What first had you interested in the culture of Spain?
I was trained as a Russian linguist (forgot almost of all it, since I used it only in military intelligence eavesdropping missions) at Monterey, California. In the infinite wisdom of the military, I was sent to Rota, Spain for the last two years of my four-year hitch. Upon my arrival, not long after daylight, our military plane banked near El Puerto de Santa María and I got my first glimpse of Spain: whitewashed buildings surrounded by palm trees in a sea of stubby vines surrounded by stark white soil, for the base at Rota lay near the Sherry vineyards between Jerez de la Frontera and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. I was filled with a sense that a real adventure was awaiting me below. I fell in love with Spain before I even landed.

When did you first realize your love for food and wine?
My grandparents had a very modest, plate-lunch and sandwich country restaurant in Southern Illinois, in what is now an epicenter of barbecue country (I was born in the town where World Champion Barbecuer Mike Mills has his 17th St. Bar & Grill mothership), so I grew up in a restaurant environment, but it was not until I reached Spain and began learn about the country's regional cuisines during my days of following the Spanish ferias that I really began to get a grasp on the great wider world of food. After spending eight years in Spain, I moved to New York (in the mid-1970s) and began selling top-end wines as a restaurant wine specialist, which meant I had lunch and dinner for a living in the best restaurants of New York. During that period, I began to learn to judge Spanish food on a world-class scale.

What is your favorite dish?
Because of the regional differences in Spain, singling out a "favorite" is difficult, but if I had to select a menu for the proverbial "last meal," it would include a selection of tapas from favorite spots such as Andalucía's Bar Bigote in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Ganbara in San Sebastián and Barcelona's Boquería market; gazpacho blanco (white almond gazpacho) from Andalucía; a selection of shellfish from Galicia in a salpicón de mariscos (shellfish in a vinaigrette with Spanish extra virgin olive oil, chopped peppers, onion and diced tomato); a small plate of primo steamed percebes (goose barnacles from Galicia's Costa da Mort); a small plate of jamón Ibérico; whole rodaballo (fresh wild turbot) grilled over a wood-fire as done at Elkano or Kaia in Getaria (Basque Country); some chuletillas de cordero (baby lamb chops) grilled over grape vine cuttings as done at Viña Pedrosa en Ribera del Duero; and de postre, for dessert, a crema catalana (the original crême brulée) with the caramelized crust just right and a bowl of fresh picota cherries from la Valle del Jerte in Extremadura.
The wines, Pol Roger Champagne Rosé, Galician Godello white from Pena das Donas (Ribeira Sacra), a dry Garnacha Rosado from Señorío de Sarría (Navarra); a Ribeira Sacra mencía-based red (13% alcohol or less); a old Viña Real Gran Reserva from one of the great years at Cune and López de Heredia Viñ a Bosconia 1947 (both La Rioja); and a MalvasÍa Dulce from Viñiatigo (Canary Islands) or a superb old Barsac from Château Climens with a small selection of Spanish cheeses (Torta de Casar, Los Beyos, Gamonedo). And for after-dinner, a copa of Cardenal Mendoza or Gran Duque de Alba Gran Reserva Brandy de Jerez; a great Calvados from DuPont; Domaine Boigneres Armagnac; or a snifter of Baines Pacharán (on the rocks).

What is your favorite vintage and varietal of vino?
López de Heredia Viña Bosconia 1947 may be the greatest red wine I have ever drunk, but right now I am madly enamorado with the wines of Ribeira Sacra, a remote, mountainous wine region in Galicia that well may be the most stunningly beautiful wine region in the world. The best whites, like Pena das Donas, are made with godello, a little known native grape that may be one of the five best white wine varieties in the world. Ribeira Sacra reds are primarily mencÍa-based, but field blends with other native grapes make some of these wines exotic and unique. Some of these wines are somewhat rustic, but part of that is from the unique flavors derived from the grapes which carry an inedible stamp of terroir (in Spain, terruño) in the graphite-like mineral flavors that come from the impossibly steep, terraced, slate vineyards on which they are grown.

