FoodieBuddha.com

Celebrity chef/TV personality Andrew Zimmern just wrapped up his IAmA over on Reddit.  For those of you with better things to do than yours truly, you may not know what that means.  Here’s the deal:

Reddit.com is a heavily trafficked website mostly reserved for sharing videos, pictures, internet memes, and so forth.  The community occasionally dabbles in political movements and other things of ideological importance.  Reddit consists of sub-reddits that are like hyper-focused forums for a specific topic.  One of the coolest sub-reddits is the IAmA reddit.  It’s an opportunity for a person to say “I Am A ______, ask me questions.”

Many times these are just everyday folks interested in talking about a whole bunch of stuff.  However, notable and famous people do them from time to time.  A few politicians have braved the waters, comedian Louis CK did one recently, and now Andrew Zimmern has gotten in on the fun.

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When discussions of deconstructed food and molecular gastronomy occur, rarely do concepts like sustainability come to mind.  People (like me), who eat food from the admittedly quirky chefs that make these whacky concoctions, are almost always focused on the hedonistic experience of this type of consumption.  This is obviously not lost on Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche, who serve as the executive chef and the executive pastry chef of Moto Restaurant in Chicago respectively {Homaro is on the right}.

Moto is one of the Windy City’s most notable Modern American restaurants.  At this internationally acclaimed establishment, Cantu and his team drop some mad scientist methods to produce food that’s been torn down and built back up in ways most people could never execute (let alone imagine).  If it wasn’t previously obvious that guy’s like Roche and Cantu are concerned with the food system beyond how they can use it to blow your mind as if you’re a character in Inception, it should be obvious now.

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Ladies and gentlefolks, foodies of all ages, I share with you some work from Snack To The Future:

If the samples above haven’t led on – the designer behind S2TF takes movie posters and gives them a good working over with some foodie love.  It’s not updated frequently, but when it is … it’s pretty awesome.

I actually have a non-food tumblr myself; but, Snack To The Future is just one of several food tumblers you should check out (along with IntoNoRes+, FuckYouYelper, ThePriceHike, and FancyFastFood amongst the many fabulous ones).

Cheers y’all!

image courtesy of FancyFastFood.com

McDonald’s decision to bring back the McRib has absolutely inundated food news over the past few days.  Even mainstream media lamed things up with their coverage and there has been a surge of new “make your own McRib” posts going up.  So why did I jump on the band wagon? B/c the McRib is just another fantastic opportunity for me to direct y’all to Fancy Fast Food, a website I’ve mentioned before.

With all the brouhaha over the re-launch of this “cult classic,” it’s nice to find a somewhat unique twist on the story.  Basically, Fancy Fast Food is a website (and now a cookbook that you can buy on amazon) dedicated to remixing your favorite fast food dishes.  Erik Trinidad takes what was once homely and depressing and re-engineers it into something beautiful.  In the case of the McRib (pictured above with a few other Chez Mac classics), FFF has put together a Hawaiian Thanksgiving feast.  Though I have yet to try the recipe, I would recommend replacing the bottled water with a more “natural” option.  Other than that, it looks good to me!  With all the McRib obsession, who says we’re in a health conscious era?

I was recently poking around the web when, for no reason in particular, I ended up on the website for Elmyr, a Tex-Mex cantina in Little Five Points.  Even if you’ve never set foot inside of Elmyr, its address in Atlanta’s definitive alternative neighborhood should tell you something.  For those a bit less traveled, L5P is a ruffian’s wet dream.  While I don’t find the neighborhood particularly unsafe, it is a place where the tattooed, the tie-dyed, and the street performer come together to form a homogeneous mixed pot, defined as “one” in much the same way you’d consider a small bowl of potpourri.

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Dear 10 Degrees South,

As a highly-trained and well-versed internet technologist, I take great interest in any restaurant’s web presence.  Though it is an oft abused topic – great website development, as with any skilled form of labor, is in short order.  As many will lament, the restaurant and food industry is a wasteland of digital vomit.  In that respect, I must commend you on the recent changes to your website; however, I must now ask that you change it back to the way it was.

Again, let me be clear.  Your new website layout, design, and code structure is vastly superior to what once was.  Unfortunately, the site still suffers from major usability issues, rendering problems, and so forth.  Although, even if it was a perfect example of “best practices,” I would still be writing you this letter.

Why you ask? Because I visited the previous version of your website far more often than I will this one.  The number of websites who can reasonably justify the use of music, especially music that automatically starts upon a visitor’s arrival to said site, is beyond slim and barely more than none.  Yours is and was no exception.  However, I found myself repeatedly returning to your old site simply because of the included accompaniment of ‘Forgot About Dre’  rendered as one of the silkiest examples of muzak the world has ever seen.  I shit you not – it truly was awesome!

