just like bacon
just like bacon
Life as a restaurant, food, and wine critic is … different. Some weeks it’s phenomenally difficult – despite what people think, negative reviews invariably cost me weeks of sleepless worry, and the most difficult ones feel like they’ve taken years off my life. Other weeks I get nearly giddy with the possibility and joy of it all. On a good day, when you write about food, you write about life. On a bad day, when you write about food you write about nothing but yourself and failure. But hey. Those are the breaks. That said, here are a few of my favorite columns, divided broadly by what I liked about them:
Comical:
Vodka!
Much Ado About Hamburgers
Lyrical:
Ice cream
Sausages
I miss George Delmonico
And if that’s not enough for you, everything else:
http://www.citypages.com/authors/summary.asp?PPDID=55
The novel I’ve been working on since 1999 is tentatively titled “Tempest, Tossed”. It’s a comedy, the story of two fifteen year old girls in a prestigious Manhattan private school who skip out on their week-long spring field trip and live catch-as-catch-can in the city, each seeking answers to highly personal, highly urgent questions of their own. Whether the girls survive is the book’s topic.
While the book has teenage girls as protagonists, it is distinctly not a YA book, due to both content and style. It’s more like J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”, Padgett Powell’s “Edisto”, or Martin Amis’ “The Rachel Papers”, in terms of being a novel with teenage heroes, for adults.
Denise Chavez, judge for the 2005 Loft McKnight Artist Fellowships for Writers, had this to say about it:
“’Tempest, Tossed’ presents a terrible vision of American youth, mores and attitudes, while showing us the ugliness we don’t care to see in our children’s lives: their egotistical lack of concern for others, their hedonistic hell-bent-for-leather embracing of their self-absorbed selfishness, greed and loneliness. The writing is relentless, hard, no punches are pulled back and ultimately, the lives of our two fifteen-year-old heroines, if we can call them that, Jewel and Tempest, denizens of the Manhattan skyline, who emerge as speakers of the true word and world, share their primal reality with us as they bop and twist and push their way through an unimaginable landscape that haunts the reader, sending us reeling into acknowledgement. This is an authentic and real voice, a writer who is unafraid to tell the story that no one wants to hear.”
Since 1997, when she became the restaurant and wine critic for City Pages, Minnesota's outpost of the Village Voice, Dara Moskowitz has won an obnoxious number of awards. She has been nominated three times for the biggest honor a food writer can get, the James Beard Award; she won once, for her restaurant criticism.
She has won three Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards, including the top award for food writing in the prize’s inaugural year; three Reader’s Choice Best Columnist awards; several Association of Food Journalist Awards, a few Society of Professional Journalism awards. Her work has been chosen three times for inclusion in the annual Best Food Writing anthologies.
However, while most people think that food writing is in fact the purpose and summit of Dara’s ambitions, most people are wrong. In fact, the food and wine writing has always been the means to an end – that end being not starving to death while writing a great novel.
The whole novel writing thing proved to be far more soul-wrenching, terrifying, insane-making, and intimately catastrophic than it appeared on episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, but, thankfully, there have been bright and shining signs that Dara is on the right path, including a 2005 award of a Loft McKnight Fellowship of in support of the novel. In 2004 she was a finalist for a Bush Foundation fellowship for the novel; in 2004 she was a Dana Award finalist for the novel; in 2001 and 1994 she was awarded Minnesota State Arts Board grants for her fiction writing, and, in previous years she won the Tamarack Award for a short story, and was chosen for inclusion in 1997's anthology of the Best Unpublished Short Stories.
