Blame calzones for ending the tenure of this magazine’s first-ever dining editor. To hit a deadline, David Bauer consumed eight of the Italian turnovers within a few days, and the ricotta cheese did him in. In truth, Bauer never set out to cover food. In 1974, he was a long-haired and bearded Dartmouth grad looking for a job in journalism because, he says, “I couldn’t think of anything else to be.”
“The first person you’re going to hire is not going to be that hippie, right?” said D Magazine’s founding publisher, Wick Allison, after editor Jim Atkinson brought Bauer on board. Some months later, when Allison announced that someone would need to build a dining directory modeled after the one at Philadelphia Magazine, Bauer volunteered.
“Except for the fact that I liked to eat, I had no credentials, no expertise,” Bauer says today.
His mini-reviews gave Dallas its first taste of dining criticism: “An old Market St. warehouse brought back to life and loaded with antiques. … It’s possible the spaghetti is also antique,” he wrote in the magazine’s first issue. Word got around among the city’s restaurateurs to watch out for “a guy who looks just like Jesus.”
Inexperience aside, Bauer did have an ace up his sleeve. His girlfriend at the time was Nancy Nichols. Longtime readers will recognize the name, as Nichols was D Magazine’s dining critic from 1996 to 2015. But back in the 1970s, she was not a writer at all. Nichols had worked the line at a buzzy Austin restaurant called MarCo’s and then served as a chef and waitress at La Cave in Dallas, which she claims was Dallas’ first authentic wine bar. “But The Grape fights me on that every time,” she says. So while Bauer could write, Nichols knew food and often joined him on dining expeditions.