Annabelle Tometich Transcript

 Annabelle Tometich Transcript

 

Londyn Crenshaw:
Hey there, you're listening to Radio Cherry Bombe and I'm Londyn Crenshaw. Host Kerry Diamond is on vacation this week, so I'm filling in. I'm the Content and Partnerships Manager at Cherry Bombe, and I'm coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. 

I'm a big fan of food memoirs, so I was excited to learn about “The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony” by Annabelle Tometich. I picked up the book and was just a few pages in when I knew we had to ask Annabelle to come on the show. I'm thrilled to report she's joining me as today's guest. Annabelle thought she'd become a doctor one day, but life had other plans. After college, she worked as a line cook, then spent 18 years as an editor, writer, and restaurant critic for her hometown paper, The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida. Annabelle and I talk about her critically acclaimed book, the all important mango tree and wellness and anonymity when it comes to restaurant reviewing. Stay tuned for our chat.

A little housekeeping. Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Art of Entertaining dinner at Alex Wight's Crown Jewel restaurant in Portland, Maine. We had a beautiful night with Alex and her team on Great Diamond Island. Special thanks to our sponsors, Kerrygold and Pernod Ricard. If you'd like to learn about future Cherry Bombe events, head to cherrybombe.com. Check out our events calendar and sign up for our free weekly newsletter.

Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everybody. This is Kerry Diamond, the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe. This episode of Radio Cherry Bombe is supported by OpenTable. As you may know, we've been on the road this summer with OpenTable for our Sit With US community dinner series, which highlighted amazing female chefs and restaurateurs in the Cherry Bombe and OpenTable networks. Thank you to everyone who joined us and to the amazing chefs and teams at the featured restaurants. We kicked things off in early June in New Orleans with Chef Melissa Arujo at Alma, and then we had to Atlanta for an evening with Le Bon Nosh with Chef Forough Vakili. We were in Dallas at Jose with Chef Chef Anastacia Quinones-Pittman, and we had a sweet ending to our series at Nostrana in Portland, Oregon with Chef Cathy Whims. It was such a treat meeting so many of you. Beautiful food, beautiful people, it's been so much fun. Thank you to OpenTable for bringing these experiences to life with us. By the way, if you're interested in curated dining events like the Sit With Us dinners, check out the OpenTable experiences on their app and website. Head to opentable.com/experiences to explore what's happening near you or use it to find fun events to enjoy on your travels, like OpenTable's Summer Sets, a dinner series that combines music and food to create one of a kind evenings in cities like Miami and New Orleans.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Now let's check in with today's guest. Hi, Annabelle. Welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe. I'm so excited to be talking with you today about your memoir, “The Mango Tree.” So fruit, Florida, and felony, that subhead absolutely grabbed me. Why those three words?

Annabelle Tometich:
I mean that's the crux of the book. It's fruit, as in mangoes, which is the fruit that my mother was defending when she landed in a Robert E. Lee County courtroom in 2015. Florida, it's a very Florida book. I'm a Florida kid. It is the state that shaped me and molded me into whoever this is I've become. And then felony, it was not a misdemeanor charge for what my mother did. She is a convicted felon. Alliteration, we love some alliteration, so we landed there just to try to give the reader a sense of what was ahead, an idea.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Where did the idea for the memoir come from?

Annabelle Tometich:
Oh, wow. I was a food writer for 18 years, a journalist, I should say, and most of that time, the vast majority of that time, was in food in some capacity. I joke, but it's not entirely a joke that this book was a midlife crisis in 2019. I was 39 and I was still at my hometown paper in Fort Myers, Florida, and it became very clear that year that I was going to be spending a lot more time in my hometown. I had some opportunities that had arisen in Tampa and to do some food writing in other places. My family, everything is still in Fort Myers. The spiral began of, what the hell are you doing with your life? Are you going to keep reviewing the same 50-some restaurants over and over again? Where do you go from here if you're still in this relatively small town?

