When I was younger, I looked forward on the weekends to the Times food columns by Amanda Hesser. My boyfriend and I would get up early to retrieve the paper before it was stolen from in front of our door. The thief, we were convinced, was a spry retiree down the hall who’d get up at dawn to snatch other residents’ copies of the Times, the Post, the Journal. I’m a very specific Sunday paper reader, I deconstruct the sections and organise them again: the Very Important (A, business, Week in Review), the Meh Fluff (sports, travel, arts), the Wholly Guilty Pleasures (Styles, the magazine). And we’d loll in bed or sprawl on the couch — they were approximately four feet apart, so no matter — and read aloud the clever bits of Ms. Hesser’s food column, the girl on the town who slowly, surely, falls in love with the city and food and this culinary neophyte New Yorker writer she dubs Mr. Latte.
Fast forward ahead 10 years. The boyfriend and I are no longer together. The last time I saw the retiree he was shuffling along with a cane and a nurse. But Ms. Hesser is Mrs. Latte now. And she’s still writing engaging, relevant food journalism that makes me want to stuff my face.
