Splitting checks in Davis Square (photo: Dan4th/Flickr)

One of WBUR’s producers, Karen Given of Only A Game, is also a food blogger. She’s taking a course with BU’s Gastronomy program called “Food Writing for Print Media,” which led her to interview Ike DeLorenzo of the Boston Globe.

Ike regularly contributes to the Globe’s “Cheap Eats” column. Here’s the story on how he got started.

Karen Given
OnceUponAKaren

With tousled brown hair, a slight build, and pleasingly geeky glasses, Ike DeLorenzo looks like he’d be more at home in front of a computer monitor in Silicon Valley than in the kitchens of Boston’s most interesting restaurants. And, until recently, that’s exactly where you would have found him.

But, in 2009, after 12 years living in San Francisco and working as an executive at high tech companies, DeLorenzo was ready for a change. That change took him back to where he came from…the Northeast and the world of food.

DeLorenzo still has a toe dipped in the high tech waters of software consulting, but his main passion is writing about food and culture for publications such as the Boston Globe, the Atlantic and his own The Ideas Section blog.

“Food just cuts to the core of what people are doing with their lives,” DeLorenzo recently told a class of food writing students. “If there’s food involved, there’s going to be something interesting to write about.”

Born to an Italian father and an Italian American mother, DeLorenzo says he “grew up with food” in a small town in New York’s Saratoga county. While studying at MIT, he was the only overnight cook on duty at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Cambridge. But, when he finished school, DeLorenzo says the experience of growing up “not rich” led him to look for the biggest possible paycheck.

He found what he was looking for in the high tech world of Northern California, but his career choice didn’t allow him the time to enjoy his success. In between long hours in front of a computer, DeLorenzo read San Francisco’s “Cheap Eats” column and harbored a dream.

“It seemed like the greatest thing ever to write about,” he said.

So, when DeLorenzo moved back to the Boston area, where his partner was employed, he decided to make a change. “I told my parents, ‘I want to do writing. I want to do food writing,’” DeLorenzo said. “They were so supportive, so they bought me Best Food Writing 2009.”

Just two years later, to the “astonishment” of his parents, DeLorenzo’s Boston Globe story on questionable business practices at Yelp and other online review sites was featured in Best Food Writing 2011.

That same article inspired a backlash of anger from Yelp supporters online, but DeLorenzo has found that even his most benign stories have unexpected consequences. Early on, he reviewed coffee and low-end espresso machines for the Globe. He found one brand of coffee to be consistently better than the rest. It might have been a discovery he would have liked to keep to himself.

“The entire North American supply of this coffee sold out,” DeLorenzo remembers. “So I could not have that coffee for six months as a result of writing that article.”

Despite these minor setbacks, DeLorenzo is sticking with his new career choice. It might not be as lucrative as software engineering, but as one of the regular contributors to the Boston Globe‘s “Cheap Eats” column, at least DeLorenzo will always know where to find a good meal on a budget.