How did this Ph.D. in art history turn into a food writer? The path wasn’t straight. My first books—Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain, a collection catalog co-authored while Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Unpackaging Art of the 1980s, a history of that era’s most controversial trends—followed the art historical trail. It never ended. I teach art history (at Cal Poly Pomona) today.
Yet, all along, I also took inspiration from personal experience and popular culture. My work as a fitness trainer to finance my doctorate resulted in “AB (dominal) EX (pressionism): Notes Toward an Art Criticism for Bodybuilding” for Cakewalk. Living with an actor in Los Angeles, where I moved in 2001, compelled me to pen the prize-winning “The Other Bohemia” about a little-known subculture of the entertainment industry for Southwest Review.
Tapping my life led me inexorably to restaurants. They were objects of fantasy to me as a child; and, with my training in the history of art, I grew to see them in less mystifying, but still profound, ways. Restaurants became definers of brands, communities, labor, leisure, art, pleasure, the social self. I explore these themes in Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America, May We Suggest: Restaurant Menus and the Art of Persuasion, and my latest, Meet Me at the West Beach Café: Art, Restaurants, and the Rebirth of L.A.
Meet Me at the West Beach Café fuses my expertise in restaurant history and the art world of the 1980s with new research into the cultural and urban history of my adopted city. The book tells a little-known story of how the worlds of contemporary art, vanguard restaurants, and municipal politics met and mingled in 1980s Los Angeles unlike anywhere else. Their relationships proved mutually beneficial, nationally influential, and key to the transformation of Los Angeles into a so-called “global city.”