FOOD YOUNG & HUNGRY
Writers’ Digest City Paper staffers have never been highclass gourmands. We appreciate a nice meal as much as the next person, but as most people who’ve passed through its offices will tell you, the most anticipated meal of the week was often the snacks and beers shared after an issue closed on Wednesday night. As broke alt-weekly writers and editors, we subsisted for periods on a diet of liquidy, semi-suspect Mexican layered dip from the Adams Morgan Safeway, stale office coffee, and whatever offerings PR companies or restaurants sent over. Some new brand of instant ramen? Sure. A plastic bag of sausages and sauce from a crawfish place? We’ll try anything once. To thrive, you had to be omnivorous, both in your interests and your appetite. Those omnivorous tendencies helped Brett Anderson land a gig as City Paper’s first Young & Hungry columnist in January 1996. Known as “someone who would steal your lunch off your desk” at the office of the Twin Cities Reader, he followed former Reader editor David Carr to D.C. to write about food. As a 25-year-old “very raw” writer with a burgeoning interest in food writing, Anderson says he never expected to make a career of it, but nevertheless, he has. After leaving City Paper in 2000, he spent nearly 20 years as a restaurant critic and writer at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans before joining the New York Times in 2019. Eating experiences in greater D.C., especially sampling the region’s diverse global cuisines in Annandale and Rockville and its early forays into modern Southern cuisine at restaurants like Cashion’s Eat Place, prepared him for those endeavors. “As a young person who ended up kind of accidentally becoming a food writer, it was an incredibly great place to become introduced to a great variety of cuisines and restaurant styles,” he says. For Laura Hayes, who wrote Young & Hungry from July of 2016 until earlier this year, the challenge was balancing restaurant coverage and careful reporting on the District’s booming hospitality industry. “The food beat is the best because of the people you meet and the unlimited storytelling potential. Food coverage can touch on labor, politics, race, immigration, history, culture, and the environment,” she wrote in her final column. The Young & Hungry columnists grew up with the District’s food scene. They watched it evolve from a steakhouse town to the place Bon Appétit labeled “Best Restaurant City of the Year” in 2016. Below, three other writers who helmed the food section share their favorite moments on the beat. —Caroline Jones Before I was hired as the Young & Hungry columnist in January 2006, I had to
Darrow Montgomery
City Paper’s food writers reflect on D.C.’s ascent to dining destination status and the memorable things they ate along the way.
try out for the gig. I still have the edit of my first dress-rehearsal column. It was a review of Miss Saigon, a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown that had seen better days. I had no idea why Erik Wemple, then the editor of the paper, wanted me to review it, but if it was a test to see if I’d lobby for a place more relevant to readers, I flunked it. I didn’t register a single protest, dutifully reviewing a restaurant that I deemed, right or wrong, a tourist trap. You have to understand that when I started at Washington City Paper, I was not a novice. I had more than a decade of journalism experience. I had been a full-time music critic at a daily. I was part of a team that launched some of the first city guides on the web, courtesy of Bill Gates and Microsoft. I even was the managing
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editor at an alt-weekly in Houston for a couple of tumultuous years. But when I got that edit from Wemple, I felt as if I were a second-year journalism student fumbling through his first sorry attempt at a review. Wemple buttered me up with a little praise at the top, saying that I had a “point of view that remains strong from start to finish.” (Incidentally, Wemple recently told me that he learned his velvet hammer approach from Carr, the editor who left a permanent mark on City Paper.) But two paragraphs later, as I dithered over whether to dismiss Miss Saigon or not, Wemple lost his patience and retracted the compliment. “Fuck this; I hate this equivocation,” he wrote. “Forget what I said up top about you keeping a strong POV throughout this piece.”
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The style of editing and management that Carr/Wemple developed during their time at City Paper was critical, sometimes confrontational, and always uncompromising. (Wemple told me repeatedly that only “brilliant” metaphors and analogies get published in his paper, implying that mine were a long way from making the cut.) But there was a method to this madness, and it was to produce a paper that you couldn’t wait to pull from the box each week, one that was deeply reported and more than a little edgy. (Wemple wanted me to tell you that he hired me, no matter how harsh his first edit.) To say that I was uncomfortable with conflict at the time of my hire would be an understatement. I grew up in a family that never argued, not once that I can remember, as if an argument