And very naively, I was like, "Oh, you can write a book, that's easy, right? I can just write a book." And actually, it started as a cookbook. That was what I did. That's what I knew. I thought I could maybe put together this cookbook essay collection that was like a hybrid and these quirky essays from my childhood and my very eccentric Filipino American family, but then also tie in these recipes that were tangential to these stories and very early on, a few of my early readers were like, "We love the recipes, but if you get rid of them and just connect these essays, you have a really powerful memoir." And I was like, "But I'm not writing a memoir. I'm writing a cookbook." And they're like, "No, you're not. Nice try."

Londyn Crenshaw:
Well, I'm grateful to those readers because this memoir is out of this world and it deals heavily with your relationship with your mother. What was it like telling her about the book?

Annabelle Tometich:
Yeah, it was very easy telling her it was a cookbook. For a long time, I was like, "Yeah, I'm working on this cookbook. Can you tell me more about your pancit recipe?" Or, "Let's talk about lumpia." Let's talk about these easy conversation things, and then I would pepper her with more questions of, like, "Well, then what year did you come to the U.S.? Remind me specifically what your job was and which hospital you worked at first," and things like that. Unfortunately, my mother has vascular dementia, so she still thinks it's a cookbook, even though I've told her many times that it's more than that. She's held the book in her hands. She knows that it's out there, but her cognitive abilities aren't to the point where she can really read it, which, I don't know, that's a blessing, but also sad.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Do you want to talk a little bit more about the fact that you don't necessarily need to broach the depths of the book with your mom, but also the fact that maybe she can't totally understand even the response to the book and the success that it's had?

Annabelle Tometich:
Yeah, if she was able to read it, she's never been ashamed of anything she's done ever. And I touch on this a little bit at the end of the book, but she was convicted of a felony for shooting at a man who she claimed was taking mangoes from her yard in South Florida. She was sentenced to five years of probation and very early on, I want to say eight months in, her Filipino probation officer, which what are the odds of that, was like, "She's paid all of her fines, all her drug tests are clear. She's a 60-year-old woman who's really never been in trouble in her life up until this point, and I'd be happy to sign off on her early termination of her probation because the only thing she has to do is go in front of a judge and say that she's sorry for what she did."My mom was like, "Absolutely not. I'm not sorry for what I did. That man should be sorry for messing with my mango trees."

And she served every single day of her five years of probation because she was not apologetic. She refused to just say sorry for what she'd done. And that's like her in a nutshell is she carries no shame. She's very shameless, very, very shameless. I think the parts that she would probably... She would get me on details, she'd be like, "That dress was not brown, it was pink." She would get me in the little things like that or whatever. That's where the fights would start.

Londyn Crenshaw:
I've heard you say that you were actually more worried about your siblings reading the book. How did they take it once they'd read it?

Annabelle Tometich:
Yeah, they lived this childhood just like I did. More than anything, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I want to make sure that they're okay with this stuff being out there and these family stories being in print." My sister especially, she and my mother have a very fraught relationship still, and my honest to goodness worry with my sister was that she would think I was taking it too easy on our mom, so she was one of the very early readers once we had finished final pages and things like that, and I think she read it in 12 hours and I was so nervous. Her synopsis was, "This is the story that you had to write about our childhood." And I was like, "I think we can live with that. That's doable."

Londyn Crenshaw:
Yeah, I think that's a lovely way to look at it. It's like, "I'm not going to put my own experiences on you. This is your experience and this is your book." And so that segues into my next question, did you learn anything about yourself while writing this book and exploring those memories?

Annabelle Tometich:
So much. So much. I had no trouble writing the book once I figured out this story. I think I had at one point 160,000 words. That's like two books, so there's a lot of trimming down. My agent was like, "We don't need every single fight you've ever had with your mother. Let's pick one or two that illustrate the nature of things and let's trim out these other ones." That wasn't really a problem at all, but a lot of the editorial process was just trying to make sense of all of these incidents. I think from being a journalist, I was very fine with writing out these scenes and showing what was happening, and then it was like, "Well, now you have to figure out what it all means."

