Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption

by Ed Levine, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (Foreword by)

Overview

"A hilarious and moving story of unconventional entrepreneurialism, passion, and guts." —Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group; Founder of Shake Shack; Author of Setting the Table

Original recipes by J. Kenji López-Alt of The Food Lab and Stella Parks of BraveTart

James Beard Award-winning founder of Serious Eats Ed Levine finally tells the mouthwatering and heartstopping story of building—and almost losing—one of the most acclaimed and beloved food sites in the world.

In 2005, Ed Levine was a freelance food writer with an unlikely dream: to control his own fate and create a different kind of food publication. He wanted to unearth the world's best bagels, the best burgers, the best hot dogs—the best of everything edible. To build something for people like him who took everything edible seriously, from the tasting menu at Per Se and omakase feasts at Nobu down to mass-market candy, fast food burgers, and instant ramen.

Against all sane advice, he created a blog for $100 and called it...Serious Eats. The site quickly became a home for obsessives who didn't take themselves too seriously. Intrepid staffers feasted on every dumpling in Chinatown and sampled every item on In-N-Out's secret menu. Talented recipe developers like The Food Lab's J. Kenji López-Alt and Stella Parks, aka BraveTart, attracted cult followings.

Even as Serious Eats became better-known—even beloved and respected—every day felt like it could be its last. Ed secured handshake deals from investors and would-be acquirers over lunch only to have them renege after dessert. He put his marriage, career, and relationships with friends and family at risk through his stubborn refusal to let his dream die. He prayed that the ride would never end. But if it did, that he would make it out alive.

This is the moving story of making a glorious, weird, and wonderful dream come true. It's the story of one food obsessive who followed a passion to terrifying, thrilling, and mouthwatering places—and all the serious eats along the way.

Praise for Serious Eater

"Read[s] more like a carefully crafted novel than a real person's life." —from the foreword by J. Kenji López-Alt

"Wild, wacky, and entertaining...The book makes you hungry for Ed to succeed...and for lunch." —Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar

"Serious Eater is seriously good!...you'll be so glad [Ed] invited you to a seat at his table." —Ree Drummond, author of The Pioneer Woman Cooks

"After decades of spreading the good food gospel we get a glimpse of the missionary behind the mission." —Dan Barber, chef, Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525533542
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/11/2019
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ed Levine is the founder (his employees affectionately call him the overlord) of Serious Eats, as well as creator and host of the Serious Eats podcast, Special Sauce. In 2016, Ed was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America.

Read an Excerpt

It was a sunny, bitterly cold day in December 2010, though there was so little natural light in the Serious Eats office that it was impossible to tell once you were inside. The eleven of us were crammed into our funky loft office on one of the last blocks of what was once the thriving Little Italy enclave in lower Manhattan. Actually, to call it a loft would be a stretch. It was a nine-hundred-square-foot, awkwardly shaped studio with low ceil­ings that our Italian commercial baker landlords had once used to churn out cannolis. The “test kitchen” was a funky island we had bought at Ikea that we had rigged with an induction cooktop. It was so not up to code that we could only hope and pray that the Department of Buildings of New York City would never pay us a visit. It was tight in that office, but it was all we could afford. And we were a tight- knit group anyway.

I was about to ring the cowbell, which I did whenever we earned a major piece of business. And we were celebrating a major piece of business: a $500,000 advertising campaign from a huge financial services company. It was a commitment from a Fortune 500 company. It was a big fucking deal. This was going to be the ad campaign that put us over the top, the one that made us a sustainable business after five nail- biting years of me won­dering every week if we were good for payroll. We were going to make Seri­ous Eats work as a business. I felt so sure of it, I let myself gloat.

We ordered pizza from Prince Street Pizza to celebrate— specifically, its Spicy Spring, a Sicilian- style pizza with a chili- flecked sauce and crisped slices of pepperoni. A Spicy Spring slice is simply a life- changing slice of pizza. Believe me. I know pizza. I wrote a whole book about it, spending an entire year eating a thousand slices in America and Italy. The pan- baked crust is a gorgeous burnished brown. It is crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside. The crisped pepperoni is the good stuff. It doesn’t turn the whole slice orange, though there’s plenty of spicy rendered fat on top. Once you have a Spicy Spring slice from Prince Street Pizza it’s hard to eat any other slice of Sicilian pizza.

