Longtime TV Producer David Latt: Have Pen, Will travel (and Eat)!

By MICHAEL AUSHENKER | Contributing Writer

As a TV producer and writer in the 1980s and ’90s, David Latt racked up numerous credits on such shows as “Hill Street Blues,” “Twin Peaks” and “Get a Life!” What he could not have foreseen at the time is how his hobby since early childhood would blossom into a second (even third!) career as a food and travel writer in the 2000s.

The longtime Palisadian, who started his “Men Who Like to Cook” blog in 2007 and followed it up more recently with “Men Who Like to Travel,” recalled his mom’s epicurean passion.

“My mother thought cooking was a lot of fun. For her, it was not only the act of cooking, it was the shopping,” Latt recalled.

Latt’s progressive mother, who originated from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, started Latt cooking from scratch when he was 5.

That meant young David—growing up around West Los Angeles—helped her make Jewish delicacies such as cabbage briskets, gefilte fish and roast leg of lamb.

Latt’s palate expanded while attending UCLA, where his Japanese-American roommate introduced him to Westside’s Sawtelle district and Little Tokyo.

“I fell in love with Japanese food, Mexican food,” he said. “I really began to appreciate what’s so great about Los Angeles.”

A teaching gig at Rhode Island College in Providence forced him to resume cooking for himself.

“At the time, they didn’t have the food they have there today,” he said.

Home cuisine yielded unforeseen fringe benefits.

“If you’re single, women like guys to cook,” he said, grinning. “That was a great incentive to learn how to cook.”

MAKING HEADWAY (AND POUND CAKES) IN HOLLYWOOD

“Through a series of accidents, I ended up in television, back in Los Angeles,” Latt said, and it was here in L.A. that Latt moved to Pacific Palisades in the mid-1980s. With wife Michelle Satter, who runs Robert Redford’s Sundance film labs in Park City, Utah, Latt created a family and got involved in the social scene at his local synagogue, Kehillat Israel.

‘They created a [dinner group] made up of seven or nine families,” he remembered. “It was a great way to socialize and have the kids to hang out together. We held monthly potluck dinners.”

In addition to heaping Latt’s tasty entrées on their paper plates, the other parents heaped praise on Latt, so his wife encouraged him to write a cookbook. However, TV’s 16-hour workdays kept him busy.

“What kept me sane was that on the weekends, I would cook four to six hours a day,” he said.

“People think that producers are like little kings. The truth about producers, you’re actually working for everything else,” he added. “They are constantly troubleshooting and everything is about somebody else. Doesn’t matter if I’m hungry, doesn’t matter if I’m tired, doesn’t matter if I don’t want to eat what is being served.”

So his weekends became his respite from his day job.

“Cooking is fantastic because—I make this joke on my blog—a carrot never talked back to me,” Latt said.

Working on various TV pilots, “I started bringing food to the set,” he said. “People regard those who feed them more positively than those who do not,” he continued. “I would bring in a two-burner stove and make a duck soup with shitake mushrooms and spinach. People just really cheered up. I would make pound cakes, I would make chocolates.”

For Latt’s proposed cookbook, his agents told him how he needed an Internet presence, so he established his cooking blog.

However, Food Network was taking off.

“That depressed the food book industry,” Latt said. His cookbook “went nowhere.”

FROM FOOD BLOGGER TO TRAVEL WRITER

Just as his life as a producer began slowing down in the late 2000s, Latt’s robust Men Who Like to Cook blog began gaining a following.

“I just developed [as a cook],” he said. “I was going to farmer’s markets. I was increasingly realizing what I like about cooking is simplifying recipes.”

He found that while Santa Monica’s farmer’s market had more variety, the Palisades Farmer’s Market had more quality.

“Just as you’re going from spring to summer, the Palisades would have corn long before Santa Monica did. [Conversely, by summer’s end,] Santa Monica would have figs and the Palisades wouldn’t,” he said.

By 2011, Latt wrote columns for Zester Daily. Having befriended New York Times writer Mark Bittman and “CBS This Morning” travel guy Peter Greenberg, Latt began contributing to Bittman’s New York Times blog and petergreenberg.com, respectively. He had also launched his Men Who Like to Travel blog.

Latt’s first big travel assignment was to explore the French Sofitel hotel chain in Paris and London, where he indulged in ‘food porn.’

“Long before it was popular to photograph your food, I would be doing that,” said Latt. He recalled one instance where he was sitting among some 30 journalists at the Heathrow Sofitel at the end of a runway at Terminal 5 at a breakfast and tea ceremony: “I pull out my camera sheepishly” then turned to find that all 30 people had their cameras out, too.

“I thought to myself, ‘Oh, my God! I’m with my people!’”

On that trip, Latt befriended his New York Daily News editor. He also writes for Luxury Travel magazine and an in-room hotel quarterly distributed at the Montage.

While on a trip to Morocco, he found himself covering cooking classes in the High Atlas Mountains where he took a backroom seat in “a woman’s kitchen, peeling potatoes, pulling the guts out of a chicken.”

In the Basque region of Northern Spain, Latt discovered how “the food is completely different. You’d have tapas—that’s very Southern Spain. In the Basque Pintxos, tapas are always on little pieces of bread.”

Earlier this year in March, he traveled to South Wales and the Netherlands for the Huffington Post, inspiring about a dozen articles and hundreds of photographs. Over the summer, Latt toured the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York, starting in Rochester and then heading south to Ithaca and Elmira and north to Syracuse.

“The trip was about discovering the area but also to visit orchards,” he said of this “very American, very beautiful” region, where he sampled some of the best varieties of brandy, vodka and gin made from fermented apples.

The trip informed a Daily News piece themed “15 Great Reasons to Go to the Finger Lakes.”

For Luxury Travel, Latt spent time in five-star hotels in Switzerland and explored the resorts and cooking classes of Costa Rica. Just this month, Latt ventured back to Monterey.

A RETURN TO CUBA—16 YEARS LATER

In December, Latt plans to return to Havana.

He originally visited Cuba with his wife in 1999. At the time, friends warned him how bad the food was, as restaurants there operated under a Communist-run nationalized food industry.

“It was horrifying,” Latt recalled. “I bought crackers and sardines.”

Having heard “the food has gotten better,” he is eager to verify.

Latt travels 10 times a year, usually solo, although Satter did accompany him to Costa Rica. All this and Latt still tackles movie and TV scripts.

However, unlike writing screenplays, which can take years to reach the screen (if at all), Latt enjoys “the immediacy” of journalism. Despite flexing a different set of writing muscles, he does see parallels.

“I’m telling stories,” he said. “I’m trying to create a visual specific so you can see it or almost taste it, like in a script, putting you into a narrative.”