What is "How To Eat A City"

In a nutshell: How to Eat a City is my attempt to eat at every restaurant in the city of Providence, RI, and write about it.

I'm deeply indebted to the late great Los Angeles food critic, Jonathan Gold and his 1998 essay, "The Year I Ate Pico Boulevard," as well as my sister, an Angelino herself, for drawing my attention to it. My idea had been to just eat and write about the restaurant. Instead, based in part on Gold's template, the essays became more deeply personal. They are food writing, they are place writing, they are memoir, they are a confessional diary--of sorts.

Restaurants aren't just a place where people eat. Food is the main event, but many people live a not-insignificant part of their lives in restaurants. On one night at any given restaurant, you might see someone fall in love, someone hurt another person, the celebration of someone's life milestone, two or more friends gathering to strengthen the relationship, a depressed person sitting alone, a person performing an act of self-care sitting alone reading a book. How to Eat a City is about those moments, using myself as the lens, because I am myself and only myself.

It's also a paean to the city of my birth, and where I've spent the vast majority of my adult life. The natural state of a city is change, and over thirty-five years and counting, I've seen Providence change a lot, and Providence has changed a lot more than just what I've seen. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. That deserves to be chronicled, celebrated, and condemned in equal measure, and I hope to do some of that through this project.

And my apologies to the restauranteurs who might encounter these thinking they're getting a review or something like that. I always start thinking about the food, but unfortunately the milieu is just the setting for the ramblings of a cluttered mind.

Thanks for reading.

-Alex