What is it about Spanish food that influences your writing?
Spain's cocina de vanguardia modern cuisine, made world-famous by über chef Ferran Adría (I published the first article about him in an American magazine, Food Arts, in 1997), draws foodies from far-and-wide, but many of them discover the greatness of Spanish traditional cuisine, now wonderfully modernized (without losing its essence) in many cases. Although, I count many vanguardia chefs amongst my friends, the traditional cuisines of Spain are what attract me. There are 17 autonomous regions in Spanish, each comprised of from one-to-eight provinces. Each province and sometimes, areas within those provinces, offer unique dishes often found nowhere else. You can have gazpacho blanco in Málaga and gazpacho blanco with a different twist in Córdoba; superbly crisp fried fish in southern Spain and superbly grilled whole fish in the Basque Country; those baby lamb chops cooked over grapevine cuttings and whole quarters of succulent roast suckling lamb or pig in Castilla y León; eggs "broken" over a pile of fried potatoes on Damon Runyon-esque (Spanish style) Sunday nights at Casa Lucio in Madrid; platters of incredible shellfish in Galicia; a parade of excellent dishes at La Taberna del Gourmet in Alicante; thin rice paellas with wild rabbit and wild snails at Casa Elias in Xinorlet; and I could go on and on.
But, it is the Spanish sense of place that distinguishes each of these eating experiences. And usually it is not just the place (sometimes visually stunning, just as often plain and down-home) and ambience (lively, engaging, sometimes quite romantic), but the people who make eating in Spain so special. Usually making one of those classic Spanish pilgrimages (sometimes a hundred kilometer detour) to eat a special dish or dishes in a particular place means going back to see friends you have cultivated over many years.

And, therein lies the secret to what really influences my writing about Spanish food the most. It is the people (the owners, the chef, the waiters) and the dining companions I am with who make these experiences so memorable. In recent years, I have come to realize that great food-and-wine matches are really great food-wine-place-and-people matches and just like the greatest thing about any plate of food or bottle of wine, it is usually the people surrounding the dish or bottle that make them magical.

Have you always wanted to write?
I began writing about sports when I was in 8th grade. The curse is still with me.

Which aspect of Spanish culture do you think directly influences the dishes there?
Conviviality and a long history of financial deprivation amongst the lower classes which caused them to develop a taste for any number of dishes that are now highly prized by gourmets--that very thin-layered paella with wild rabbit and wild snails being one of them.

Spain is the size of Texas--that's if you don't measure verticality. Spain has some eight mountain range systems and many thousands of miles kilometers of convoluted coastline--both Atlantic and Mediterranean. This means that it can take quite a chunk of time to get from one place to another--and in the days before modern transportation--the next village could be a good day's travel. This separation and isolation caused Spain to develop four separate languages (and many more dialects), 17 different autonomous regions, 50 provinces, thousands of unique customs, and thousands upon thousands of regional dishes that are sometimes unique to a single village.

What is the worst meal you've ever had?
There have been countless ones in America including a cioppino on Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey California, a pile of over-cooked gizzards in a bar in Missouri and the green asparagus that I used to go down the railroad tracks and cut with my grandfather back in Southern Illinois and then bring back home so they could boil those freshly cut stalks into an inedible chartreuse mush.
The worst meal I ever had in Spain would take some thought. There used to be places that had four-course menus económicos that cost 15-50 cents!, and some of them were pretty grim, but the tapa that caught my attention the most was in a bar in Extremadura. When I asked, "Que hay de tapas?" the owner non-chalantly held up a hog jowl--a hog's face whisker's and all, that is--picked up a pair of shears, snipped off a few strips, threw them on la plancha, added some coarse salt and that was the tapa. I didn't order seconds.
And at a famous place in Sevilla, the specialty was testicles of fighting bull simmered in a testicle of fighting bull sauce and served with a mound of rice. I made it through one of the spongy spheres and decided that I had recorded the experience for posterity (deep-fried, battered, fighting bull's balls aren't bad) and decided not to pursue further gastronomic research into that particular dish.

What direction do you think the culinary world is going to go in the next few years?

Really fancy restaurant meals will be reserved for truly special occasions--birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, etc. --and business affairs where impressing someone may be important. Casual dining and small-plates restaurants have become so good and so laid-back in recent years that laying out plastic for heavy tabs seems way out of place in this economic environment. That doesn't mean that the great places with great chefs won't survive, it will just mean they will have to put in a lot more work and display a lot more creativity (that can also mean thinking how to prepare simpler, but still delicious dishes with less expensive ingredients), which will mean the restaurant still remains viable, but with less profits.
Wine, which has been disgracefully over-priced--both in stores and in restaurants, for the newbie wine-rich over the past decade-- is already dropping in price, like a rock in some categories. Wise restaurateurs will have to drop their insane pricing strategy. When I first came into the wine business in the mid-1970s, wines were marked up three times on the bottom end of the wine list (i.e., if a bottle cost the restaurateur $4, it was sold for $12), 2 1/2 times markup in the middle of the list (if a wine cost $8, it sold for $20), and only 2 times for higher end wines ($25 sold for $50). Now it seems three times markup across the board is the norm in many places and four times in some. I would think that making $10-$20 on a bottle of wine and getting second bottle sales (by adding many more wines with less than 14% alcohol) would be a good policy.

BITS (Butts In The Seats) is key in restaurants. This was the key behind those restaurant week menus that surfaced in the 1990s ($19.92, etc.)--and became permanent in some establishments. If the customers don't show up, the restaurant makes no profit. If they do come, they will find a way to spend money, therefore not making customers shun your establishment because of exorbitant pricing on things like wine will be key.