, Philippe Rochard, who had been with him for many, many years. And he sort of thought that he would be welcomed back in the kitchen as an advisor and whatever. And Rochard said, no, this is my restaurant now. You know, we don't come in for dinner, but I, you know, stay out of the kitchen.