My editor at Little, Brown, Vivian Lee, who is phenomenal, a lot of her notes were just like, "Question mark, question mark, question mark? What does this mean to you now? What does this mean to you at the time? How have you processed this? There was a lot of forced reflection where I think I have been comfortable for a long time just not thinking about certain things, but then you put it all together in a book and you're forced to make sense of all this stuff.

I think a big part of this was the fact that my mother had her issues. I was very ready to dismiss her as just this wild woman who I happened to grow up with for 18 years, but then when you dig deeper, there's so much more to her and there's so much strength there and there's so much resilience and endurance and these really great qualities that if you dismiss somebody entirely, you're dismissing those as well. It's understanding what's worth holding onto in certain relationships. It puts a lot of stuff into perspective honestly, and then if you do that with all your relationships, you're like, "Oh, well, this is all different now."

Londyn Crenshaw:
We'll be right back with today's guest.

Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everybody. This is Kerry Diamond. Today's episode is also supported by Pernod Ricard, creators of conviviality. Pernod Ricard is a worldwide leader in the spirits and wine industry and embraces the spirit of convivialite as we all should and is focused firmly on a sustainable and responsible future. Their prestigious portfolio of brands includes classic names beloved by bartenders and mixologists around the world. There's the Glenlivet single malt Scotch, Martell cognac and Codigo 1530 tequila, just to name a few. If you are a regular listener, you know my preferred drink is always bubbles, so I love a glass of Perrier-Jouet champagne to kick off a special night out, and I also love a champagne cocktail. My favorite is a French 75, which you can make with Perrier-Jouet Grand Brut and some Malfy gin. That sounds lovely, doesn't it? To learn more about Pernod Ricard, head to pernod-ricard.com and don't forget, always drink responsibly.

The new issue of Cherry Bombe's print magazine is now available and it's all about Paris, the city of the summer. Chef Dominique Crenn is on the cover and the inside features our ultimate guide to female fueled Paris. If you want to know what women on the culinary scene in Paris are up to, you don't want to miss this issue. We've got info on all the restaurants, cafes, bakeries, ice cream shops, boutiques, and more run by the most interesting, creative and dynamic women in the city. Whether you're visiting this summer or dreaming about a trip, be sure to pick up our Paris issue. You can find Cherry Bombe magazine at your favorite shop or bookstore, places like Wedge in Warren, Rhode Island, Sandwichette in Paris, and Good Cakes and Bakes in Detroit. Also, there's a special promo for the Bombesquad running right now. Buy the Paris issue, plus any Cherry Bombe subscription and get free shipping. Just use code PARIS at checkout.

Londyn Crenshaw:
In many ways, the story revolves around your mom's relationship with the mango tree. What did the mango tree mean to you?

Annabelle Tometich:
I mean, I love mangoes, but the trees were just a pain in the butt because it was like you have to fertilize them, you have to make sure that they're trimmed and pruned and picked up after. It was like another job. It was almost like taking care of another kid, which as the eldest daughter is the last thing you need is one more child to take care of. I wasn't a fan of them growing up, but then in retrospect, that tree saved my mother. We were on the verge of moving to the Philippines and after my dad passed, there were some really big life changes that were quite possible for us, and I do honestly think that those mango trees, it gave her a connection. It was her connection to home. It was, in a way, another sibling for us and something that she could take care of, and that paid her back in sweet juicy mangoes every summer.

Londyn Crenshaw:
What role did food play in your life growing up?

Annabelle Tometich:
I've always loved food. I don't think I fell in love with food until I was older, until I was out of the house and stuff, because again, food was just like a chore. I had this little sister and a little brother to feed, and you learn out of a necessity. Food Network was becoming a pretty big deal on cable when I got to college. This is the late '90s, early 2000s and I loved it because I had these skills. I knew how to make eggs, I knew how to saute chicken and the basics, and then it was like, oh, you have these skills and now you can build on them by watching Rachael Ray and Ina Garten and all these people do really cool stuff with it, where these basic dishes that I was making for my brother and sister, you could then take them and ratchet them up a couple notches and make them into something that's honestly delicious.

