humble, sure. But the nugget rings true. Because the best food writing is never a discussion about how well cooks comingled their fats and acids. Through a plate of food, you can tell entire stories of history, culture, religion, socioeconomic strata, ecology, economics, and the personality of the person making it. Shepherd’s pie speaks of Irish suffering. Birria is a story of Spain colonizing Mexico with a bunch of annoying goats. The Big Mac Index is a widely used, very real economic tool designed to analyze the strength of global currencies. Food writing took off because it attracted great writers, the poets who could juggle and sword-swallow the English language. One of SDM ’s earliest food critics, Tom Gable, would go into restaurants anonymously with a microphone in his pocket, wired up his sleeve to record his thoughts without detection. Restaurant criticism was very serious business, real covert-ops stuff. Just a bunch of hyper-literate Jason Bournes saving San Diego’s humankind from subpar soufflés.
BELOW Food critic Tom Gable’s 1976 story describes a deluge of tips from SDM readers lauding strip-mall Chinese food spots. RIGHT In 1975, William Thomson, the executive chef of a pre-Mediterranean Room iteration of the La Valencia hotel, posed for a piece on holiday eats.
47 SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE
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