Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Dish.com
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

One of the stressful things about living in New York and being a contributing editor at GOURMET is that I get asked several times a week to recommend places for visitors to eat. One of the realities of being someone who travels a lot, has a wife who travels a lot, and is the parent of 21-month-old twins, is that I rarely eat out in New York these days. I never know what to say.

Bloggers to the rescue! The NYT profiles the hyper-competitive, hyper-gossipy New York food bloggie scene. Some highlights:

THERE are almost as many new ways to read about the restaurant world as there are blogs. Grub Street (nymag.com/daily/food), New York magazine’s food blog started in August last year and written mostly by Josh Ozersky, 39, and Daniel Maurer, 28, has a regular “Restroom Report.”

Zach Brooks, author of Midtown Lunch, chronicles the comings and goings of sidewalk carts and restaurant traffic between 32nd Street and Central Park the same way paparazzi follow every step of Angelina Jolie.

Eater has a recurring feature called “Brunibetting” that sets odds on how many stars Frank Bruni, the restaurant critic of The New York Times (who has his own Times-sanctioned blog, Diner’s Journal will bestow in his reviews. Last Tuesday, the odds were set on Gordon Ramsay at the London: Zero Stars: 9 to 1; One Star: 5 to 1; Two Stars, 3 to 1; Three Stars: 6 to 1; and Four Stars: 1,100 to 1. On Wednesday, Mr. Bruni’s review appeared, awarding the restaurant two stars.

Clever features are nice. But being first with news about openings and instant judgments about dinner is more important.

“I’m just a dude with a ridiculously opinionated stance on all things food,” said a 36-year-old blogger who calls himself Augie. He has a day job at a Wall Street firm that, he said, might not appreciate the time he devotes to his blog, so he requested anonymity. His site, Augieland augieland.blogs.com), made a splash after he ate at the Japanese restaurant Morimoto in Chelsea on 10 consecutive nights and filed a detailed review.

Elsewhere, the piece talks about:

Restaurant Girl is the pseudonym of Danyelle Freeman, 32, a former actress who has been breaking restaurant news and filing reviews on her blog, www.restaurantgirl.com, since March 2006. By last Sunday, three days after her meal, an 829-word review noting that “the saga of E. U. continues” and including snapshots of the food and a criticism that the quail was so undercooked “it practically walked over to the table on its own,” was posted on the Web site.

Ms. Freeman had beaten to publication a rival blog, Eater, whose scribes had also been at the restaurant that night, and which on Monday reported itself satisfied with Mr. Nawab’s hamburger, noting that if E. U. survives, it will be “an underdog story for the ages.”

I, of course, don't have time to read them. But if you pick up any good tips, or if you discover a new place in town I can recommend to friends who ask me, pass them along! It's nice to live vicariously.

Labels: Food

Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM
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