The "Chuck" Introduction

Hi, I'm Josh, and here are a few things you might need to know.

Food is good. Cooking is good, eating is good, et cetera. Thus, a food blog.

I have a job, and it pays the bills, but I don't have a whole ton of excess spending money, so I'm not going to be going to Per Se a few times over the course of a week and writing a review, much as I might love to do so. Rather, the focus of this blog will generally be on towards reasonably-priced foods: sometimes on cooking with everyday ingredients, but more often on reasonably-priced restaurants, food stands and the like. I mean, look, if you're willing to drop $50 or $100 or more (how much is the dinner prix fixe at Masa? $400?) on dinner, you're going to have a good meal, because odds are you're you're at an establishment with trained personnel using quality ingredients. Places that give you a good meal for $5 or $10 or $15 need love too.

Because that's one of my areas of focus, one food writer I'm a big fan of is Zach Brooks (and the rest of his crew) at Midtown Lunch; now there's a guy who's taken a niche and made it his own. Other everyday reading includes Ted Berg's TedQuarters, where devotion to Taco Bell is elevated to an art form (along with some of the most sensible writing about the Mets on the web), and Sports Illustrated/Kansas City Star sports columnist Joe Posnanski's excellent JoeBlog, which takes asterisked footnotes to a whole no level.

During the recent "Obsessed" episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Tony did a segment where he spoke to a few food bloggers, and expressed his distaste for people who have to take a picture of everything before they eat it, while their food is getting cold in the meantime. I tend to agree with him on this point: eat it while it's hot. To that end, while I'll occasionally snap a photo of something before I eat it, it'll be few and far between. I think we're all better served by leaving such snaps to better photographers than I, in any case.

That's probably enough to get the ball rolling. Looking forward to writing more in the coming days...