There are quite a few new readers here, which means not everyone knows how I ended up spending my days researching, writing about, guiding, discussing, and occasionally yelling about Italian food. The short version is that none of this was planned. The long version is below.
I didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming a food writer because, honestly, I didn’t know that was a job. I grew up in suburban New Jersey obsessed with food, but not in a precious way. I liked eating, loved restaurants, and cooked very little. I understood that food mattered to people, but mostly as a source of pleasure and identity. It never occurred to me that someone could build a career documenting what and how people eat.
My first legal job was at a bagel shop in Plainsboro, New Jersey. I sold bagels by the baker’s dozen, made sandwiches, assembled pizza bagels, and learned early that food work is repetitive, physical, and deeply social. To this day, I think a bagel shop tells you more about human nature than some academic disciplines.
In college, I continued working in hospitality, as a club promoter (lol), bus person, barback, hostess, server, and daytime bartender. When I moved to Rome after graduation, I was obsessed with learning everything I could about Italian culture, especially food and wine, but still had no idea those interests could become a profession.
My first job in Rome, legal status unclear, was teaching Roman topography to freshmen at an international boarding school. I got the position midway through the academic year because the woman who taught the course during the first semester quit. She had been working roughly eighty hours a week for €500 a month. Naturally, I accepted the job with enthusiasm.
It quickly became clear that the position was less about teaching and more about doing whatever needed doing. I shelved books in the library, worked in the fundraising office, and helped keep boarding students alive on the weekends. Somewhere in there, I also taught. The experience taught me a lot about Rome and even more about labor conditions in Italy. I did not return the following year.
When that chapter ended, I turned to the only marketable skill I had: talking to people about art, architecture, and archaeology. I joined Context Travel, then a relatively young company built around the notion that scholars could lead walking tours. Suddenly I was spending my days guiding visitors through the Vatican Museums, the Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum.
The tours taught me how to take a sprawling subject and turn it into a three-hour experience. You can’t explain two thousand years of Roman history to a jet-lagged traveler before lunch, but you can give them enough context to make sense of what they’re seeing. That skill became the foundation of everything I do, whether I’m leading a tour, writing a cookbook, recording a podcast, or giving a lecture.
I also noticed a pattern. No matter what the tour was about, everyone wanted restaurant recommendations. We could spend three hours discussing imperial propaganda on the Arch of Titus and the first question at the end would still be, “So where should we eat?”
By then I had already completed a sommelier certification through FISAR. I initially enrolled because I wanted to improve my Italian and learn more about wine. The certification also gave me an excuse to start leading tastings, which nudged me closer to making food and beverage the center of my professional life.
Around that time I spotted an announcement for a master’s degree in Italian Gastronomic Culture at the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata. It felt custom-built for me. Until then, food had been something I pursued alongside my work. The degree suggested it could become the work itself. More importantly, it gave me an academic framework for understanding Italian food culture and the confidence to develop food-focused tours grounded in research rather than personal enthusiasm.
At the same time, I was writing constantly, especially guidebooks. Many of my early assignments came my way because other writers had dropped them. I can only assume they looked at the workload, did the math, and wisely walked away. Guidebook work required weeks of reporting, fact-checking, mapping routes, updating listings, and rewriting entire sections for pay that rarely reflected the effort involved.
I was too inexperienced, stubborn, and desperate to say no. What started as cleanup work gradually turned into bigger assignments. Editors learned that if they handed me a guidebook, it would come back thoroughly reported. Over the years, I updated, edited, or wrote SO MANY guidebooks covering Rome and destinations across Italy. The work wasn’t glamorous, but it taught me how to report efficiently, how to organize large amounts of information, and how to become a reliable source of knowledge about a place. Most importantly, it forced me to develop an encyclopedic understanding of Rome long before anyone was paying me to call myself an expert.
