Vir Das Quotes

Writing about food is my default.

I think I wrote my first piece about food in 1978.

I've been fascinated by the world ever since I read 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain. I've watched 'Top Chef' and watched interviews with chefs on 'Charlie Rose'... I thought they're really intriguing characters, and they really encapsulate that tension between vision and commerce, art and commerce.

The Guardian's 'Word of Mouth' blog bridges the gap between blogging and serious food journalism.

However, I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire, and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.

I'm a professional food eater.

Jessica Battilana has been my kindred cooking spirit for more than 10 years. Our careers as cooks and writers have taken us through the same Bay Area restaurants, bakeries, magazines, and newspapers.

At the end of the day, it seems like there's a critic archetype for food movies, like with 'Ratatouille' or anything. You know, if you were doing a puppet show about chefs, one puppet would be the chef, one would be the critic.

I did skit comedy online for many years, beginning around 2001. Around 2006 I started watching a lot of food television and got re-interested in food. I come from a very food-obsessed family. But I also wanted to do my own thing, which was the comedy.

If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.

I'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.

I started on the fringes of journalism as a cartoonist on The Daily Mail.

I'm interested in food and sharing my passion with a community of like-minded people. All of the celebrity stuff that comes along with that is just an incidental byproduct of being able to do what I love for a living.

I always say I'm more of a food writer than a TV presenter, because that's what I'm trained in, that's what I spend most of my year doing. TV is about performance and I've never had any training.

One of my first jobs was as a recipe tester for a PR agency. One week, the editor of 'Housewife' magazine called my boss and asked me to write a column - the cookery editor had gone away on a press trip. I was terrified.

Think both big and small. Loving to bake doesn't only mean becoming a baker. It could mean starting a blog, becoming a food photographer, or going into organic chemistry.

Chicago, with its big newspapers and major broadcasting stations, couldn't have been a better city to start a journalism career.

I swear, I didn't really go in thinking, 'I'll be the Simon Cowell' of 'Top Chef.' I was just used to being a judge on British food shows where people are much more outspoken and rather rude. That's the culture over here.

The critic has to do more of what the book critics and art critics have done in the past. Which is give you a context for understanding the restaurant, give you a better way to appreciate it, give you the tools to go in there and be a more informed diner who can get more pleasure out of the experience.

There are probably close to a million people in the hospitality industry here in the United States, and there are probably only a few hundred opportunities in the food media industry.

I'm a total foodie.

Food trends have been around as long as people have had the ability to choose between different things to eat, but the modern, interconnected media has made food trends a viral phenomenon. Once upon a time, it was just a few newspapers and a few select gourmet magazines that were writing about food. Today, it's every single publication.

When I was younger, I read all the great food memoirs, by M.F.K. Fisher and Laurie Colwin and Julia Child and Nicolas Freeling and Ruth Reichl, and felt flooded with a sense of comfort and safety.

You can be a decent critic if you know about food, but to be a really good one, you need to know about life.