In conversation

A short, lightly edited interview conducted for this site — on pacing, notebooks, and why the plastic-stool kitchens matter more than the famous tables.

You write a lot about slowness. Isn't that a hard sell to an editor with a deadline?

It can be. But slowness isn't the same as slack — I still file on time. It just means the reporting itself happens on a longer clock than the trip does. I'd rather understand one market than photograph ten, and that shows up in the writing whether or not the trip itself was rushed. More on this in on travel.

What's actually in the notebook?

Less than people expect and more than I can use. Overheard fragments, a smell I don't have a word for yet, the order in which a cook adds things to a pan. Almost nothing that looks like a finished sentence. The notebook page on this site is the closest thing to seeing it directly.

Do you have a favorite cuisine to write about?

I resist ranking them, mostly because the honest answer changes depending on what I've eaten that week. What I can say is which ones I keep returning to and why — that's the whole subject of the cuisines page.

What do you say to people who think food writing is a soft beat?

That they've never tried to write honestly about someone else's kitchen without either flattening it into a stereotype or performing their own cleverness instead. Getting it right is one of the harder things I know how to do, which is more or less the argument of writing philosophy.

Any advice for someone who wants to travel and write the way you do?

Stay longer than feels efficient, ask more questions than feels polite, and write it down before you're sure it matters. You'll know what mattered later. In the meantime, there's more of this kind of thinking in the FAQ.