And I think there's so much power in that. There's so much power in being able to not just feed yourself but feed yourself well and do things that are wonderful and that bring people together and that people will talk about and things like that.

Londyn Crenshaw:
You were the food critic at the News-Press in Southwest Florida for 18 years. How did you find yourself at the food desk there?

Annabelle Tometich:
It's so random, yeah. Not only was I the food critic, I was the food critic writing under a fake name, so I wrote for many years under this pseudonym Jean Le Boeuf, which everyone thought I was a French guy, which I was also like, "Yeah, sure, let's be a French guy. French guys get free passes and respect and whatnot. That's great." I graduated from the University of Florida. I was supposed to go to medical school, ended up not doing that and started working in restaurants. I did everything. I was a hostess. I worked back of house, front of house. I cooked. I worked for a catering company for a while. We did big event catering and things like that.

I had done a lot of food stuff and I got a big head and I was like, "Well, you could do your own catering company." And so I was doing breakfast/lunch catering, and I needed a night job because I was just bleeding money and a friend of mine, I was like, "Anything that's in the evening, let me know." And there was a job at my newspaper on the sports desk, which didn't make any sense, but it was night and I was like, "Yeah, I'll take it." I started working at the paper and I fell in love with journalism. I fell in love with writing and all of it.

I worked in sports for a couple of years. I think I started doing reviews while I was on the sports desk, and it was great because no one had any idea it was me because I was like the sports girl. I was covering high school sports and then once or twice a week, going out and reviewing restaurants, pretty incognito. I was experiencing the restaurant the exact same way anybody else in Fort Myers, Florida was experiencing it. And then at some point, some colleagues left and the food position became my own and I got to really have fun with it and do what I wanted to do.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Can you tell us a little bit more about Jean Le Boeuf and how it came to be and what it meant for you in particular to assume that identity?

Annabelle Tometich:
So the Jean Le Boeuf name has been used by the News-Press since 1979, and the guy who created it, Bill Morris, he had no food experience. He just wanted an excuse to take his girlfriend on more dates and not have to pay for it, so he created this name because he was like, "I don't want people to know that I'm writing these reviews." It stuck. I didn't create the name by any means. I inherited it from my predecessors. I definitely ran with it. My first review ran in 2006. I was the one who created a Facebook page for Jean Le Boeuf and a Twitter account and an Instagram, and I got him on social media and stuff like that, and we built this cult following in this place of this person who no one was supposed to know who it was. I loved that. I think especially all of the imposter syndrome, all of the insecurities, being a mixed race woman in Robert E. Lee County, Florida was like, "Oh, well, you don't have to think about any of that if your pen name is Jean Le Boeuf.

Londyn Crenshaw:
How do you think being a critic in Southwest Florida, Fort Myers in particular, differs from somewhere like Los Angeles or New York?

Annabelle Tometich:
It's a totally different, totally different beast. I mean, on the one hand it's like the big fish small pond kind of thing, because there's no competition. We get to set the agenda and we get to pick the places that I want to go to and want to write about and want to feature and want to shine light on, which is nice. That is very nice to have that freedom. But then at the same time, I think the beauty of small town dining isn't in high end places. It's in the hole in the walls. It's in the little mom and pops that you have to go out and find because they don't have marketing and they're not doing Instagram and they're not doing whatever.

But that's also fun to feel like you're perhaps, honestly helping some businesses that may not otherwise get the attention of the broader public was a really nice feeling. I think that was probably my favorite part of the job was just wandering around and going into all the different neighborhoods and all the different nooks and crannies of Southwest Florida and being like, "Oh, there's some really great stuff happening at this El Salvadorian pupuseria over off of Palm Beach Avenue." I love that and I do miss it. I left the paper in 2022. I took a buyout and I got to focus on this book and everything, but I think that is the one part of it I miss a little bit.

Londyn Crenshaw:
How big was your territory when you were the critic there?

