Rick Nichols is a Philadelphia native (a product of rowhouse Mayfair) who moved as a child to Lower Bucks County and later to New England. He graduated from the University of North Carolina and worked on the newspaper in Raleigh. After a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, he joined The Inquirer in 1978. He was for many years a member of the Editorial Board, and has several journalism awards.
His column “On the Side” appears Thursdays in Food, and his column “Food” appears in the Sunday Image section.
Video: A chat with the owner of Queens Farm at the Head House farmers market.
Series: On the Side | The Kitchen Diaries, a tour of Rick's new kitchen.
Email Rick at rnichols@phillynews.com
- An all-American Southern Thanksgiving
- World's greatest beer?
Rick Nichols: An entire Christmas season has gone by. And a Valentine's Day. And, no less dismaying, an Easter since the Berley brothers began their reclamation of the landmark.
Rick Nichols: An exhibit at the National Archives describes that in the fight for pure food, some government regulation was easy to swallow.
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Have his steak and eat it, too
- "This is America," Joey Vento's sign said. But was his challenge to immigrants in the true spirit of America?Rick Nichols on Joey Vento: Like language and food, politics and food are intimately bound up.
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A calendar for the ages
- With its precise illustrations from the 1800s Album Benary, it deserves more than a year.We have grown accustomed to - no, make that attached to - the calendar on the wall of our kitchen that reproduces the vintage drawings from something called Album Benary, an archive so foreign to us that we have long assumed (wrongly) it was of Italian extraction.
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On the Side: Ripening too early for ancient rhythms
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We find ourselves on the cusp of an ambivalent May, the first, fragile blush of spring already fading - a special breed of Jersey broccoli rabe, so tender it can be eaten raw, finished; good-bye, too, to the feathery, early dandelion greens (saluted with their own annual banquet in Vineland), gone.
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On the SideCan the Italian Market be saved?
- Its very roots - humble, cut-rate curbside sustenance - could be the salvation of a revitalized Ninth Street Market.If you linger on South Ninth Street long enough, it can come to have the feel of a boulevard of broken dreams, and not just because trash bags are heaped on occasion at the base of the Italian Market signpost.
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Where’s the beef? Still at Nick’s
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On the resolutely prosaic, two-story corner of 20th and Jackson in South Philadelphia, one encounters Nick's Roast Beef (est. 1938) ...
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Hoagies the way they’re supposed to be
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I have come to pay homage at the unadvertised shrines of true hoagie art deep in South Philly's rowhouse warren, far from the Wawas and Subways and their bubblegum bread.
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'This Is My Cheesesteak' documentary debuts
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At the Bridge Cinema, 40th and Walnut, the royalty of cheesesteakery was on hand Saturday morning for what was billed as "the exclusive world film premiere" of This Is My Cheesesteak, hot from the editing monitor in Ben Daniels' dorm room at Syracuse University.
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Grand tradition in a modest tea room
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Why I found myself motoring down Berkley Road in Devon is not particularly important, though it had to do with the offer of one of those tilted copper bowls they use to whisk the puffy omelettes (French souffles, almost) on Mont Saint-Michel.
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The new Silk City: No diner, but better
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In the great American roadside idiom, the diner is sacred ground, stainless in a rusting world, unchangeable and enduring, a waitress named Mary watching over you, dispensing a bottomless cup of joe (= love).
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A baked potato near and dear
- If it's taste you want, reach for a moist and creamy Keuka Gold from Schuylkill County. You'll drop that Idaho spud like a hot . . .Well, the way that Keith Masser sees it, the Idaho Potato Commission has about convinced people that Idaho is the only place to get your potatoes from, even though its Russet Burbanks - grown in irrigated, sandy soils - tend toward a dryness and don't have anywhere near the flavor of your basic Schuylkill County spud.
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