My Dinner With Bittman

The lobster course….  about half way through the meal…

Last night we had dinner with our friend Mark Bittman and his wife Kelly.

It’s always a pleasure to have dinner with Bittman. Besides being a world-class raconteur, he’s also the food columnist for The New York Times. So he not only knows where to eat and what to eat, when he walks into any restaurant in New York, everyone knows him.

Last night he took us to Jean Georges’ new restaurant, ABC Simple.

Jean Georges has some of the world’s best restaurants, and ABC Simple having just opened is currently the hottest ticket in NY, and pretty much impossible to get into.

However, as soon as we entered with Bittman, we not only were escorted to our table, but Jean Georges himself came out to greet us.

The menus were taken away, and Jean Georges provided us with a never-ending stream of tastes and examples from the menu – an array of appetizers, salads, fish dishes, entrees and finally 5 deserts.

And each one fantastic.

The meal would be enough to blog about, but ironically, just on the heels of Bittman’s call, I got an email from Walkley Magazine. I had never heard of Walkley Magazine, but it’s for journalists in Australia, and they want me to write a piece about the future of journalism and how journalists can make a living.

Bittman, I think,  provides me with a model of the journalist of the future.

He writes for The New York Times and has a very successful column, very popular, as well as a blog on The Times. But Bittman does much more.

He has written some of the best selling cookbooks in the world.

He has written a number of deep-thinking books about food and its place in culture.

He does videos for The Times, but he also does TV shows for PBS.

He lectures all over the world, writes articles for magazines.

He is, in short, his own business.  His work with The Times only one part of it.

There was a time when no one in their right mind would have thought that being a chef was of much value, beyond just cooking a great meal.

But in the past decade or so, we have seen chefs become brands in their own right.  Names like Jean Georges Vongerichten, or Alain Ducasse or Gordon Ramsay have built multi-million dollar empires around their brand, far transcending their cooking.

If you can do it with a chef, you certainly should be able to do it with a journalist.

After all, journalists like Bittman are far better known than the chefs like Gordon Ramsay where when they first got started.

If Gordon Ramsay can leverage off a pate and turn it into a multi million dollar empire, I am willing to bet that some journalists could do the same.  We accept the idea of the chef entrepreneur, why not the journalist entrepreneur?

After all, one does not live by bread alone.

Sometimes you need to read about it – or watch a video on how to make it at home.