Annabelle Tometich:
So Fort Myers, the greater Fort Myers area is like 400,000, almost 500,000 people, so it's bigger than you think. It's bigger than I think because I still remember when I was a kid there and it was nothing. But then we also would cover Naples into Out East, which is a lot of farmland and stuff, but there's some great little restaurants out there too. Lee County, Collier County, Hendry County, which are all in between Tampa and Miami on the South Gulf Coast of Florida. It got pretty extensive. I mean, I also had a team of three at one point, which was fantastic, but then journalism, it was me. And it became a lot to try to cover and to try to do effectively, but it was just a lot of fun and they gave me a lot of leeway to do what I wanted to do, and there wasn't a lot of questions of why are you focusing on this or why are you doing that because we had really good results.

Londyn Crenshaw:
What are some of your favorite restaurants in Fort Myers?

Annabelle Tometich:
Oh my goodness, there's so many. For really good seafood, because we are, we're right on the water, Blue Dog Bar and Grill, if you're ever in Matlacha, Florida is fantastic. Those guys, they aren't fishermen themselves, but Island Seafood is right across the street, so they're at Island Seafood every morning. The fishermen are pulling up, they're taking the fish off the boats, they're bringing it over there. They're also one of the few places where you can find local shrimp. While prior to Hurricane Ian, Fort Myers Beach was one of, if not the largest shrimping port in the country, and so we have a surprising amount of shrimp, but not very much of it stays in Fort Myers. It all goes to Tampa and then gets processed and sent out to everywhere else.

The funny thing about shrimp in Fort Myers is we catch it, we send it to Tampa and it comes back to us, which is just a silly thing to do. So there's a handful of restaurants where they are going to the docks and intercepting the shrimp before it goes to Tampa and getting it on the plates, and Blue Dog is one of the few places where they're willing to do that work and get the good stuff and bring it in, so I love Blue Dog. I always recommend them for local seafood.

And then higher end stuff, we have a great restaurant called Liberty. It's a tiny... It's probably 20 some seats. The chef used to have a really big 300 seat concept, and then this is just his, "I'm just going to do the food that I want to do for 20 to 25 people a night and we're going to sell what we sell and move on." So there's some interesting little places if you're willing to look in our area.

Londyn Crenshaw:
What do you think is unique about the food scene in Fort Myers? What sets it apart?

Annabelle Tometich:
Yeah, a lot of places, the food scene is determined by the immigrant population in those areas. Some of the best food is coming from this first generation, second generation of immigrant families that are in there, so we have some amazing Central American food. El Salvadorian, which I mentioned, Honduran, Costa Rican. We have some amazing Costa Rican restaurants, and having traveled to other parts of the country, I'm like, "They are on par with some of the best El Salvadorian food you're finding in New York or Los Angeles or wherever else." And our South American, we to have amazing Peruvian restaurants too because it's that access to fresh seafood, but then the Peruvian techniques coming together, that's really good.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Something that I like to ask all restaurant critics that I get the chance to talk to is what makes a restaurant good?

Annabelle Tometich:
That's a great question. It's such a silly answer, but it's like there's a vibe, right? When you walk into a place, you can't always put your finger on it. Especially having done this for so long and having worked in restaurants for so long, but very soon after walking in, you can tell are things moving effectively? Is management doing what management's supposed to be doing? Is everybody trained the way that they should be trained? Is there cohesion? Does the story make sense? Does the menu make sense in context of the neighborhood, in context of everything else? It is one of those things that's really hard to put a finger on.

We didn't get rid of stars, but I was pushing to get rid of stars because I feel like you really just need to read restaurant reviews to understand what a critic is thinking, and the stars are just like, "Oh, well, four stars. It's great. Let's go." There's so much nuance. I'm like, "I don't know how to answer that," because it is, it's all those things coming together and that vibe you get when you just know that everything's going to be good and you're going to have a good time.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Pete Wells recently announced his departure from the New York Times, and in his farewell, he talked a lot about the health ramifications of the job. What were your reactions to that farewell and how did you manage dealing with the less glamorous sides of the job?