The pizza came, and the celebration was on. We broke out the wine and the beer. Our two resident mixologists, Drinks editor Maggie Hoffman and managing editor Carey Jones, whipped up a cocktail or two. Yup, we were on our way. We were kicking ass and taking names.

The next day our ad sales director got an email from his contact at the financial services company’s ad agency. They were canceling the ad buy effective immediately. “Can they just do that?” I asked. “Yup,” he replied. “It happens all the time.” Five hundred thousand dollars— the $500,000 that would keep us safe— went out the door in a nanosecond. It was gone, and it never came back.
The timing of this particular fiasco couldn’t have been worse. We were running out of money. My investor brother had told me, “When you run out of money, you lose control of your business.” Actually, in my case, I was just going to flat- out lose my business.

I had been fruitlessly searching for new investors for the previous three months. My old investors were tapped out. I had learned the hard way that just because almost all my investors were people of considerable means did not mean their checkbooks were always open for me. To keep the busi­ness afloat, I had taken out a loan from a bank that I had personally guaran­teed. Why? Because one of the deep dark secrets of trying to build a small business in America is that you cannot borrow money for that business without personally guaranteeing it.

Of course the bank tells you that the money you get from them in the form of a line of credit should not be used for operating capital. Good luck with that, I thought to myself. I had no choice, because there was no other money to use to pay the staff. That’s right. I was betting the ranch, or in my case, the apartment we had been living in for more than thirty years.

So the day after my suddenly meaningless cowbell- ringing ceremony, the ball had rolled back down the hill, Sisyphus- style. I tried to put on a brave face, but my lousy poker face made that a doomed endeavor.

How had Serious Eats, the flavor of the month, even the year, the site that the New York Times Magazine called the “culinary supersite,” that PBS had called the future of food media, ended up in this insanely precarious position? I knew the answer, but I couldn’t say it aloud to my employees or even my wife. There was no road map for digital publishing businesses, par­ticularly those that are bootstrapped and undercapitalized. We were all making it up as we went along. And press clippings cannot be used as col­lateral or to pay the rent. All the great slices of pizza from Prince Street were not going to change that.

Table of Contents

Foreword J. Kenji López-Alt xi

Serious Eater Playlist xvii

Prologue 1

1 Missionary of the Delicious 5

2 The Love I Lost 11

Recipe: Hot Fudge à la C.C. Brown's Stella Parks 22

Recipe: Dad's Old-fashioned English Muffins Stella Parks 23

3 Grinnell College: Where Everything Seemed Possible 25

4 Trying to Hook All the Shit Up 29

Recipe: Fat, Diner-Style Burgers à la the Village Vanguard's J. Kenji López-Alt 40

5 From Jazz Guy to Ad Guy to New York Eats 43

6 One Small Thing 51

7 Gusto: The Meal Ticket That Wasn't 61

Recipe: Magic Bagels Stella Parks 69

8 The Siren Call of the Blogosphere 71

9 Next Stop Startup-ville 81

Recipe: White Clam Pizza J. Kenji López-Alt 94

10 Team Serious Eats 97

11 Tribe Serious Eats 107

Recipe: Spiced Onion Clusters with Blackened Ginger-Curry Sauce J. Kenji López-Alt 121

12 2007: The Year of Living Deliciously and Dangerously 125

13 Meltdowns, Traitors, and Truth 141

14 The Great, Slow Pivot to Recipes 151

15 Some Dreams Die Hard 165

16 The Dramamine Years 179

17 Only the Strong Survive 199

Recipe: Classic Cherry Pie Steila Parks 212

18 The Jig Is Up 215

19 Waiting to Exhale 221

20 The Aftermath 239

Recipe: Onion Bialys Steila Parks 250

21 A Day in the Life of This Serious Eater (2018) 253

Acknowledgments 261

Editorial Reviews

★ 04/22/2019

Food writer turned entrepreneur Levine tells of how he launched the James Beard Award–winning website Serious Eats website at age 54 in this passionate personal business history. Levine found his calling while writing a book titled New York Eats on the best non-restaurant food in New York City; it sparked a mission to celebrate “even the cheapest and most common foods, like pizza and hot dogs.” When writing opportunities for him started to dwindle around 2006, he began blogging and soon launched Serious Eats in an attempt to educate food lovers and keep “deserving food purveyors’ dreams alive.” Levine excelled at attracting talented staff and writers (J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Stella Parks among them) but struggled at first to run the business. He writes of an “insane thrill ride” through office robberies, failed buyouts, and family investments that put his personal relationships at stake. “We were changing the way people cooked and ate,” he writes. “We taught people to think critically about received wisdom in food science.” Foodies and tech junkies will tear through this fast-paced tale from a food-loving entrepreneur who changed the course of food media. (June)

