Eating Authors: Tim Pratt

It’s a gloomy, foggy kind of day here in the greater Philadelphia area as I prepare this week’s EATING AUTHORS entry, but as large chunks of the USA are apparently buried under snow, and vast portions of Australia are enduring record heat waves, I suppose I should just shut the hell up about the weather and get on with this week’s installment. Yeah, let’s do that.

Our guest this week is Tim Pratt, who—in addition to being a past Hugo Award winner and Nebula Award nominee—is likely known to many of you as a senior editor at Locus. His latest book, The Nex, came out earlier this month from Merry Blacksmith Press. In fact, he’s so busy writing that he’s done so under a couple additional, thinly disguised, names: T. A. Pratt (his Marla Mason books, beginning with Blood Engines) and more recently T. Aaron Payton (The Constantine Affliction). If you’re new to his work, you might want to start out with his shorter fiction, some of which has been conveniently compiled into the collections Little Gods and Hart & Boot & Other Stories. But now, let’s find out about his food choices.

LMS: Welcome, Tim (if that’s your real name). Let’s talk about meals. What stands out as your most memorable one?

TP: Oh, wow, to narrow it down to just one is impossible… two come to mind immediately.

In 2006 my wife and I went to Jenner CA near the mouth of the Russian River for our anniversary. We stayed at a little bed & breakfast, but we had a magnificent meal at River’s End, a restaurant that overlooks the place where the river meets the Pacific. We had an immense, decadent, multi-course meal, with amazing sea food, watching the sun disappear into the sea. The highlight was an immense chef’s salad, full of fresh ingredients, which could have been a meal unto itself.

Another: I work for a trade publishing magazine, and a couple of years back a very generous visiting author offered to take the whole staff out for a meal. We went to Pizzaiolo, one of my favorite restaurants in the Bay Area, founded by a former Chez Panisse chef and specializing in wood-fired pizzas and inventive appetizers. Confronted with a menu filled with too many tantalizing options to choose from, the aforementioned author said, “Why don’t we just have one of everything?” And so I had the pleasure of tasting everything on offer at one of my favorite places to eat, in truly outstanding company.

Good food and good people are a combination that have led to many of the best times of my life.