Annabelle Tometich:
I 100% agree that there are serious health ramifications of eating out that much. I am probably in the healthiest I've been these last two years of not eating out two to three times a week, and I mean, in New York, you're eating out every night. That is a full-time eating job, but here, it was definitely two to three meals at least a week in addition to pretty much every lunch was out because you're just trying to keep up and everything.

I went full-time as a restaurant critic doing that in 2010, and that was the year my son was born. I had always been a skinny kid, and then I had my son, my first child, and I was doing the food stuff full time and I was like, "Why am I not losing weight?" I was like, "What is going on?" And I realized, "Oh, you're eating out more than you ever have in your entire life in addition to just having a baby." And so that was a huge realization of, "If you're going to be living this lifestyle, you need to move your body and work some of this stuff off." It also took me a very long time to understand that you don't need to eat the entire dish to be able to properly rate the dish, and that was also just the immigrant daughter in me of like, "You need to clean your plate. Don't leave food behind."

For a long time, there was a lot that I learned, and in 2020 I actually wrote a pretty interesting story about how during the pandemic I was one of the people who lost weight because the restaurants were closed, and so I wasn't eating out as much as I usually was as a restaurant critic. And it was also that realization of as I'm getting older, I need to figure out this balance because it's a big sacrifice to... I mean, it sounds so silly to eat out that much is a sacrifice to your body because there's a lot of butter, there's a lot of animal byproducts and sugar and stuff and restaurant food, and that's why it's so delicious."

Londyn Crenshaw:
I totally understand and it's hard to say to people, "I have to go out for dinner. I have to go out to dinner for work and I don't want to." And everyone's like, "You're so lucky. You get to go out to dinner for work," and sometimes it doesn't feel so lucky.

Annabelle Tometich:
Right, exactly. And you're like, "I just want to go home and have toast. I just going to go home and have a little bit of ice cream and go to bed." And it's funny because at the time, my kids hated going to restaurants. They're like, "Oh my God, we have to go to a restaurant again? Are you kidding me?" I'm like, "Do you have any idea how spoiled you sound right now?" Because when I was a kid, that was the dream was to be able to go to a restaurant. That was the height of living. No matter what the restaurant was, it was like the Wendy's super buffet? Yes, let's go. I love it. Ponderosa? Hell yeah, let's get some steak.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Ruth Reichl writes about this, how her son, Nick, was really excited when she left the New York Times as the food critic because he was like, "We get to have dinner at home." And I think that is so interesting, this dynamic of when something that is so special to people, and I think for a long time was as big of an event as maybe even going to a concert, not so much in modern times of eating out, but in the past, to be like, "Well, maybe I don't actually want to do this every single night."

Annabelle Tometich:
It's almost two years that I've been away from the paper. And so my kids are like, "We should go out to eat tonight." And I'm like, "Oh, who are you? Where do you want to go? What's going on?" Yeah, so they're little brains, they've forgotten already.

Londyn Crenshaw:
The Times also announced Priya Krishna and Melissa Clark as the interim critics in Pete's place, and obviously, they're very beloved public figures, so it'll be hard for them to remain anonymous. Do you think anonymity still has a place in restaurants?

Annabelle Tometich:
Oh, my goodness. I mean, I think ideally, maybe. The thing I came to learn with the pseudonym and everything is that the people who have money and power will almost always know who you are no matter what because they have the publicists and the teams and the people in place to know who's who and to sort you out. So it's like those high-end concepts, I think they're always going to know or have an idea. The people who don't know are the people that don't need to. It's like the little El Salvadorian place on Palm Beach Boulevard isn't going to know who I am, isn't going to care who I am.

So yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure anymore. The 15 years, 18 years that I did it, people figured it out despite having the pseudonym. Especially when I was a one person food team, people figured it out. I'm not sure how much you can change. If I'm not making a reservation under my own name, if we're at least taking those measures, no one's going to know until I get there. How much can you change and the five minutes it takes to figure somebody out and get them seated and whatnot? Yeah, I'm not sure anymore.

Londyn Crenshaw:
So going back to the topic of identity, something you say throughout the book is, "No one is from Fort Myers." But you are from Fort Myers, so I want to talk a little bit about what it means to you to be from Fort Myers.

