Do you think that the old school restaurants have just disappeared?Ī: No, they haven’t disappeared. In the book you distinguish between Chinese American food and traditional Chinese food. Q: Hey, a sidetrack: A lot of people ask me to recommend an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant. And you know how it goes, person A recommends person B. Spoke to a number of authors and to a number of other experts in those fields. I read all or part of 200 books for this book. You gotta do your research, which is reading whatever’s been published on the subject. My biggest shock was when Mel Brooks’ folks said he wanted to talk to me at my request for the bagels and lox chapter. And B: You have to have no fear of rejection. How did you get these people?Ī: To be a journalist A.: You have to be curious. I interviewed her when her book came out she has done a ton of reporting on ice cream. Q: In the ice cream chapter alone, you talked to Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Jerry Greenfield, you interviewed Tyler Malek, who’s on the leading edge of alterna flavors, and Amy Ettinger. So the work took two years almost to the day. Finding the time to research for a chapter - it’s almost enough for a book of its own. Q: How long did it take you to write the book?Ī: Because it was my first book I was deciding to basically do somewhere between 10 and a dozen different foods without thinking of how much work would go into each one. But the fact of the matter is, arguably speaking, the first wings in Buffalo were not made at the Anchor Bar, unless you define Buffalo wings as that particular style of wing. Young served his wings as one piece with something he called Mambo sauce. Now Young’s wings were different than the variation the Anchor Bar eventually produced, which is wings broken into two pieces, served with blue cheese. But as I discussed in the book, there was a restaurant making Buffalo wings before the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, a place known as Wings and Things (no relation to the chain) run by a guy named John Young who, according to his daughter, ate plenty of wings and other parts of the chicken growing up poor and African American in the South. ![]() Everyone accepts that the Anchor Bar invented Buffalo wings. That story about the janitor inventing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos went down in flames recently.Ī: So much of it is who got the attention of the time. I think it’s really important to try to separate myth from reality when you’re reporting - frankly, how do I say this politely? - there is a lot of legend and misreporting when you dig into the food area. I referred to the hamburger at Louis’ Lunch in New Haven as something that they claim to have been the first burger in America. How did you get it done?Ī: I approached the book as a journalist and I applied the same standards to it that I would have applied to any of the producers who worked for me when I was in charge of the investigative unit at “20/20.” One of the things I’m proudest of is that I do some debunkery of stories. ![]() Q: This book contains an astounding amount of reporting. I started pitching the Food Network on some projects of my own which eventually resulted in “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” from that I then created a syndicated series called “Beer Geeks.” And then I looked around one day and said, you know what? I better write that damn book. You want to do some of that?” I said sure and all of a sudden I was a food journalist. You got anything?” He said “I’m doing a lot of things for the Food Network. Al had set up his own production company and I called up and said, “Hey, I’m starving. ![]() Al had worked for me when I ran the (Weekend) “Today” show.
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