(Her novel is provisionally titled “Tempest, Tossed”, and is about two fifteen year old girls who skip out on their Manhattan private-school field trip and find a lifetime’s worth of trouble living catch-as-catch-can in New York; it’s kind of like a current “Catcher in the Rye” with girls. (read chapter one)
In addition to her weekly City Pages column Dara currently writes a monthly column for the magazine Experience Life, and occasionally contributes to magazines including Gourmet, Wine & Spirits, Midwest Living, and Condé Nast's Traveler. She is a frequent radio and television guest, and can occasionally be heard on local Minnesota broadcasts of NPR’s All Things Considered and Weekend America; on television she wears a wig and funny sunglasses in her role as monthly restaurant critic for local NBC affiliate KARE-11. Overall, Dara is pretty happy with the course her life and work has taken, and always takes great solace in the fact that George Bernard Shaw and Dorothy Parker were working critics for years before they found artistic success. She only hopes that she can pull it off before she grows one of those crazy George Bernard Shaw beards.
Born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Dara Anastasia Moskowitz soon realized she couldn’t compete with the locals when it came to opinions about the whitefish at Zabar’s, and so fled Manhattan for the leafy northeasternmost corner of Queens, where she pursued an interest in blocks.
Her passion for speaking truth to power was first exhibited at P.S. 94, when she rose from her seat in Mrs. Kelly’s first grade class and demanded to know why ‘high’ was not pronounced ‘higg-eh’. To this day she feels all answers to this question have been unsatisfactory, and that this led her to a dark outlook on life.
When she was thirteen, her mother confronted this dark outlook with the question: “If sitting with on the beach all summer with your family is so burdensome, why don’t you get a job washing dishes?” Such a job was found, and, like most decisions made out of spite, it filled the rest of her life with rewards immeasurable.
First, she discovered that a thirteen year old dishwasher spends her evenings in the company of fourteen year old busboys. Second, she found that chefs are very, very interested in feeding their dishwashers well, and she learned about many things, including what candied fennel tastes like, and how long it takes to de-beard eight bushels of mussels. For the next six years, Dara would work her way through nearly every kitchen position, ending up as a sous chef in a restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Simultaneously, back in New York, she attended math and science magnet Stuyvesant High School, in the dark years just prior to its abandonment. There she learned a lot about Bunsen burners, about mechanical drafting, and about keeping your bookbag off the floor during tenth period Bio, lest a rat should crawl into it. Meanwhile, she conceived a strong passion for the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Willa Cather, and the music of Hüsker Dü and Babes in Toyland. This led her, in the hazy logic of seventeen year olds, to a conviction that only in the Midwest were the people pure of heart and legible of intention. She thus applied only to Midwestern colleges, and, after her Chef convinced her that she could go to cooking school anytime but only be a freshman in college at the same time as everyone else once, she went to Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota.
Upon graduating, cum laude, having majored in Art History, Dara set up shop in Minneapolis, intending to write a great novel that would change everything. Soon, she found her work was mostly threatening to change her into a raving lunatic who was also starving to death. Looking for food, she found a truly limitless supply as the restaurant and wine critic for City Pages, Minnesota's outpost of the Village Voice.
Welcome. If you’ve found this website it’s likely you are either the victim of an exceedingly elaborate typo, or you have wondered in the dark hours: Who is Dara Moskowitz?
Is she a restaurant and wine critic with far too many opinions on vodka, chickens, ice-cream, wasabi foam, boneset honey, and diner-cars made from corn silos? Certainly. But she’s also been working on a novel for lo the last six years, and occasionally pops up here and there as Dara Anastasia Moskowitz. Wait -- she’s not that nut wanted for cattle rustling in Arkansas?
Okay. Hold your horses. I wasn’t even in Arkansas that week. And that’s, roughly, the point of this website, to provide a public holding-pen to add actual information about Dara, the fiction writer to the already rich internet life of Dara, food and wine writer. This website won’t be a blog, and won’t offer information about restaurants or wine. It will be a place to get information about my fiction, and God willing, if I ever get my goddamn book done, it will be a place to get information about books, book tours, and such. Until then, though, it’s just me. And a chapter or two, a short story or two, stuff like that. So -- thanks for coming by! You various anonymous readers have been family to me over the years, I’d quite literally be nowhere without all of the little supportive notes and e-mails you’ve sent my way, and I’m really looking forward to adding your thoughts, feedback, and presence to the rest of my writing life.
All good things,
-Dara