Annabelle Tometich:
I'm trying to embrace it. I'm trying to figure it out more these days and see my hometown for its complexities. It's like my mother, it's very easy to reduce a place like Fort Myers too it's a red county in Florida. It's a tourist town. It's beaches. It is all of that, but it's also so much more and it's funny, because especially the book events that I've done in Fort Myers, people are just thrilled to see our little town on the page because you don't get that very often. And then I also think it challenges certain people to think of Fort Myers in different ways and to understand this backbone of Fort Myers that is very much based on immigrant workers, whether it's Filipino nurses in hospitals or migrant workers in the tomato fields or any other number of immigrant workers who are making any city tick and work.

I feel like being nobody is a great place to start. Maybe you don't center yourself on your nobodyness, but I think that's a really humble place to just be like, "Who am I? Who am I to write a book? Who am I to say this restaurant is good or bad?" It just makes you see things. It makes you try to understand them because I think when you start from a place of, "Well, I'm the restaurant critic" or "I'm a famous author," then it's like you're starting from this pedestal where you're not really seeing the whole picture. So I'm trying to make a case for nobody's. I think nobody's are a good thing.

Londyn Crenshaw:
I love that. We talked a little bit about this before, but in 2022, you left the paper and you left your post as the restaurant critic. Why did you feel like it was time to go?

Annabelle Tometich:
Yeah, for sure. We did a big unveiling, so we did this whole, who is Jean Le Boeuf piece in 2021. That was actually, it was supposed to happen in 2019 and then 2020 it got delayed and then pandemic, it got delayed more. So that probably came out in 2021. And that was a big push of mine because I think at some point I realized, while that was a very comfortable hiding place, it was also not good for my career because if you're trying to get a job as a restaurant critic at any other paper and you have zero byline showing that you were the actual restaurant critic, that makes things a lot harder. Yeah, I'm not nobody anymore. I am immensely qualified for this job in a lot of ways. I think there was a part of me that was like, "You need to claim this before you can't. You need to claim this while you can." And my editors were wonderful. They were like, "Yeah, that makes perfect sense."

And there's also, I think a part of me was thinking long-term, if I do leave, there's no way that they're going to get a restaurant critic who's going to be willing to write in 2021 or 2022, whenever, under someone else's name. The younger generations are smarter than I was at 25 or however old I was when I started it. All of those thoughts were going through my head. It was nice to claim that spot and introduce myself officially to this town that I'd been restaurant critiquing for all these years. The reaction was fantastic. Everybody was really, really wonderful, and I didn't know what it was going to be.

We did that in 2021 and then it was, "Okay, what's next?" And I think the logical next step was to get out of my comfort zone and try to figure out something that was a little more of a challenge and something that was a step up career wise. And fortunately, this book came together and we found a really good home for it with Little, Brown and my editor Vivian, and it allowed me to take that step more comfortably. There wasn't going to be a total free fall. It was like a little cushion to fall onto.

Londyn Crenshaw:
I want to talk a little bit more actually about the steps that led up to the book. So from the first idea to the agent to selling it, can you talk a little bit about what that was like for you?

Annabelle Tometich:
Yeah, so it did. It started as the cookbook idea. Once I figured out that it was going to be a memoir and I figured out this mango tree is a very convenient through line of she planted the tree a year before my father died. It fruited when we were on the verge of making this big move to the other side of the world. I wrote the vast majority of it through the pandemic. It was summer 2020. We were on furlough. So my newspaper had furloughs going on where you had to take one week off every month that summer. And I was like, "Well, if I can't touch my journalism work, then let's figure this book out and let's get it going." So I wrote the vast majority of it in 2020.

