i ate pizza with kathleen purvis

Arguably Charlotte’s leading culinary expert, Kathleen Purvis has been covering Charlotte food as the food editor of The Charlotte Observer for over thirty years. A few weeks ago, I got the (very lucky!) chance to catch her over lunch for an interview in between her chasing stories (she told me at lunch she had a lead to follow up on that afternoon and couldn’t share any more information about it, and a few hours later broke the story about Bob Peters’ new project, Queen and Glass).

Hi from Iceland!!! AJ and I left Charlotte Friday for a ten day, country wide tour of the land of fire and ice. So I’m actually not here right now, I’m probably seeing a waterfall, or hiking on a glacier, or going whale watching, or eating fermented shark or something.

I had the honor of interviewing Charlotte food royalty, Kathleen Purvis, as part of a series of member profiles for the Piedmont Culinary Guild and wanted to share it with you! We talked about everything from her professional history and how she became a food writer, to Instagram, the growth of the Charlotte culinary scene and her favorite Charlotte restaurant (spoiler, she wouldn’t tell me). All photos by Tonya Russ Price, courtesy of Kathleen Purvis.

Kathleen Purvis is a storyteller.

“At heart, I am a storyteller. Food is a lens…a way to talk about the world, and everyone can relate to it,” she says as she carefully inspects the crust of her margarita pizza. After a few pokes and prods, she lifts a slice up to examine the crust on the bottom, takes a bite and then jots some notes in a small reporter’s notebook.

I’ve managed to catch her over lunch between chasing stories; I agreed to meet her for a working lunch in Dilworth so she could do research for a pizza story she’s working on. She’ll end up eating pizza for dinner tonight, lunch twice tomorrow and dinner again tomorrow night.

“There’s a certain element that I’ve always loved about the chase; I’m a puzzle nut and the chase is kind of like a puzzle trying to figure out how I can do this better.”

Purvis, the long-time Charlotte Observer Food Editor, started writing about food because nobody else wanted the job. Growing up, she knew she wanted to be a writer but she didn’t know there was a job that paid for that skill. At the age of 10, she learned that “newspapers would pay you to write.”

That’s all she needed to know, and by the time she was in high school, she was working as a newspaper “copy boy.” She worked her way up the ladder in a laundry list of jobs including hard news journalist. In 1985, she transferred to Charlotte to be The Observer’s night layout editor, where she would work on six editions every night.

“I oddly got my job in food writing when no one wanted to be a food writer. No one knew I was a writer and I was longing to go into writing; [it’s] where my heart was pulling me, ” Purvis says.

At the time, The Observer didn’t have much of a food section, and she thought there was a great beat in food that no one at the paper was exploring. “The food editor job [at The Observer] was empty and I went to them and said, ‘I want it,’ and they said, ‘take care of it.’” She started working in The Observer’s food section for six hours a week and in a few years, grew it to a full-time job.

Her focus was on recipes and cooking stories, rather than restaurant reviews. “I wrote about what to cook, where to cook, how to cook, why to cook and how to cook, ” says Purvis.

To tell a good story, she says, you have to find the context; you need to ask questions like “why?” and “how?” rather than just absorb the information that’s given to you. “I write about anything and everything in the world of food but always with an eye of ‘is that news?’ I try to get people stuff they can take away and use immediately.”

A few years ago, The Observer transitioned to a digital space, and with that transition, Purvis had to adapt to a Online audience. What she misses most with the transition is the storytelling; for content, it’s become who has the story first, not necessarily, who can tell it best. “If I don’t have it first, there’s no audience. It’s become hyper-competitive.”

However, even in the digital age, chefs in the Charlotte community see Purvis’ value and talents when it comes to storytelling through the lens of food. “Kathleen has watched the scene grow for 30 years. Her perspective is one of breadth and depth, which lends understanding and knowledge to what good food is.” says Chef Greg Collier, owner of The Yolk Cafe in Rock Hill.

“Her integrity when writing articles has shown in every piece I’ve read or been a part of…in an era of social media where everything is about first not best, Kathleen takes time to understand stories behind the people and vice versa.”

Purvis has been able to fill her storytelling void through her three cookbooks. “[My] cookbooks came to fruition as a total accident.”

A planned project focusing on funeral food of different ethnic cultures was interrupted with the shocking events of September 11, 2001, and in the aftermath, the concept was met with disappointment and rejection so she tabled the idea of cookbooks. “Why would I give myself to something that is so heartbreaking?”

Several years later, she attended an event with Elaine Maisner, the editor of UNC Press. They were sitting next to each other, “both being introverted in the back” of the event space, and “Elaine leaned over at told me she had an idea about cookbooks featuring one southern ingredient,” and asked Purvis if she wanted to participate.

“I’m from Georgia, so pecans was a no-brainer.”

Her second book in the Savor the South series was about bourbon. Not just making cocktails and drinks, but “cooking with bourbon and using it as an ingredient.”

Purvis’ third cookbook, Distilling the South, was released this Spring. “Elaine told me she ‘loved how much [I] love bourbon and how [I] communicate, so what if we did something else with alcohol.”

Distilling the South is a travel food book, featuring five different liquor trails covering eleven southern states.

Purvis researched the book for thirteen months by visiting fifty-four distilleries and talking to the people that own them and work in them. “It’s a visceral story about people,” she says.

Distilling the South includes not only the stories behind the distilleries, but ways to use the liquor, recipes, and other information about the towns and cities she visited. Distilling the South gives the reader a way “to go experience the south and learn something.”

When asked about the Charlotte food scene now compared to thirty years ago, Purvis says the local food movement has made it look like night and day.

When she first started as a food writer, she couldn’t publish certain recipes that came off the national wire because they featured ingredients “that we couldn’t get here in Charlotte.” Now, with Charlotte’s growth and more and more people moving to the city every day, “chefs feel like they can be more experimental” with both ingredients and techniques.

“The chef-owned restaurant is really coming into its own now,” and the story of Charlotte food is “becoming chef owned restaurants that are really expressions of this place,” paying homage Charlotte’s history, location, and local farmers and purveyors with “sophistication and a personal spin.”

Purvis says she sees this in several local restaurants where everything from the food, to the theme, to the décor, to what is written on the menu reflects an expression of who they are. While she won’t disclose her favorite Charlotte restaurant “it’s like asking me to pick my favorite child, ” she gives two examples.

She often takes out of town visitors to Haberdish in NoDa, because it tells a story through the menu and food inspired by the city’s history. When eating breakfast at Collier’s restaurant, The Yolk Cafe, you have to sit at these community tables made out of wooden doors featuring family photos under the glass, reflecting the gathering and community aspects of food.

Both literally and figuratively, “you have to sit there with other people…creating a community.”

What once was pizza is now just a few lone crumbs, and you can’t leave lunch with arguably Charlotte’s biggest culinary expert without asking, “Is Charlotte a food city?” Purvis chuckles and retorts, “What is a food city?”

“Do we need to be a place that people come to, to eat? We need things that are good for the people living here.” Purvis thinks, “we have a vibrant and viable food scene,” even if people don’t see Chalrotte as a culinary vacation destination quite yet.

“Put your head down and cook. Then the rest of the world will think we’re so fun they can’t resist us.”