San Diego Reader

Naomi Wise

Naomi Wise (not her real name) spent her teens living in the Carnegie Hall Building and eating in Manhattan’s ethnic restaurants. She waitressed her way through the University of Michigan (B.A., English lit), then returned to New York. Following a motorcycle-camping trip across the U.S., she and her then-husband moved to San Francisco, where she worked a civil service day-job while writing film criticism for every low-paying publication in the Bay Area, plus a stint as restaurant critic for Francis Coppola’s City Magazine. Meanwhile, she traveled the Pan American Highway from SF to Tierra del Fuego in a '57 Chevy pickup; visited England, France, Italy, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, and Thailand; and made numerous trips to New Orleans, mainland Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, and Hong Kong, always collecting flavor-memories and scribbled recipes. Switching her “major” to food, she served as restaurant critic for the East Bay Express and the San Francisco Weekly. She has written/co-written four out-of-print cookbooks and an unauthorized biography of Francis Ford Coppola (On the Edge: The Life and Times of Francis Coppola) and has served as consulting editor on several cookbooks, travel, and gardening books. She relocated to San Diego In 2000 when the Reader made her an offer she couldn’t refuse -- a salary.

Recent Stories

American Revolutionary
American Revolutionary

Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009
Food can be a deeply political issue, but in this case it’s the merely skin-deep question of the restaurant’s name ...

Fiesta for Friends
Fiesta for Friends

Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009
It’s weird that right on the border here, we’re so slow to catch up with the rest of the country ...

The Golden Coast
The Golden Coast

Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009
The Lynnester has ways to make men talk. When Mark and I arrived to meet her at Iris, she was ...

99 Years of Seduction
99 Years of Seduction

Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009
The U.S. Grant Hotel, completed in October 1910, is one of the city’s grandest old hotels. Its signature restaurant, the ...

Rare Burgers? Rarely
Rare Burgers? Rarely

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2009
Trekking in Nepal involved 25 grueling vegan days of rice, lentils, mustard greens, noodles, barley stew, and boiled potatoes (and ...

Have It Your Way
Have It Your Way

Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2009
Don’t cry for Laurel. It has gone to a far better place. Reincarnated as Cucina Urbana, you can now hang ...

Free-Range Grazing
Free-Range Grazing

Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009
Alchemy doesn’t turn lead into gold, but its kitchen does turn good ingredients into palate-pleasers. Open seven months and well ...

Feasting on Olympus
Feasting on Olympus

Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009
Looking at the $20 menus for upcoming Restaurant Week, the sole temptation was Apollonia — but clicking to the website ...

Crab Bag
Crab Bag

Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2009
Truluck’s is a Florida-based surf-and-turf house specializing in crabs — above all, Florida stone crabs, but also Maine Jonahs, Pacific ...

Sail Away
Sail Away

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009
“Hotel restaurant” used to be shorthand for “What’s that slop you’re eating?” — back in the era of moldy “colonial” ...

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