Debonair Magazine’s Food Blog Awards

When working in an office, I found it incredibly difficult to inconspicuously ruffle through The New York Times and read an 800-word restaurant review or try to hide my stacks of Saveur and Gourmet. Thankfully, a good food blog offers quick snippets of information that can easily be read between conference calls.
What makes a food blog good? Frequency of posting, pictures and videos, overall presentation, quality of writing, relevancy, usefulness and originality are all important, but mostly, it should be fun.
Here are Debonair Magazine’s Food Blog Awards:
Most Entertaining Food Blog:
www.amateurgoumet.com
Adam Roberts, “The Amateur Gourmet” started this blog in 2004 while at NYU’s Tisch School of Dramatic Writing. With pure wit, energy and appetite, he chronicles his eating adventures from sampling a cupcake made to look like Janet Jackson’s breast to trying a truffle tasting menu at Daniel.
Best Eco-Friendly Food Blog:
www.ethicurean.com
Have your cake (or steak) and feel good about it too! The Ethicurean is defined as “someone who seeks out tasty things that are also sustainable, organic, local and ethical. SOLE food, for short.” This blog links to articles from other reputable publications and has fascinating original content.
Best Restaurant Review Blog:
www.restaurantgirl.com
Restaurant Girl Danyelle Freeman goes to great lengths to be the first to review restaurants, often beating out other bloggers and the more established media. She has recently added profiles and interviews of New York’s hottest chefs. Her writing is fun, hip and lucid and the “Don’t miss dish” and “Don’t bother dish” are especially useful.
Best Blogging Community:
www.chowhound.com
Fun discussion boards (e.g. “What do I do with really good cream?), reliable recipes and a variety of quality bloggers contribute to this huge North American food community.
Most Useful Food Blog for Hungry Midtowners:
www.midtownlunch.com
Do you work in midtown and wonder what to eat on your lunch break? Get out of the company cafeteria and into the streets with this incredibly thorough blog as your guide. A 30 year-old midtown worker and resident charts under $10 dining, block by block. In his own words: “All in all, I hope this will be a useful resource for all of you who are unlucky enough to work in this food-challenged part of the greatest city in the world. Sure, we’d rather work in Chelsea, the Village, Soho, Chinatown (my personal dream), or at a desk in the Shake Shack – but we’re stuck in this wasteland. So, let’s make the best of it.”
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Best Chef Blogging:
www.davidlebovitz.com
A professional chef and accomplished cookbook author, David Lebovitz blogs with an informed view and adventurous palate. Based in Paris and biased towards all things confectionary, Lebovitz’s blog is one of the most consistently well-written and well-read.
Best Food Blog Directory:
www.tastespotting.com
A compilation of the top blog posts throughout the blogosphere.
Most Useful All-Around Blog:
www.eater.com
The one blog I read almost daily for gossip, reviews and more gossip. Restaurants fear being put on Eater’s “Deathwatch” – a telltale sign of closure. Eater also lists restaurants that have recently opened, shutdown and been reviewed, as well as relevant New York food news. In addition, Eater sports an L.A. version and a real estate spin-off called Curbed.
Best Recipe Blog:
www.101cookbooks.com
In 2003, cookbook author and photographer Heidi Swanson realized that she owned more than 100 cookbooks. So, she decided to blog her way through them all. Great recipes and professional photos make this blog better than owning the books Swanson’s writing about!
Best Travel Food Blog:
www.travelerslunchbox.com
Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, this blog chronicles Melissa Kronenthal’s world travels through food and photography. A word of caution: with such engrossing photography one can regretfully overlook Kronenthal’s insightful prose.
Best Food Blog Writing:
www.chocolateandzucchini.com
Montmartre, France native, Clotilde Dusoulier shares her passion for all things food-related — thoughts, recipes, musings, cookbook acquisitions, quirky products, nifty tools, restaurant experiences, ideas, and inspirations.
Best Food Porn:
www.nordjus.co.uk/en
Some bloggers are incredibly sophisticated photographers – none more than Keiko, a Japanese-native who now lives in the UK and takes hunger-inspiring snapshots.
www.shewhoeats.com
The insightful food pictures that Chika Yoshizaki takes from her Japan base and her world travels are enough to make you hungry and at least a bit jealous. I just wish she posted more frequently.
chezpim.typepad.com
San Francisco-based blogger Pim Techamuanvivit is a former Silicon Valley exec whose photos of her dining and traveling experiences made me install a drool protector on my laptop.
A Nod to the Blog That Started It All:
The Julie/Julia Project
Julie Powell, a self-described “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night” cooked every recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) between August 2002 and August 2003. She shared this huge project with over 800,000 people who made it one of the most popular blogs ever. Although the project is now complete, the archives are available for viewing and Powell still posts from time to time between working on what she calls a “really obscene” book deal.