At the same time, I maintained a now-defunct Mac blog about Rome that somehow caught the attention of editors. One of them was Dan Saltzstein at The New York Times Travel section. He invited me to pitch story ideas. Those first pitches were terrible, but slowly I learned how to get a story published. Miraculously, Dan kept assigning stories and, before long, I had bylines in the newspaper of record. To say this opened doors to other publications would be an extreme understatement.
By 2008, after five years in Rome writing about archaeology, history, transportation, neighborhoods, hotels, and whatever else editors needed, I made a decision: food and beverage only. I gave myself a year to figure out whether I could make a living doing it. The timing was not ideal. The global economy was imploding. Print media was collapsing. I had no savings to speak of and no backup plan. What I did have was an unhealthy tolerance for work and a growing obsession with understanding Italian food culture.
I pitched constantly. Most pitches went nowhere. I wrote for websites, newspapers, guidebooks, mobile apps, and anyone willing to cut a check. I led tours, consulted on projects, and said yes to absolutely everything. There was never a grand strategy. My goal was simple: know more every day.
I wasn’t the most polished writer, and I would be lying if I said I enjoy the writing process. But I could out-research almost anyone. If there was a baker, cheesemaker, butcher, winemaker, farmer, or historian willing to talk to me, I was there asking questions.
Being based in Italy made things harder. I didn’t have journalism school credentials or deep publishing connections. Building relationships happened slowly. Freelancing is less about talent than people like to admit. A lot of it comes down to surviving long enough for editors to remember your name when an assignment lands on their desk. Not every idea worked out.
Years before apps became ubiquitous, I invested my guiding fees in developing city guide apps for Rome and Istanbul. The apps were successful, which made what happened next especially painful. The developers ghosted me, and when operating systems evolved, the apps died (RIP). The cost of rebuilding them exceeded anything I could afford and years of work vanished almost overnight. It was a terrible business outcome and an excellent lesson. The value of my work was not in the platform, it was in the research, reporting, and earning readers’ trust.
Over the years the work diversified. I wrote cookbooks, worked on television productions including Master of None and Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, co-hosted the Gola podcast with Dr. Danielle Callegari (order her new book!), launched tours, hosted TV shows, and continued reporting. The subject matter and format changed, but the mission remained the same: help people understand Italy as it actually is, not as it is imagined.
Too much writing about Italian food relies on fantasy. Eternal nonnas and idyllic olive groves do exist. But so do labor exploitation, agricultural monopolies, fraud, environmental degradation, and organized crime. The version of Italy that interests me is the one that mirrors reality.
People often ask what skills matter most in this line of work. Curiosity is important, but endurance matters more. I don’t sleep much and I have difficulty finishing one project before inventing three more. Most importantly, I became comfortable looking ridiculous. If you aren’t willing to ask dumb questions, send bad pitches, or hear “no” repeatedly, freelancing is going to be a miserable experience.
Education helped, too. My degrees gave me confidence before I had earned it. Academic credentials open doors and, at the very least, they can distract people from noticing how terrified you are to fail.
If I could change one thing, I would have trusted myself sooner. I spent years waiting to feel qualified before pursuing bigger projects. That feeling never arrives. I also should have started writing books earlier.
For anyone hoping to build a career in food, my advice is straightforward:
Study seriously. Everyone eats. That doesn’t make everyone an expert. Understanding food culture requires research, context, and intellectual rigor.
Learn languages. You don’t truly understand a culture until you can think in its language and understand it on its own terms.
Bet on yourself. Nobody is going to hand you a career. Well, almost nobody. Nepotism remains alive and well. For the rest of us, risk is part of the deal. Sometimes that means keeping a stable job while building the career you actually want on the side.
Stay independent. Nothing has strengthened my credibility more than paying for my own meals and travel. It creates accountability, supports the people whose work I cover, and builds trust with readers.
Learn from rejection. Every meaningful lesson in my career arrived attached to a failure.
And finally, take vacations. Occasionally, your brain needs a rest.
I’m still working on that one.
