I cooked, for more than a decade and a half, in restaurants. In 2002 I left the kitchen to chase a food-writing career, and at the end of 2008, got my first gig with teeth, as the first full-time editor of SF Weekly’s awkwardly titled restaurant blog SFoodie. The responsibility of covering food in San Francisco weighed on my shoulders like a double-lug crate of asparagus. I wanted to report honestly, in stories that told how it felt to eat here, and why so many cooks with talent had come; still come.
By spring I was working on an idea: to write and edit a sprawling set of stories timed for Pride month. I called it “Queer Food Capital,” got theWeekly’s art director to design the series logo, and planned the stories: the story of Genevieve Callahan and Lou Richardson, the lesbian couple who designed Sunset magazine’s food coverage in the 1920s, and which still endures; a flip through Lou Rand Hogan’s heavily coded artifact of mid-sixties camp, The Gay Cookbook. We’d do reviews of queer-friendly restaurants, bars, and cafes. And, I thought, I’d interview every gay and lesbian chef in the city famous for them.