11/2/2022 0 Comments Tomi on the daily show![]() ![]() ![]() The manager was Peter Sclafani Jr., scion of a well-known local food family. The chef, Leon Dicort, was schooled in France. But its menu didn’t feature ordinary campus cuisine. The Flambeau Room was, at the time, the restaurant in the University Center. “‘Do you know about the Flambeau Room?’ I asked, quite sure that he didn’t. Not wanting to give up the clubhouse privileges that accrue to newspaper staff, I begged to stay on to write feature articles.”Īsked by the editor to elaborate on what topics he might tackle, Fitzmorris gave a quick answer. “He told me his friend would take over my cartoonist gig-and that I was, like, fired. “When the fall semester began, a new editor cleaned house,” Fitzmorris writes in his Hungry Town memoir. At first he penned movie, theater and music reviews for The Driftwood, where he was also an editorial cartoonist. It took a bit more time before Fitzmorris began writing about food, however. “He turned me on to the food world and it was straight upward ever since.” “I didn’t understand the pleasures of the table until I read Collin’s book,” Fitzmorris said. ![]() Two years earlier, he published The New Orleans Underground Gourmet, a book of more than 250 of his highly-opinionated reviews. When not chronicling or teaching history, Collin wrote about food like few others had, as the city’s first newspaper restaurant critic, starting at the States-Item in 1972. The UNO campus was where he met a history professor who would change his life and become his mentor: Richard Collin. His mother was a fabulous French-Creole cook at home, but until his college years, Fitzmorris said he hadn’t developed a passion for New Orleans’ restaurants. He’s been eating, writing and talking about food nearly every day since.įitzmorris calls himself a walking New Orleans cliché: born in the city on Mardi Gras, delivered by a jazz musician-obstetrician and never absent from his hometown longer than the six weeks after Hurricane Katrina. It appeared Sept.1,1972 in the student newspaper The Driftwood. It was here-50 years ago-that Fitzmorris wrote his very first restaurant review. The cover of Tom Fitzmorris’ 2010 book Hungry Town calls it a culinary history of New Orleans, “the city where food is almost everything.” For the city’s preeminent restaurant critic, you could say everything began at the University of New Orleans.
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