Colman Andrews - Magazine Life

Magazine Life

Andrews left Atlantic before a year had passed to accept his first leadership role on the staff of a consumer magazine. He became the editor of Coast, a Los Angeles-based lifestyle magazine; he held the position until 1975. Meanwhile, Andrews continued his association with the music industry reviewing records for Creem, where Lester Bangs was his editor, and covering live music in the LA area for The Hollywood Reporter and other publications. He also made radio commercials and wrote artists’ bios for several record companies and wrote liner notes for numerous albums, receiving a Grammy nomination in 1972 for notes on a special edition of Miles Davis reissues. In 1975, Lois Dwan, restaurant reviewer for The Los Angeles Times, who had read his Mr. Food pieces, asked Andrews to substitute for her while she went on vacation. This began his long association with the newspaper, in the course of which, though he was never officially on staff, he was alternately a restaurant reviewer and columnist, book reviewer and travel writer, and the editor of the paper’s travel magazine, Traveling in Style. In 1978, Andrews was hired by Los Angeles magazine to write a monthly wine column. Once again, he took a pseudonym: Van Delanay (a pun on the phrase vin de l’année, or wine of the year). He was hired that same year as an associate editor at New West magazine, a bi-weekly California publication started by Clay Felker as a parallel to his seminal New York magazine. He was promoted a year later to senior editor. During this time he met Ruth Reichl, then the restaurant columnist for the Northern California edition of New West, who would go on to become the restaurant critic of the New York Times from 1993 to 1999, and, later, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. For a period the two were lovers, their relationship chronicled in Reichl’s memoir Comfort Me with Apples (Random House, 2002).

Andrews left New West in 1980 and began writing for Apartment Life, an urbane lifestyle magazine helmed by Dorothy Kalins. A year later that magazine was transformed into Metropolitan Home. Over the course of that magazine’s first decade, Andrews wrote dozens of articles and columns, the majority of which were about food and wine (although he also occasionally wrote about art and design, including interviews with David Hockney, Terry Allen, and Charles Moore). During this time Andrews wrote about restaurants all over the world; he was the first American reporter to introduce readers to the great French chef Guy Savoy. Perhaps most significantly, Andrews got a contract to write a book on Catalan cuisine based on an article he’d written for Met Home. Throughout the eighties he spent a great deal of time traveling to Barcelona and vicinity. The resulting book, Catalan Cuisine, published in 1988 and still in print, has become the standard reference book for restaurant kitchens in that region, and is revered by the top local chefs, including the world-renowned Ferran Adria.