Colman Andrews - Saveur

Saveur

After finishing his Catalan book, Andrews worked as a freelancer, writing articles for the Los Angeles Times and for Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and many other publications. In 1992, Andrews published his second book, Everything on the Table: Plain Talk About Food and Wine, a collection of new and revised short pieces, and shortly thereafter he began work on a book about the cuisines of Genoa and Nice, Flavors of the Riviera: Discovering Real Mediterranean Cuisine, published in 1996. Meanwhile, in 1994, Andrews had become a founder of Saveur magazine, and in late 1995, he moved from Los Angeles to New York City. The magazine was a watershed publication, the first of its kind to delve beyond recipes and formulas and tell the stories of the people and cultures behind the food. During his tenure, Andrews won six James Beard Journalism Awards, and in 2000, Saveur became the first food magazine to win the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for General Excellence. The following year, after the magazine changed ownership, Kalins left to work for Newsweek and Andrews took over as editor-in-chief. He left Saveur in 2006, becoming the restaurant columnist for Gourmet and undertaking new book projects—the first of which, The Country Cooking of Ireland, will be published in 2009 by Chronicle Books.

Despite his association with Barcelona, the two cities that most shaped Andrews’ passion for food, he has said, were Paris and Rome. He first visited the former in 1965, during which he was guided by an old friend of his father’s, Claude Caspar-Jordan, the administrative director of Associated Press France. Meals with Caspar-Jordan forever changed Andrews, and the two would dine together in Paris at least once a year for 28 years more until the Frenchman’s death; Andrews wrote a moving account of their times together called Paris Authentique that appeared in the twelfth issue of Saveur (May/June 1996). On repeated trips to Rome throughout the 1970s and early ‘80s to visit an American friend who had moved to there, Andrews made a serious study of Italian food, paying particular attention to the Romans’ style and pace of eating, and it left an indelible impression. “Rome made me,” he has written.