FOOD WRITER Amanda Hesser surveys a plate of fried catfish on a bed of coconut rice at Le Zinc, a boisterous bistro in New York. A brown bob, held back by two black-and-white gingham barrettes, frames her small face. Her tiny figure is outfitted in a manner that suggests a young girl playing dress-up: black sweater, black skirt, black tights, plum-and-pink flats, and a string of purple beads.

Biting into a forkful of fish, Hesser, 30, overflows with a sort of Annie Hall–esque, wide-eyed delight. "I never realized catfish is so firm and meaty," she reveals. "I guess I’ve never had it before."

A food writer for the New York Times — and she’s never eaten catfish? That’s right. And with such earnest and candid observations, Hesser has added a new voice to today’s food world — a voice filled with palatable wonder, youthful marvel, and a Midwestern-like authenticity in what can often be a snarky field. Meet the woman who Jeffrey Steingarten, food writer for Vogue and author of The Man Who Ate Everything (Knopf, 1997) calls "one of the best — if not the best — young food writers."

These days, Hesser may be best known for her biweekly "Food Diary" in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Just under a year ago, she added the first-person column to her plate of reporting food-trend news for the Dining In/Dining Out section of the paper. The column — which has been likened to the Candace Bushnell New York Observer columns that formed the basis for the book and subsequent HBO series Sex and the City — chronicles the intersection of food with Hesser's relationships with family, friends, and fiancŽ, "Mr. Latte" (a/k/a New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend).

Hesser’s timing couldn’t be better. Once a niche genre, food writing has been winning increasing space in the lexicon of popular culture, as the Food Network beefs up its programming with wham-bam enthusiasm, and books like Patricia Volk’s Stuffed (Knopf, 2001) and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (Bloomsbury, 2000) fly off the shelves.

Now, thanks to her column’s visibility, Hesser’s been launched into the spotlight. First teased in the New York Observer last year, she’s since been profiled in W magazine, written up in Food & Wine, and taken down in the Hartford Courant. Most significantly, Hesser recently signed a book contract for a compilation of her columns, to be published in the spring of 2003 by W.W. Norton.

With a reach as wide as Emeril’s, sex appeal on par with that of TV-chef-cum-temptress Nigella Lawson, and a literary voice likened to M.F.K. Fisher's, Hesser — and her work — has stirred up some fierce reactions. Some call "Food Diary" disappointing compared to her meatier newspaper work. Others eagerly await each of Hesser’s dispatches on pet peeves, dinner-party imbroglios, and foodie anecdotes. But whatever the reaction, people are reading on. Somewhere in the midst of providing a beginner’s point of entry into the food world and giving old-time foodies more substantial informational nuggets, Amanda Hesser is touching a national nerve. Read it all as a sign that the young scribe is food writing’s Next Big Thing.

BORN IN Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and raised in a working-class family outside Scranton, Hesser has traveled quite a distance to her perch at the New York Times. But you could say she’s always been hungry for culinary information, dating back to a studied childhood interest in what her mother made for dinner. "My mother was a very good practical cook," Hesser explains. "She cooked seasonally. She baked her own bread and made her own cookies. She made her jams and jellies in the summer, and fruit preserves."

Hesser attended Waltham’s Bentley College, where she double-majored in economics and finance. "I came from a family with a very blue-collar mentality," she explains, between sips of water in the Times cafeteria. "You get a job that’s going to have all the sort of security of the American dream."

But when Hesser spent a summer and the first half of her junior year studying at the London School of Economics — and eating her way around Europe — thoughts of 401(k) plans and life insurance quickly lost ground to a burgeoning interest in food. Back at Bentley, she started exploring Boston’s culinary highs and lows. There were margaritas at the Border CafŽ, scorpion bowls at the Hong Kong, ice-cream cones at Herrell’s, pizza at Bertucci’s. The young gourmand saved her money for dinners she enjoyed alone at the East Coast Grill, Hamersley’s Bistro, the Blue Room, and Biba. "On Friday nights, when I was making plans with my friends, I was more interested in deciding where we would eat before we went to a party than the party itself."

A meal at the now-defunct Michela’s prompted Hesser to write a letter to the restaurant’s chef, Jody Adams. "I said, basically, ‘I’m interested in cooking; I’m interested in restaurant life; I know nothing about it. Can I come in and just observe or help out? I’ll do anything that you need done.’ "

Adams, now chef and co-owner of Rialto and Blu and author of In the Hands of a Chef (HarperCollins, 2002), distinctly remembers getting the "lovely" note. She immediately put Hesser to work plating desserts, peeling vegetables, running to the fridge for butter, and pulling pin bones from salmon. "You can tell a lot about a person by the way they respond to situations," notes Adams. "Amanda was fearless."

She was also eager. Interested in the growing artisanal-baking trend, Hesser penned a similar note to the owners of the Cambridge bakery Panini and soon began working there. On a whim, she signed up for a continuing-education course in French culinary history at Radcliffe, taking the last spot in what turned out to be a class filled with a star-studded cast of food writers, historians, and academics. "I showed up on the first night, and the professor, Barbara Wheaton, was sort of laying out the plans for the semester," Hesser remembers, "and she named all of these books that I had never heard of — ‘You’ve got to get this and that’ — and by the end of the night, I was like kind of freaking out, like, what did I get myself into?" But Hesser quickly made friends with her classmates, among them Sheryl Julian, food editor for the Boston Globe, and Corby Kummer, senior editor at the Atlantic Monthly and food columnist for Boston magazine. "She was sort of like our little mascot," recalls Julian.

It was the first time Hesser had entertained the idea of becoming a food writer. "Writing had an appeal to me because I liked to read it, but I didn’t imagine myself as a food writer because I didn’t know how to get there," she says. "By meeting Sheryl and Corby, it kind of opened that door — ahh, this is what they do, this is what their jobs are like."

After graduating from Bentley, Hesser applied for and received a coveted scholarship from philanthropic food organization Les Dames d’Escoffier. The few thousand dollars enabled her to travel, apprenticing for short stints in kitchens and bakeries across Europe. No job was too big, too heavy, or too daunting. One day, at a bakery on the Campo de’ Fiore in Rome, nationally recognized food writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins stumbled upon Hesser. "I was astonished to see this little bit of an American smacking huge sacks of flour around," Jenkins recalls bemusedly.

Meanwhile, Hesser had also applied to the ƒcole de Cuisine La Varenne in Burgundy. She was accepted and went on to study at the school’s Ch‰teau du FeØ, where she assisted cookbook author and culinary historian Anne Willan. After receiving her degree, Hesser stayed on to work for Willan for another year, keeping a journal and putting together notes for what would become her first book, A Cook and a Gardener (W.W. Norton, 1999). The cookbook, which won the award for Best Book in France by a Non-French Writer at the Versailles Cookbook Fair, intersperses recipes with the story of a grumpy, Old World, and ultimately endearing gardener at the Chateau du Fey.