Rick Nichols

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

Bartram´s Bitters, made by Philadelphia Distilling from a formula found at the garden.

BEVERAGES

Ye olde Bartram's Bitters

By Rick Nichols

Posted 05/23/2012

Rick Nichols: From Bartram's Garden, a dig into history to re-create a 19th-century beverage.

Geese guard the ducks at Paul Gavzy´s place.

LOCAVORE

Duck eggs: All they're quacked up to be

By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

Posted 03/06/2012

A dispatch from Rick Nichols: Farmer Paul Gavzy describes his poultry project as something between an oversize hobby and a small business.

LOCAVORE Shane's candy store finally ready to reopen - 11/16/2011: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

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.
What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? - 09/14/2011: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

Rick Nichols: An exhibit at the National Archives describes that in the fight for pure food, some government regulation was easy to swallow.
Have his steak and eat it, too - 08/26/2011: "This is America," Joey Vento's sign said. But was his challenge to immigrants in the true spirit of America?

By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

Rick Nichols on Joey Vento: Like language and food, politics and food are intimately bound up.
A calendar for the ages - 12/31/2010: With its precise illustrations from the 1800s Album Benary, it deserves more than a year.

By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

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.
On the Side: Ripening too early for ancient rhythms - 05/01/2008: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

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.
On the Side Can the Italian Market be saved? - 11/12/2008: Its very roots - humble, cut-rate curbside sustenance - could be the salvation of a revitalized Ninth Street Market.

By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

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.
Where’s the beef? Still at Nick’s - 07/28/2009: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Food Columnist

On the resolutely prosaic, two-story corner of 20th and Jackson in South Philadelphia, one encounters Nick's Roast Beef (est. 1938) ...
Hoagies the way they’re supposed to be - 07/28/2009: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Food Columnist

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.
'This Is My Cheesesteak' documentary debuts - 04/19/2007: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

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.
Grand tradition in a modest tea room - 07/13/2007: By Rick Nichols, Inquirer Columnist

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.