About Evan

I learned early on that I was much more comfortable hanging out in the kitchen and cooking for people than I was sitting at the table and making small talk. Which was good, since my mother was a terrible cook but a wonderful talker. We made a good team. As an only child of a single parent growing up in the 1960s I was expected to help shop and make dinner. Eventually I found out that cookbooks not only showed me how to make a dish, but many of them put that dish in context, whether it was historical, cultural, personal or technical. And for some reason I was voraciously interested in places that weren’t Los Angeles. I fell in love with reading cookbooks which made my mom very happy because she didn’t have to spend as much time in the kitchen anymore. I grew up in the Los Feliz and Silverlake areas of Los Angeles at a time when grocery stores were small and butcher’s and specialist delis and cheese shops dotted the neighborhoods. Mom would call in the orders and I would drop by the shops after school to pick up fodder for meals. We would spend Sundays cooking for the week. It wasn’t long before my identity as “the one who cooks” was firmly entrenched.

The books with their recipes from far away places led me to study languages with the goal of traveling to Europe. I earned money for my first trip in 1970 by selling chocolate chip cookies to stoners at my high school for fifty cents apiece. I was barely seventeen when I left on that first trip with a backpack and Eurail pass. There were weeks and months spent in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece. It changed my life. Food became even more linked with cultural experience and that way of seeing illuminated every part of my world. Upon my return after a hesitant foray into Music Studies at UC Berkeley, I ended up at UCLA where my studies in Italian Literature and Film allowed me to plunge into Italian food culture with trips to Italy on scholarship every summer. That period created a foundation for understanding and a belief in the role of a food-centered life. I ate, I cooked, I read. But it turned out to be just the beginning.

I started cooking for people for money when I was fifteen. First, on my own doing little jobs here and there for my mom’s friends. Then I worked for a Hollywood caterer through my senior year of high school and while I was at UCLA. It was inevitable that I would find myself in a professional restaurant kitchen. It felt like putting on a comfortable suit of clothes. It just fit. After a few years cooking for others, in 1984 I opened Angeli Caffe. By serving rustic, regional Italian food in a space designed by cutting edge firm Morphosis, it seems that I created a restaurant archetype that inspired imitations all over the country. My first cookbook, Cucina Fresca, came out that year too. By the time Angeli closed in 2012 the place was an L.A. institution known as much for the warmth of the welcome as for the food. I came to think of it as the Cheer’s of L.A. Italian restaurants. Ruth Reichl said of Angeli upon its closure “It’s hard to remember now, but when Angeli opened nobody was doing that kind of food in the US. Marcella Hazan said it was the most authentic place she’d been – high praise from someone who doesn’t hand it out lightly. I think I was in love with it from the first bite, the spare simplicity of the food.”

Several other cookbooks were to follow, as did more travel, more writing and a lot of cooking. In 1998 I was asked to host KCRW’s Good Food. It was the first time I could bring my lifelong food nerdiness and love of reading and research together with my expertise as a chef and restaurateur. Since 1998 the radio show and eventual podcast Good Food I’ve been exploring every aspect of food and how it intersects with human (and sometimes animal) life through conversations with writers, cookbook authors, farmers, chefs and more. The show airs on KCRW, an NPR station in Southern California and has a worldwide audience on the web.

Thousands of interviews later, I tell people that hosting Good Food has been like taking a PhD in food studies. I certainly never realized that this nerdy child who was only comfortable while reading a book or in the kitchen would end up talking to people for a living. In 2017 I was inducted into the James Beard Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.Good Food received Best Audio Series award from the IACP in 2012. Over the years I’ve been a member of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and was the founder and leader of the L.A. Chapter of Slow Food for many years.

I’m available for a limited number of speaking engagements each year. If you want to use my voice on a project please feel free to contact me.