That there was no logical or reasonable purpose for that song to be the audio file of choice simply added to the charm.  Sure, I often visited with the intent to coax out my inner Nelson Muntz, point at you and laugh at your plight isn’t really the point.  At least I was there.  Sure, your inane web developer who agreed to or perhaps suggested that you include some muzak should be flogged for his transgressions, but again … I was there.  Of course, I repeatedly shamed you publicly for the decision … but at least I was driving traffic to you.

Now, that is all done and gone.  Instead of being a noticeable piece of what not to do with a high degree of “entertainment value,” your website sits as a modicum of “slightly better than not horrible” web development and design.  You went from being a big fish in a big pond to being a small speck in a river of constantly moving waste.

Whatever you believe to be the tone and intent of this letter, I can assure you this is a most honest plea.  I want that turd of a website back because it brought with it this awful clash of cultural themes (Elevator Music, Hip-Hop Culture, and South African cuisine) and a pleasantly humorous amount of shock value.  And though I will even go a step further and assume that you did not have license for said song – continue to break all the rules and put it back in action!!!!!

Okay, maybe I wouldn’t be making this request if you happened to have a stellar example of competent web work … but I’d bet I’d still be less inclined to come look at your site on a semi-regular basis.  And in the world of the web, it’s all about the eyeballs baby!

Yours in food,
Foodie Buddha

Now this is one hell of a great idea!  RoamingHunger.com is a site dedicated to those lovely little food trucks we’ve heard so much about.

While these little wandering snack shacks are noticeably absent from Atlanta’s dining scene (since the demise of Via Elisa), this is a great site for the foodie on you. [sic ]  Roaming Hunger is a glorified twitter aggregator that tracks the daily location of roughly 200 trucks.  It comes complete with user ratings and little tidbits about each truck.

Food trucks are a trend that has grown from underground “coolness” into on the cusp of being overdone.  I’m sure it will definitely hit here sometime … but for now, we have Ketel One vodka’s alcohol-free truck on the loose.  Top Chef’s Ilan Hall is behind the wheel on that.  Meanwhile, Taco Bell got busy, and Ingrid Hoffmann (of the Food Network) is doing it up Miami style.

[thanks FC]

It’s been roughly a year since I last mentioned Foodzie.com.  In that time, the site has grown the point where it is now capable of making headlines beyond our little food community.  The site, which is tagged as an online specialty shop for food, just made a big splash by hiring Adam Sah.  The name won’t mean a lot to many around these parts, but this is an interesting hire.  Sah, who has been enlisted as the VP of Engineering, cut his teeth working for internet behemoth Google.  If you use iGoogle or any of the Gmail gadgets, then you have Sah to thank.  After all, he’s the man behind Google Gadgets.  Though that might not impress every technophile you come across, it is still a noteworthy accomplishment.

This is the result of tremendous growth from Foodzie.  In the year previous, they went from 25 vendors to 250.  Also notable is their branded partnership with The Atlantic, that really kick ass website.  I’ll be curious to see what a guy like Sah will serve up for Foodzie.

[via TechCrunch]

Time is short today, so my first impression post on Miller Union will have to wait until tomorrow.  In the meantime, check out this cool image.

That little artistic gem comes courtesy of the Coffee Creations website.  As you’ll see, its a website featuring the art of someone named Karen.  What’s particularly interesting is that all the work is made from espresso beans.  Neato!  So visit the website or become a fan or a follower.  Enjoy your weekend, reviews are a comin! I promise.

Yesterday, I mentioned how online media portal Hulu.com added Martin Yan’s Hong Kong to their repertoire.  Today, I figured that I might as well expand on that post just a bit.  If you don’t spend a lot of time on the computer, and/or don’t try and stay plugged in to the “what’s happening at an internet near you,” it is quite possible that the name Hulu is nothing more than a head-scratcher.

The joint-venture startup launched just shy of three-years ago and currently houses thousands upon thousands of hours of television.  Unlike some of those other sites offering free television programming, Hulu has several major advantages.  Most notably, it’s legit … so everything is super duper high quality.

The site offers commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from TV stations like NBC, Fox, ABC and many other networks and studios.  Of particular interest to ya’ll is the website’s Food & Leisure channel.  There you’ll find all shows from the likes of Paula Deen, Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsey (who doesn’t love to see Gordo go ape all over some moronic excuse for a restaurateur – aka Kitchen Nightmares).  Meanwhile, Bravo TV shows like Top Chef are available for your viewing pleasure, as is the Food Network’s Good Eats with Atlantan Alton Brown, and the PBS show Diary of a Foodie.

Even if food related television isn’t your favorite, Hulu is definitely worth a visit.  The site is just loaded with great stuff.  Alright folks, until we eat again.  Meanwhile, any of you who actually have employees working under you – make a beeline for your IT Department and ask them to block the website … otherwise, you’re gonna have some ravenously unproductive people in your office in about 30-minutes.