Sitting in the dining room of Four Kings in San Francisco’s Chinatown last May, watching the chefs at the wok station, Eleanore Park dug into her chili crisp pig head and prepared to take notes.
Twelve years earlier, she used to make a pig’s head dish at Bar Agricole, which had operated just two miles from where she now sat.
For Ms. Park, the distance felt greater. In that 12 years she had transitioned from a line cook in restaurant kitchens to a journalist in newsrooms, and, eventually, into her current role, as an audience editor on the New York Times Cooking and Food team.
The journey had taken her from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York and back. She reviewed Four Kings last year as part of The Times’s guides to America’s best restaurants.
“It’s just been a really weird loop-de-loop journey,” Ms. Park said in an interview.
Ms. Park grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, immersed in the food world. Even as young as 12, she’d help her mother, who owned a Japanese restaurant, by folding napkins, grabbing faxed orders and helping to prepare miso soup.
During high school and college, she kept a foot in the food world, working at a pub, a diner and some cafes. In her 20s, she landed a position in the kitchen at Zuni Café, a San Francisco institution known for its roast chicken, Caesar salad and formidable chef, Judy Rodgers.
Ms. Park started at the garde-manger station, where she was responsible for making the salad. It was, she said, like “getting thrown into the deep end immediately.”
She worked her way through other vaunted kitchens, including Mission Chinese Food and Bar Agricole, where she and her husband met while working as line cooks. Then, in 2013, while cooking at the newly opened State Bird Provisions, Ms. Park took a look ahead.
“That’s when I started thinking about journalism,” she said.
She had written for a music blog, even traveled with a band on a tour bus from the Bonnaroo festival up the Eastern Seaboard, and had heard about a fellow restaurant worker who had started working for Bon Appétit magazine. She decided to make the leap and moved to New York, where she worked catering gigs while writing articles and developing recipes for Vice Munchies, Saveur, Bon Appétit and Lucky Peach.
In 2017, Ms. Park became an assistant editor at The Wall Street Journal. Later, she became one of the newsroom’s two editors for search engine optimization, an essential field in digital newsrooms. S.E.O. editors help inform their colleagues’ publishing decisions, ensuring that readers can find articles on Google and other search platforms. (She also wrote a recipe column called Pro-Moves.)
The work was fast-paced and intense, especially once the coronavirus pandemic hit. But Ms. Park found that the scrappiness and resourcefulness she had gained in restaurant kitchens was helpful in newsrooms, too.
Cooking and journalism both require quick problem solving. Ms. Park said The Journal didn’t have a test kitchen at the time, and sometimes she found herself improvising photo shoots in the office kitchenette.
In 2021, she saw that New York Times Cooking was looking for an S.E.O. editor. She said she had been surprised by the way the job description “mirrored my weird mosaic of experiences.” She joined The Times’s Cooking and Food team that summer.
Now, in her expanded role as an audience editor, she helps plan editorial strategy, steers long-term projects, works to build The Times’s digital readership and occasionally reports articles. One minute, she said, she might be “talking to engineers or a product manager about the requirements of what a certain page needs to look like,” but then she’s back to “brainstorming ideas for Thanksgiving, or summer grilling.”
A conversation with friends, who had started keeping a Narcan kit in the bar they owned in San Francisco, provided the idea for an article she wrote with Priya Krishna about how bars and restaurants were preparing their staffs to reverse opioid overdoses.
“Just still keeping in touch with people or following people on social media who still work in the restaurant industry is maybe 80 percent of what informs my ideas,” she said.
In 2023, with Brian Gallagher, her colleague on the Food desk, Ms. Park helped launch The Times’s local restaurant guides, which spotlight the best places to eat in cities around the country, including Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
She had been thinking about the service journalism that the Food desk could offer, “with reporters on the ground all over the country,” and pitched the idea of the restaurant guides as a way to expand food coverage.
When she is eating in a restaurant Ms. Park is thinking about the line cook, who may have shucked dozens of oysters that day before the restaurant even opened, as she had at State Bird Provisions. She is thinking about the person working the garde-manger station, as she had at Zuni Café, who might be handling half the dishes on the menu.
She understands all the hustle it takes to put out the plate she’s reviewing. Or simply enjoying.
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