For 15 years, Rick Nichols was the food columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, writing by rough count close to 1,5000 short essays, several of which are anthologized in Best Food Writing, the annual collection. He is a Philadelphia native, who moved to New England, and later – in college – to Chapel Hill, N.C., where he developed a fondness for Southern cuisine. Rick was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and has led tours of ethnic culinary enclaves in the city for First Person Arts, a local non-profit. He’s a reader at the Rosenbach Museum’s annual Bloom’s Day celebration of Joyce’s Ulysses, and each December plays a mean (in both senses of the word) Ebenezer Scrooge in Narberth’s Dickens Festival. No longer fulltime at The Inquirer, he teaches a writing course at the University of Pennsylvania and periodically hosts classes at COOK while sipping on his signature Negroni cocktail. Recently, the Reading Terminal Market unveiled the finest tribute Rick could wish for – a new public meeting space called The Rick Nichols Room.