My Usual Table

For Colman Andrews, restaurants have been the constant in his life. From his Hollywood childhood through his days in the music business, his first forays into restaurant reviewing, and his ever-evolving career as a food writer and magazine editor, he has seen the world mostly from the dining room. Restaurants have been his theatre, his playground, his university, his church, his refuge.

Coincidentally--or perhaps not--the restaurants he gravitated to often turned out to be seminal ones, places that incited or exemplified or definitively interpreted the culinary trends that have changed the way people cook and eat and think about food over the past half-century, in America and Europe alike. He’s been right there in the dining room-menu in one hand and notebook in the other-watching the birth and growth of Nouvelle Cuisine and fusion cuisine; the organic and locavore movements; nose-to-tail eating; and so-called “molecular gastronomy.”

Now, in MY USUAL TABLE, Andrews combines personal history-growing up in the last days of the golden age of Hollywood, coming of age in the ‘70s Los Angeles demi-monde, becoming one of the most influential food writers of this or any time, founding Saveur, and travelling the world in the pursuit of great food--with an intimate accounting of the seminal restaurants and the great chefs and restaurateurs of our time-from Trader Vics to Chez Panisse and Spago to El Bulli.