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Second Acts: The Man Who 02138 Everything

by Lindsey McCormack
Winter 2007

Tara Donne

It’s 4:30 in the afternoon, and food writer Jeffrey Steingarten is assuaging his hunger with tuna on rye. In the Chelsea loft he shares with his wife, Caron Smith, the kitchen is the heart of the home. With its racks of copper pots and ample refrigerator, it’s a scene familiar from many of his Vogue columns. Author of the bestseller The Man Who Ate Everything (1998) and its sequel, It Must’ve Been Something I Ate (2002), Steingarten has won a National Magazine Award and multiple James Beard Awards. Sky King, his affable golden retriever, curls up on the floor as we delve into the subject of how a Harvard-educated lawyer ended up writing about food for a living.

Act One: Law “I think lawyers are great,” Steingarten says between sips of Coke. “After graduating, I felt that anyone who hadn’t gone through the first year of law school on the level of Harvard couldn’t really think straight.” Even now, he wonders how life would have been at a Wall Street firm.

Instead, after law school Steingarten went to work in the office of Boston mayor Kevin White. His immediate superior was Barney Frank, now a Congressman from Massachusetts. “Barney wasn’t gay then—no one was gay then,” he reminisces. “Gay people were either closet perverts, or flamboyant grad students in English who tried to imitate Oscar Wilde.”

By the early ’70s, the New York native was back in Manhattan, consulting and lobbying for poverty law centers. Later he went into practice with two Columbia professors and grew to enjoy the perks—nice hotels, flights on the Concorde. “And of course, lawyers can afford to eat anything.” He worked in corporate law for almost a decade.

Act Two: Food Writing Like most lawyers, Steingarten always thought he could be a writer. After the Lampoon, he honed his style through years of correspondence with friends in England. “In a way,” he says, “we were performing for each other.” He’s been a gourmand since high school, when a trip to Paris “opened my eyes to how good things can be.”

But he knew that so long as he clung to his vague ambition, he couldn’t put his heart into lawyering. In 1987, he set a deadline: If he hadn’t at least tried to become a writer within six months, he would forget the whole thing. “Six months passed and there it was in my datebook, and I just said to myself, okay, why continue to entertain this hope?”

Two weeks later, the dream job fell into his lap. Anna Wintour (then with House + Garden), whom he knew socially, assigned him a piece on microwaving fish. “I really hated the idea,” he says. “I’d never even used a microwave.” But the quintessential ’80s topic turned out to be the entrée to his new career. In 1988, Wintour moved to the helm of Vogue and he found his place in the Condé Nast firmament. “When I first moved to Vogue,” Steingarten recalls, “Anna said, ‘You know you’re not going to get as much money as a New York lawyer.’” He replied, “I understand that—how about a New York plumber?” Wintour told him it would take a few years to get to that level.

Today, with a carte blanche expense account, Steingarten still embraces the populist mindset of his early law career. “I’ve gone to the most expensive, lavish restaurants in the world, and the food can be very good there,” he says. “It can also be good with almost no money at all. People seem to have to choose between the high and the low, but I see no reason to do that.” Lighting an after-sandwich cigar, he confesses a passion for primeval foods, the sort that require the same techniques cooks used 6,000 years ago. “Pizza,” he says, “can even bring a little tear to my eye.”