By Diana Brement,
JTNews Columnist
I’ve wanted to interview Seattle Times food writer Nancy Leson for a long time, so I was very excited when we finally talked on the phone last week in a wide-ranging and entertaining conversation.
Nancy has been serving food, cooking food or writing about food her entire adult life. “When I look back at my body of work,” she says, “some of my best pieces, no question, are related to growing up Jewish.
“That wellspring of Jewish culture is so embedded in your psyche that even if you’re not religious…it comes out all the time.”
Many are surprised to find out that Nancy is Jewish, although if you’ve heard her Wednesday-morning food conversations with KPLU radio host Dick Stein, you’ll have caught them talking about latkes and matzoh ball soup.
“I think of myself as a social Jew,” says Nancy, who grew up in a “predominantly Jewish” neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia where schools didn’t close for Jewish holidays, but it was “ridiculous…to keep them open.”
She had an ecumenical upbringing, though, with a lot of Christian friends, and a mom who introduced her to a variety of cultures.
“I was one of those kids who grew up with…a Hanukkah bush,” she confesses.
She went to Jewish camp and Quaker boarding school, eventually marrying a Catholic man. But their “Cashew” son (Catholic-Jewish) “spews Yiddish” like he “was raised in a religious household.”
Although she wanted to be a writer from the age of 7, she didn’t complete her journalism degree until she was in her early 30s, after moving to Seattle following seven years in Alaska. On graduating from the University of Washington, she was so broke she decided to wait tables for another year, but an ad for an unpaid writing internship at The Seattle Weekly caught her eye.
That quickly became a paid restaurant reviewing gig as Nancy moved from the Weekly to Sasquatch books to the P-I, finally becoming the Seattle Times’ restaurant reviewer in 1998. Two years ago, she switched to writing her blog, “All You Can Eat,” (seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/allyoucaneat), and we finally got to see her picture in the paper.
She was eager “to get off the restaurant critic beat,” she says.
Restaurant reviewing is not all it’s cracked up to be.
“For every wonderful meal, you’ve eaten 10 mediocre ones and 20 bad ones,” she says.
Plus, she had a young son and a husband who was tired of eating out all the time. But food is still her overriding passion.
“It drives my family crazy,” she says, but “it’s what I love.”
Nancy notes that many well-known food writers are Jewish.
“Jewish people love to eat and Jewish people love to talk,” she says. “We come from a culture where to eat is to say “˜I love you.'”
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You might say a series of stepping stones led Audrey Fine to her new position as development officer for the Bellevue Arts Museum.
Before having kids, Audrey worked in healthcare administration and management for more than 15 years.
Next step: Staying home with kids Adam, 16, Mitchell, 14, and Sophie Katz, 12, “just doing the usual parent volunteer work,” she tells me.
As she thought about working again, she targeted her volunteer efforts to certain fields.
About two years ago, she started writing grants for Broadway Bound, the children’s musical theater organization in which Mitchell was involved, first volunteering and then as a part-time staffer.
“That was my first entrée into the arts world,” says Audrey.
She also took on some contract work, “and one of my clients was the Bellevue Arts Museum.”
Until she worked for BAM, she confesses she hadn’t been there “since it had been on top of the shopping mall!” (It formerly resided atop Bellevue Square.)
On her first visit to the now-freestanding museum, “I was awestruck. It’s beautiful,” she says. “Every day I walk into work and I can’t believe that I work here.”
She’s says she’s adapted well to working full-time and commuting across the lake.
“I weave my way through Seattle [in the mornings] and then I get on the bridge, and every day it’s beautiful.”
Aside from her fundraising duties she wants to “get more people to come and see [the museum],” and she especially challenges Seattleites “who don’t venture across the bridge except to go to Bellevue Square,” to come, while admitting she was firmly in that camp before getting this job.
So, no matter which part of the Puget Sound region — or the state — you’re in, make a point of visiting this little museum with its focus on Northwest arts, crafts and design. Find more info (and watch an informational video) at www.bellevuearts.org.
Audrey is married to Steve Katz and they belong to Temple Beth Am.
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Esther Helfgott has written a piece on the late Eleanor Siegl, founder of The Little School, one of Seattle’s first preschools.
“Her philosophy of education — let children discover their own talents, as opposed to the traditional “˜Do as you’re told, speak-when-spoken-to’ stance — reflected her progressive views,” writes Esther. Read the piece at www.historylink.org, along with her essays on Fritz Schmidl and Edith Buxbaum.