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.
Email Rick at richard.nichols@comcast.net
At a glance last week, the flutes on the luncheon tables at the National Constitution Center didn't hold much promise.
They were brimming with bubbly...
Rick Nichols finds entrepreneurs at work in the old Globe Dye Works at the edge of Frankford's postindustrial boneyard.
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BEVERAGESYe olde Bartram's Bitters
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Rick Nichols: From Bartram's Garden, a dig into history to re-create a 19th-century beverage.
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LOCAVOREDuck eggs: All they're quacked up to be
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A dispatch from Rick Nichols: Farmer Paul Gavzy describes his poultry project as something between an oversize hobby and a small business.
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LOCAVOREShane's candy store finally ready to reopen
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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.
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What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?
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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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