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After 7 Years, Westword Food Writer Shows His Face

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Jul 3, 2009 11:07 am US/Mountain

After 7 Years, Westword Food Writer Shows His Face

Jason Sheehan Goes On TV To Promote 'Cooking Dirty'

DENVER (CBS4) ― If you're a Denver foodie you know Jason Sheehan. Not personally, but you know his writing.

Sheehan joined Westword as their restaurant critic at about the same time I started here as the Web site manager at CBS4. I had actually seen the posting in Westword that the weekly newspaper was looking for a food writer and flirted with the idea of sending in some writing samples.

Food writing wasn't something I had much experience with but I was thinking it might be a fun thing to get into, particularly after a visit to a Wahoo Fish Taco that was memorable for all the wrong reasons (a large beetle crawled out of the lettuce in my wife's appetizer and the manager nearly had a nervous breakdown).

I realized after reading a few of Sheehan's first columns that when it comes to food writing, experience is what counts. And with a dining scene that's as hot as Denver's, a dining critic needs to bring his or her A game all the time. Sheehan does, and I've loved reading his reviews ever since.

And now, 7 years later, I and every other fan knows what he looks like. Sheehan came by CBS4's studio on Friday to promote his memoir, which has his face on the inside cover.

"Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen" is his story of his past as a working cook at a variety of restaurants across the country.

"I was a sort of a mercenary chef," Sheehan said. "The title 'Cooking Dirty' is actually cook slang from back in upstate New York. If you were between jobs, if you were waiting for a new kitchen to open and you were just taking a job for the money. You were just working at a diner or a roadhouse or at a bar or something you were "cooking dirty" until your real job picked up."

Sheehan says he did 15 years essentially doing just that, and the wild and wooly aspect of that lifestyle is something he misses dearly.

"It was this immersion into this different world that had its own sort of cant and its own language and that was one of the things I loved the most," he said. "And thank God I get to write about it every week now for Westword."

In addition to going through publicity efforts to promote the book, Sheehan now faces a new challenge -- being a restaurant reviewer who any restaurant manager in the city will be able to identify if they simply type Jason Sheehan in Google.

"It's so cool to see you because you've had a concealed identity until now," said CBS4 anchor Brooke Wagner, who then asked Sheehan how it feels to be going in front of the camera.

"It's a very strange experience," Sheehan said.

One of the special aspects of Sheehan's reviews up until this point has been his ability to describe the true vibe of an eating establishment from the perspective of an average joe, albeit a Joe who knows his cooking chops. It will be interesting to see how his weekly reviews change moving forward.

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