California cuisine, Italian chic, and artful vegetarian cookery were just the beginning: cookbooks for authentic Mexican fare and Middle Eastern food appeared; sushi entered the lexicon, as did Szechuan. Theatrical Japanese steak houses opened and Americans were mesmerized by the fireworks of tapas, pad Thai, and bi bim bap. In 1976, a new restaurant atop the World Trade Center included an international café that served global hors d’ouevres such as sashimi. The monopoly of French inspiration was over. The sense of liberation from la veritable cuisine Française was picked up by M.F.K. Fisher, who had returned home to California to write her memoir, and by her friend, Julia Child. Even though her television program was called The French Chef, Child was compelled to say that “I remain very American indeed.” In fact, Child was on her way to becoming a cultural icon: in 1978, Saturday Night Live’s Dan Ackroyd spoofed her as The French Chef, fashioning a tourniquet from a chicken bone.
The term “foodie” was first used in print in 1980 by New Yorker magazine’s Gael Greene. That same year, the first Whole Foods Market opened in Austin, Texas. In the Eighties, restaurants became ateliers, bistrots, and trattorias, like New York’s Mezzaluna, which opened in 1984 serving wood-fired pizzas with speck, broccoli rabe, and burrata. When James Beard died in January, 1985, his townhouse became the home of the James Beard Foundation. From 1985 to 1995 foodie culture matured into a permanent part of American life. Cooking was not just a household chore; it could be a fulfilling cultural pastime.
The trajectory of the American foodie in the latter half of the 1990s, however, began to split in two. The movement that began with the affluent bon vivants Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher was being democratized. In 1993, Condé Nast bought Bon Appétit, the less literary cousin of Gourmet magazine, and the Food Network launched that same year. If the movement had previously been shot through with a dose of Gallic hauteur, by the mid-nineties, everyone could throw some garlic in hot-but-not-smoking olive oil and start cooking. In 1996, viewers of the Cooking Channel were kicking it up a notch with The Essence of Emeril.
Perhaps in response to the broadening appeal, in 1997, the New York Times replaced the unpretentious Molly O’Neill with polarizing food thinker, Amanda Hesser, who treated her readers to pieces on gastro-chemist Ferran Adrià and precious postmodern recipes for den miso, piadina, rizogalo, and fufu.