Publishers Weekly

I’ve followed Levine’s food-writing career since it started, and if you gave me a bumper sticker that read “Ed Levine Is God,” I’d slap it on my refrigerator. (Nora Ephron thought he was godlike too; she made him an extra in her food-world film “Julie & Julia.”)" —Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Foodies and tech junkies will tear through this fast-paced tale from a food-loving entrepreneur who changed the course of food media." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Ed Levine’s Serious Eater is a hilarious and moving story of unconventional entrepreneurialism, passion, and guts. It’s also an important documentation of the very early days of foodie-ism as we know it, written by someone who rewrote the playbook on food journalism, and in doing so, generously inspired and encouraged scores of gastronauts, cooks, restaurateurs, and journalists alike.” —Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, founder of Shake Shack, and author of Setting the Table

“Read[s] more like a carefully crafted novel than a real person’s life.” —from the foreword by J. Kenji López-Alt

“Serious Eater is 50 percent startup story; 50 percent  Ed Levine’s meticulous food diary and 100 percent wild, wacky, and entertaining. Ed’s humor, charm, and genuine love and care for great food comes through on every page. The book makes you hungry for Ed to succeed . . . and for lunch.” —Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar

"Full of lively and believable dialogue and events...A reminder for all that good guys can finish first." —Booklist

“Serious Eater is seriously good! A brilliantly written account of the journey of a food media startup in New York City, it’s a delicious, sometimes stomach-churning, roller coaster ride, and each page leaves you hungry for the next. Ed’s brutal and vulnerable honesty makes you root for him from start to finish, and you’ll be so glad he invited you to a seat at his table.” —Ree Drummond, New York Times bestselling author of The Pioneer Woman Cooks

“When it comes to eating, few are as serious about the sport as Ed Levine. Serious Eater is the untold story of how Ed built his groundbreaking website and why he has devoted his life to all things delicious. After decades of spreading the good food gospel, we get a glimpse of the missionary behind the mission.” —Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

“How did we all become obsessed with food? The answer might be: Ed Levine. A tremendous writer, eater, and human, Ed has written the hilarious, harrowing, passionate, definitive true story of the birth of Serious Eats, the world’s first major food site. This is good stuff. You will eat the pages.” —Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond and Somebody Feed Phil

“Serious Eater is big-hearted, warm, fascinating, and brave. It also made me really hungry. I loved reading about how Ed Levine overcame the seemingly impossible challenges of growing Serious Eats, fueled by his never-ending optimism. And I think you will, too." —Brian Koppelman, cocreator and showrunner of Billions

“The deliciously true journey (with recipes) of one man’s adventures in the food business. We all need to eat, but Ed needs (all of us) to eat well.” —Seth Godin, author of This Is Marketing

From the Publisher

Ed Levine narrates with the passion of personal experience. The food writer, impresario, and founder of Serious Eats—a major web presence in all things culinary—tells the story of his trials and tribulations in getting his popular site funded. It’s part autobiography (his parents died when he was young), part memoir (he’s had more than a hundred jobs), and part cautionary tale (for those interested in monetizing blogging or website success). Levine, who famously ate a thousand slices of pizza for a book on the subject, is at his best when talking about his tribe of quirky and talented foodies who worked with him creating Serious Eats. But his lengthy dissertation on the ardors of fundraising becomes tedious. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile

Ed Levine narrates with the passion of personal experience. The food writer, impresario, and founder of Serious Eats—a major web presence in all things culinary—tells the story of his trials and tribulations in getting his popular site funded. It’s part autobiography (his parents died when he was young), part memoir (he’s had more than a hundred jobs), and part cautionary tale (for those interested in monetizing blogging or website success). Levine, who famously ate a thousand slices of pizza for a book on the subject, is at his best when talking about his tribe of quirky and talented foodies who worked with him creating Serious Eats. But his lengthy dissertation on the ardors of fundraising becomes tedious. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

JULY 2019 - AudioFile