I first met Adam Josephs in San Francisco during the summer of 2013, and I said then—and stand by it now—that he was the most cosmopolitan man I’d ever known. In my book Delusions of Grandeur, I wrote that Adam had visited more countries than most people can find on a map, and managed to make it all look not just easy, but inevitable.
Adam Josephs often engages with top chefs, in this case Buddha Lo, the Chef-Owner of Huso and two-time Top Chef winner.
He accompanied me on my cross-country move when I left California for his native New York, narrating the entire trip like a bespoke audio tour from the passenger seat. Somewhere outside Denver, I asked, “When you live in New York, where do you go for weekend trips?” He barely looked up. “I dunno,” he said. “Paris.”
That’s Adam. Unflappable, fully informed, and somehow always already packed. A theater aficionado who can see the lights of Times Square from his own terrace, he’s worked both sides of the curtain—as a producer, a critic, and once, I think, as someone who talked a choreographer out of a meltdown mid-tech rehearsal.
He’s just as exacting about what’s on your plate. I once watched him politely correct a Michelin-starred waiter mid-sentence—gracefully, almost surgically—and then tip 25 percent anyway. That’s Adam: encyclopedic, discerning, compassionate, and never not generous.
As Out in STL’s Editor-at-Large for Culture, Cuisine & Curtain Calls, Adam brings that same level of authority, curiosity, and low-key fabulousness to everything beyond the neighborhood—Broadway premieres, queer food festivals, under-the-radar cities, and the kinds of experiences that make you want to pack a bag. His beat is the exquisite, the provocative, and the just-plain-worth-it—for St. Louis readers who still believe in things worth leaving town for.
