Road Food Fantasies

BEFORE I LEARNED TO LOVE RESTAURANTS, I LEARNED to love reading about them. My mom, a faithful Bon Appétit subscriber, meticulously kept a multiyear archive of back issues on a shelf in a closet near our kitchen. Every so often, we would go through them together, cutting out recipes to save on index cards before tossing the old magazines.

While doing that, I discovered RSVP, a regular column where readers would write in requesting recipes for favorite dishes at restaurants they’d visited. I can remember indexing the most delicious-sounding ones in my head, creating a mental atlas of places I dreamed of visiting someday. Soon interest grew into a fixation.