Colman Andrews - Early Career

Early Career

After high school, Andrews went on to Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles as an English major. Kicked out of Loyola after one year for ignoring his studies in favor of the campus radio station, Andrews spent the next year-and-a-half working and traveling, at one point following a girlfriend to Atlanta and then Boston. Returning to Los Angeles, he enrolled at Los Angeles City College in 1965, studying philosophy, art history and Arabic. He took a job in the bookshop at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the same year, and got to know many of the top Southern California artists of the time. In 1968, after a year-and-a-half at Los Angeles City College and a semester at California State University, Andrews was accepted at the University of California at Los Angeles. There he continued his philosophy training and also began studying European and Middle European history; he graduated in 1969 with degrees in history and philosophy, and his knowledge of both would eventually become hallmarks of his food writing.

It was during his college years that Andrews began paying attention to food in a serious way. His early inspiration was Holiday magazine’s annual restaurant awards, which were founded in 1952 and presided over by Silas Spitzer. Spitzer based the awards on reports from a squad of what he termed “anonymous scouts” around the country (one of whom was James Villas, who would become the food editor of Town & Country magazine for many years). At 25, aware of the fact that as a result of his privileged upbringing he had experienced “more restaurant meals…than many of my contemporaries would eat in a lifetime,” Andrews wrote to Spitzer in hopes of joining his team. Spitzer hired him to write about Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood, which was one of Andrews’ favorite places. Before the piece could run, the magazine was sold and the review was never published. It succeeded, however, in igniting a singular enthusiasm in its author.

Andrews’ first restaurant reviewing job was for The Staff, an offshoot of the LA Free Press. For the column, Andrews created a character called “Mr. Food” who had a distinctly Victorian voice and invoked a lot of food-related puns and homonyms. In early 1972, Andrews, a serious music lover and amateur singer and songwriter in addition to his interest in gastronomy, was hired by the publicity department of Atlantic Records; he penned press releases for such albums as Bette Midler’s and Jackson Browne’s debuts. Still writing restaurant reviews on the side, Andrews got his first expense account—and used it to visit LA’s newest restaurants. He began to seriously study wine and was a fan in particular of the wine writer Roy Brady, who espoused the notion that a wine should be judged not by its reputation or price but instead by what it smells and tastes like. Brady became his mentor in wine matters, and Andrews himself is known for his democratic approach to the seemingly fusty discipline.