CHOW: Hungry Mag

A few months ago, I was thinking - Why not put together a team-managed blog encompassing restaurant reviews as well as product profiles and short essays about interesting food experiences for the hardcore chowhound, all of it wittily and snarkily written?

Apparently, I wasn't the only one.

They've got that shit DOWN, yo. Check the noise from their introduction -

We are an online magazine covering all things tasty. We are not foodies. At least not in the elitist sense. We know the house salad at Olive Garden is just prepackaged circles of red onion, bits of frozen iceberg lettuce spit out from a commercial food shredder, tasteless black olives from a petri dish that have never even seen an olive branch, big fat garlicky salty croutons from the box, pepperoncinis cross bred to remove any sense of real spiciness so as not to offend “families”, all tossed with a sweet italian vinaigrette, and if you are lucky, the hapless waiter or waitress will offer a fresh crack of pepper from the spicemill.

That being said, here is our dirty secret: We love the house salad at Olive Garden!

Something about throwing all these commercialized and overfarmed ingredients together yields something tasty, something we think about occasionally when we haven’t been near an Olive Garden in years.

On the other hand, we do shop regularly at farmer's markets. We have spent hundreds of dollars on artisanal balsamic vinaigrette. We have been to the French Laundry, in fact, we once scheduled a whole vacation around reservations to the hallowed restaurant.

Yet, we know that people have guilty pleasures like the Olive Garden salad, or God forbid, the Big Mac. We do not hate those people, and in fact we are, at times, those people.

We don’t expect to have regular Coke tastings, or Olive Garden reviews, but there will be room for some fun. If it’s bad, it’s bad, and if someone genuinely likes it or thinks there may be merit, lets talk about it, not write it off due to snobbery and politics.

Above all though, we do intend to tell stories of the corner taquerias, rib shacks, and exceptional neighborhood joints. We will ignore celebrity for celebrity’s sake, dig deep into the history of food, look for artisanal, or frankly, folksy backwoods producers of the finest ingredients. We will look at all kinds of ethnic cuisine or even the best ways to prepare roadkill. We hope to do this with a smart, focused, and occasionally irreverent voice.

Much love to Secret Squirrel for the tip.