In 2021, I got very lucky and found an agent through a workshop class that I was taking. Workshops that I would've had to fly to Boston or go to Nashville or New York to attend were now online. That was how I found my agent. One of the workshop teachers, Minda Honey, who is a fantastic, fantastic person, was like, 'I really like your stuff. Do you mind if I share it with my agent?' And I was like, "No, not at all. I would love that." So I ended up signing with Kayla Lightner at Ayesha Pande Literary, and she and I spent... 2021, she gave me a checklist. She was like, "You're going to get you a Substack, like a newsletter that's yours and yours alone. We're going to get you a website. We're going to boost your social media presence just a little bit, and we're going to clean up this," I think at that point it was 130,000 words, "We're going to clean up this bloated manuscript you have. And in one year, my goal is to go on submission." And I was like, "Yeah, I'm on board, Kayla. Let's do this."

And so we did. We checked off all the things off of her list. One of them was also getting a byline and a bigger publication that wasn't just Fort Myers, Florida. I had an op-ed that ran in the Washington Post in 2021. That really just helped... She's like, "I want to make you visible to more people than just Floridians." Yeah, and then we followed her plan. In 2022, we went on submission, and I got very lucky in that there were multiple publishing houses who were interested in the book, which was wild. They all had very different visions for it. One wanted less childhood and wanted to focus way more on the restaurant critic stuff. One editor wanted to do alternating timelines where it was childhood Annabelle, adult Annabelle, and this overarching quest for identity.

And then Vivian at Little, Brown was like, "I think you have two books here. I think you have a really great coming of age memoir in “The Mango Tree.” And then I think we have perhaps a second book that is focused more on the restaurant critic stuff and is more about your time as Jean Le Boeuf." And I was like, "I like that idea a lot because that sounds way more fun to write two books." We signed the book deal in spring of 2022, and the publishing industry moves way slower than journalism does. The book came out in April of this year, so two years later, the book published.

Londyn Crenshaw:
And now the book has received, I would say, critical success. It's obviously been well received. I personally loved it so, so much. Now that this has all happened, what do you think comes next for you?

Annabelle Tometich:
I'm working on more books. We have a children's book, actually, like a picture book that is really close to being official. That is probably what will come out next is a children's book. And then I am working on a second memoir that is really more focused on my time as a restaurant critic and figuring myself out through those 18 years and everything. So I'm hoping to write more and more. I have some fiction ideas too, maybe one day. And once I get through these, we might head in that direction and see what we can do. But I love writing, I love storytelling. I love all of it, so I'm hoping to stay in this space for a while, ideally.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Let's move into our speed round. Morning beverage?

Annabelle Tometich:
Coffee.

Londyn Crenshaw:
What's always in your fridge?

Annabelle Tometich:
Oh, gosh. Coffee? Coffee.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Favorite childhood snack.

Annabelle Tometich:
Dried mango.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Dream vacation destination?

Annabelle Tometich:
The Philippines. And it always is. I've been a few times, but I would go back every time in a heartbeat.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Favorite smell?

Annabelle Tometich:
Baked goods, something baking. Anything baking.

Londyn Crenshaw:
What are you streaming right now?

Annabelle Tometich:
I've been into murder podcasts lately. We've been doing a lot of true crime podcasts with my 10-year-old.

Londyn Crenshaw:
Favorite food film.

Annabelle Tometich:
Probably “Ratatouille.” Yeah, restaurant critic, “Ratatouille.”

Londyn Crenshaw:
And then if you had to be trapped on a desert island with one food celebrity, who would it be and why?

Annabelle Tometich:
Anthony Bourdain. I am a huge Anthony Bourdain fan. When I decided not to go to medical school, it was because I had read “Kitchen Confidential” and I was like, "This sounds so cool. Let's go do that instead." So I would go with Anthony. 

Londyn Crenshaw:
Okay. Annabelle, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. We're so happy to have you on Radio Cherry Bombe.

Annabelle Tometich:
Thank you so much, Londyn. It was a pleasure.

Londyn Crenshaw:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Kerry and team for having me fill in. I loved chatting with Annabelle, and I hope you all pick up her book at your favorite bookstore. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Joseph Hazan is the studio engineer at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Our producers are Kerry Diamond, Catherine Baker, and Elizabeth Vogt, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. Thanks for listening, everybody. You are the Bombe.