Photo Friday: Last Week’s Throwdown
It’s been a while since I had to resort to a Photo Friday. I am sitting on a couple press releases, but they are about purses and shoes that you can win at a couple restaurants around town. That’s not really my scene. If you are curious, check out the websites for Creo and Bountiful Bread. Information should be there, but I haven’t checked.
What a busy week it has been. I’ve been meeting with business owners, sending emails, setting up social media accounts, and making plans for the future. I’m very excited about the direction we are heading.
Hey, speaking of social media, did I ever tell you that I finally set up a FLB Instagram account? There you will find one of the snapshots of latte art that I took while judging last week’s Thursday Night Throwdown at Stacks Espresso.
But today I thought I would share a few more that I enjoyed. Read more…
The Unthinkable
Thank you to everyone who came out to Emack and Bolio’s last night in support of my first Community Ambassador Yelp Event. Thank you to Ken and Amy for hosting the party. Thank you to Marcie for taking so many wonderful pictures. And thank you to everyone who wanted to come, but got hung up by the snow emergency.
I had a lot of fun, and from the looks of it, everyone who showed up did too. In some ways it reminded me of my wedding. There I was surrounded by so many people with whom I wanted to engage in deep conversation and catch up on pressing issues. But the clock is not kind.
Hopefully, I’ll still be able to weigh in on the curling club’s dinner, bond over Chopsticks Optional’s first deep fried burger at Swifty’s, and talk more craft spirits with Jack.
Today, I’m relying on you to help fill in the content, because I am spent. And I can’t even believe what I’m going to ask.
A Culture of Criticism
Last week was the public announcement of my new job with Yelp. It really covered what I would be doing in this new role. What it didn’t address was why I wanted to take on these responsibilities. Writing about food criticism was a part of the FLB from day one. It was always one of the categories, and to date there have been dozens of posts on the subject.
One of the earliest was called Dare to Compare, and it holds up Yelp’s star system as a great way to evaluate restaurants at all different price levels. I was a big fan of the platform then, and obviously I continue to be a fan today.
When I first moved to Albany, and started writing Yelp reviews, I got a bunch of hate mail. Most of it sounded pretty much the same.
“What gives you the right to say that this place is bad.”
“If you don’t like it, why don’t you go back to California.”
“Who do you think you are, anyway?”
What I quickly came to realize is that Albany doesn’t have a very strong culture of criticism.
A Semi-Private Tour de Tavern Pie
Before you know it spring will be here. Well, even if spring itself may be far away, I still have a hard time calling March winter. This is why I’ve recently embraced the idea espoused by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle about the two shoulder seasons to winter in this part of the world:
I had heard it suggested one time that the seasons in the temperate zone should be six rather than four in number: summer, autumn, locking, winter, unlocking, and spring. And I remembered that as I straightened up beside our manhole, and stared and listened and sniffed. There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight.
It was winter, now and forever.
Anyhow, before March is upon us I wanted to get the next FUSSYlittleTOUR on the books. Last year we had the Tour de Buffalo Wings – Troy Edition. Two years ago was the Tour de Disco Fries. Before that was the Tour de Mozz & Melba. This year it’s going to be Tour de Tavern Pie. Today, I’m looking for input and for volunteers.
Pleasant Surprises
Missed it by that much. The Seahawk loss yesterday was heartbreaking. But we won’t linger in the past.
Who am I kidding. I’m all about lingering in the past. Hopefully you indulge me as I share a couple of highlights from last week. Perhaps they can be useful for someone in the future. Because really, they have nothing to do with football, and everything to do with cooking and the procuring of quality ingredients.
Well, one of these is at least tangentially connected to football, since it has something to do with Buffalo wings. Let’s start there and then we’ll move on to the hearty grains of winter.
Are You Ready For Some Football?
Sunday is the one day a year that I watch football. It will probably be the longest stretch of live over-the-air television that I will watch all year. Young Master Fussy has somehow gotten into the spirit of this quasinational holiday of mass consumption. He’s dismayed that the game happens on Sunday and that he has school the following day.
I explained to him that he wasn’t alone.
In the past, my carnival of excess has led me to say year after year that I’m too old for this shit. Monday mornings I’ve felt terrible. Actually, last year I felt terrible for the whole day. Heck, I felt terrible on Sunday night. But I kept on eating and drinking anyway.
It would be wrong to say that I haven’t learned anything from past experiences. I have. It’s just that the lessons I’ve internalized do nothing to solve the ongoing problem of my body being less and less able to recover from gastronomic abuse.
Ice Cream in February
New Yorkers are soft. In Massachusetts they eat ice cream twelve months a year. Do you think Vermonters stop eating ice cream in winter? That’s ridiculous. But here in The Empire State, many of us want nothing to do with the stuff until spring.
I remember the first time I ate an ice cream cone in a Boston winter. It was miraculous. There I was, walking with my chocolate cone, and for the first time in my life, I could eat the thing as slowly as I wanted. It was never going to melt! How brilliant is that? Those New Englanders are onto something (but I’m still going to be rooting for the Seahawks).
Which isn’t to say there aren’t a few winter ice cream holdouts in New York. The Ice Cream Man is open during these frozen months, and closer to home we’ve got Emack & Bolio’s.
Well, I have a plan. Maybe it’s a crazy plan. Really, it’s a small handful of crazy plans all being rolled together into what should be a fun event.
The Cost of Good Food and The Sysco Problem
Time
Four years. That’s how long it took to get through college. Man, that felt like a long haul at the time. Four years is longer than I spent at any one of the advertising agencies I worked for in California.
Time feels like it’s moving faster and faster as I get older (and older). Thankfully we have Facebook, and I can see that this same feeling is common among many of my contemporaries. So that’s comforting. Additionally, as I’m in the ramp up phase of this new job, the hours of the day just zoom by.
All of this is to say that I got caught up in a couple of different projects last night, so I’m resorting to desperate measures.
As it turns out four years ago today, I wrote a pivotal post. Well, it may not have been pivotal to you, unless you are the person who lives out in Los Angeles and recently wrote a book on classic cocktails. Because I’m told, this was a very influential post to that project.
Given the way readers continually cycle in and out of this blog, and how rarely anyone delves into the archive, it’s probably not the end of the world if I repurpose this manifesto. Incidentally, it has nothing to do with time. Although if after all this talk of life flittering away has made you glum, the post below contains instructions for a suitable antidote.
A New Era for the FLB
I first started writing about food on Chowhound about a million years ago, when it was all just message boards. Then I discovered Yelp, and prefered how this new platform aggregated people’s experiences into a starred rating system.
My most prolific Yelping spell to date was in those first few years after moving to Albany when I was desperately searching for something resembling good food. I was kissing a lot of frogs, and I wanted to make sure that those who came after me would have a clear path of places to try, and spots to avoid. It was through this writing that I began to establish a voice and a reputation.
Even in those early days, Yelp had a small but active community, and I met some of those writers in real life for drinks, trivia, and bowling. Through these new friends I learned about the Roxbury Farm CSA and a whole host of other gems. Yelp also played a role in the launch of the FLB.
“Hey Profussor! What gives with the history lesson?” Well, if you were paying attention to social media yesterday, you already know the answer.
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