Free Talking with My Mouth Full by Gail Simmons Page A

reason, we wound up in California—but the seed was planted to one day make it to Aspen.
    Christmas vacation my senior year, a good friend of my parents gave us her New York apartment for a week. I’d been many times before, but this was the first time I was going as a “grown-up,” when I could go out alone with friends and navigate the city on my own. Still, my parents were with me, and I certainly let them take me out for nice meals. Our friend made us reservations at some of the city’s hottest restaurants. It was 1997.
    Over the course of that week I had three meals I will always remember: The first was lunch at Balthazar. It had just opened and was at the height of its buzz, overflowing with energy. I was convinced everyone around me was a model, amazed at how the entire population of a restaurant could be that good-looking. I ate mussels and fries, a towering seafood platter, and profiteroles with chocolate sauce, poured tableside.
    Another night we had dinner at Aquavit, which was also new. The young chef, Marcus Samuelsson, must have been only twenty-seven at the time. I sipped black-pepper aquavit and ate cured gravlax in the romantic room, all dressed up for the holidays.
    Then we went to Vong, which had just earned three stars from the New York Times. Hailed as groundbreaking, this was Jean-Georges’s initial venture into Asian territory. It was the first high-end restaurant of its kind to demonstrate such an amazingly original mix of Thai and French flavors, and epitomized the 1990s New York dining scene.
    It was dark, and the luxurious banquettes were more like private booths, covered in rich quilted fabric. The service was uncannily attentive. They served us a “white plate” with a selection of signature appetizers on it containing several ingredients I didn’t know: daikon, galangal, nam prik. There were fried duck spring rolls and delicate Vietnamese summer rolls. I returned from New York for my last semester of school inspired and determined to go back again soon.
    Back in Toronto, living at home, I was feeling confused. Although I had learned a lot at McGill, academia didn’t prepare me for anything specific. It prepared me in some ways for the adult world: I grew as a person. I learned how to write, how to do research, and how to question. But I did not graduate with a set purpose.
    At that fateful meeting with my family friend who helped me realize that “Eat. Write. Travel. Cook.” was actually a viable career plan, she also gave me more concrete advice, suggesting I try writing for lifestyle magazines. That made sense, but I had no idea how to go about getting such a job.
    By coincidence, at a bridal shower the very next week my mother was seated next to a young woman who worked on the publishing side of Toronto Life , the city’s award-winning monthly magazine. She told her about me. The woman called my mother a few days later to say I should apply for an editorial internship.
    I landed the position and soon realized writing about food was a job people actually had. It wasn’t just a pipe dream.
    I edited and conducted research for the magazine’s listing pages, including theater, art, and restaurants. I spent a lot of time learning about copyediting and immersed myself in fact-checking. It’s sort of like being a private investigator, doing reverse research. When an article includes an address, say, 431 Smith Street, in a big brownstone on the north side of the street, it was my job to make sure that was the right address, that it was indeed a brownstone, that it was big, and in fact on the north side of the street. I loved the process, even though some of it was tedious. I liked re-interviewing subjects, finding flaws, and fixing them. It felt rewarding to improve the story or to debate the nuances of the way a sentence read.
    Once while spending time in the magazine’s archives I found a food article that my mother had written some twenty years earlier. I was officially becoming my