Letter from Boston

Freelance Eating

By MASAKO YAMADA

Although working in a kitchen or food-preparation factory is not glamorous work for the most part, I think many people who are frustrated with their jobs harbor the secret desire to own a restaurant, coffee shop or bakery. Most people associate food with good times, and I suppose it's natural to want to have a job that involves these comforting tastes and smells.

I have often joked about wanting to work as a baker or a professional caterer. This is simply because I like to make food, to serve it to others and to eat it myself. But being relatively practical, I've decided that working in a restaurant would be too stressful for me, since things have to be prepared quickly, and patrons' egos must constantly be stroked in the dining room.

I still find myself going to the lab every day and I know I probably wouldn't give up this humble lifestyle even if I were offered a full-time job making pastries at the White House. Food is something that I have always pursued in my spare time, as a hobby, and I can't imagine it ever becoming a full-time job for me.

That said, I've recently taken a small step toward becoming more than just a glorified glutton. Indeed, according to some definitions, I might even be considered a food "professional." This is because I've recently landed a moonlighting job as a restaurant reviewer. I am getting paid — a tiny amount — to engage in one of my favorite activities!!

I would hate to call myself a professional food critic because I don't have much more knowledge than most enthusiastic amateur eaters. As a matter of fact, I don't go to restaurants as often as many working professionals, and the restaurants that I do go to tend to be not too fancy.

When I was interviewed for the post, the editor of the magazine asked me why I felt qualified for the job. I told him that I liked to cook and I liked to eat. That reply seemed good enough for him, and now I write articles that I believe reflect what my average reader would find interesting. I simply write about what I like.

The magazine is a local magazine that caters to the Boston-area Japanese population. It has a youthful and friendly feel to it, and since I'm a young, Boston-area Japanese person myself, I feel that I'm writing to peers I understand. Perhaps I'm fooling myself a bit, since I rarely speak with any Japa nese in Boston and I've survived quite well without associating with the large Japanese community in the area.

If anything, that's probably one of the reasons I felt such a strong desire to write for the magazine: It makes me feel a bit more connected to my roots, especially since it's written in Japanese.

I went back to one of the restaurants that I had written about and I saw a group of young Japanese girls sitting at the table next to mine. This is not a place that is on the normal list of restaurants that Japanese people visit in Boston, so I was tempted to ask them whether they had read my article. I decided not to, but it was nice to think that we might have been connected, however indirectly.

I've also met many people while writing my reviews to whom I never would have talked otherwise. The surprising thing is that many of the people that I've met in the restaurant business have had rich "alternative lives" in the past.

Some have escaped persecution in their home countries, while others have given up fancy white-collar jobs. Some have started talking to me about their families, while others, who did double (or triple) duty as chef, manager and cashier quickly shooed me away.

I even made a friend while reviewing a restaurant. I was sitting at a communal table in Chinatown and was rather conspicuously snapping photos of the food I was eating. A man asked me whether I was a reviewer, and told me that he was thinking about becoming one too. I had much too much food to finish myself, so I offered him some. It's wonderful to be able to share the pleasure of a meal — and wonderful to get paid for it.

Shukan ST: Nov. 12, 1999

(C) All rights reserved