Curated Cuisine is a monthly series examining all things edible, from the chefs cooking the food to the writers reviewing the recipes. Meet the people shaping the food industry, both local and national and enjoy a post-show bite inspired by the conversation.
Here & Now co-host Robin Young moderated a conversation with New York Times book critic Dwight Garner about his new book, “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.” In this delightful, charming and emotional memoir, Garner dishes on his two passions — reading and eating — with stories of his mayonnaise-laden childhood, his marriage to a chef, the voices of great writers on the pleasures of imbibing and more.
About The Upstairs Delicatessen
Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of “Garner’s Quotations,” serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, “The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading” is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking and dinner.
Through his lifetime obsession with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner’s life, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (including his father’s famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family (“Cree grew up taking frog’s legs to school in her lunch box”), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.