The Role of This Blog

It has come to my attention recently that the title of this blog is actually "montrealfoodblog" which kind of implies that a large part of the content is about food in Montreal!

Well, that's in an ideal world. There was a time a few years ago when I physically despised the word "blog" in the same kind of way we all came to despise the words "Information SuperHighway" or anything with "Cyber" before it.

Blog. Fuck blog, I said. If this is what they call a blog, I've been fucking blogging before WordPress's founders were billionaires. And I was!

But now that's like saying "Hey, I was on Usenet before there were forums!"

My original intentions were solid. Montrealfood.com would be a semi-gossipy, occasional resto-centric, freewheeling site that only really had one agenda: food in Montreal.

That worked for a while. But eventually, the old "no ads on THIS site" became really old. Then, the foodblogging craze exploded -- the chowhounds, the egullets, the Food Network. These days, people with degrees in foodstyling take pictures of food and publish them in a whole new category called "food porn."

Even the diehard stalwarts, the stolid bloggers who seem to love going against the flow, still devote their entire blogs to reviews of restaurants -- brilliant pictures, absolutely phenomenally well-written reviews concentrating on everything from hot dogs to zershck ... frankly, I've on a number of occasions been very suspicious as to how these people manage to go out to all these fantastic restaurants, take these gorgeous pictures and post these journalistic-level reviews.

It's a struggle for me to review even one restaurant and write it up, let alone post excellent photos with links, podcasts, what have you . . .

So guess what? I've given up. On montrealfood alone there must be at least 50 reviews -- written by someone, for sure, maybe even me -- about restaurants that are long, long gone.

Who has the time to sit around following what new restaurant sprang up here or there or where the best brunch place is in Little Italy?

Now there are monstrous, massive sites like chowhound and egullet that have entire forums just dedicated to questions like "What's the best Glatt Kosher in Montreal?" with dozens, if not hundreds of very talented responders and recommendations!

I feel truly like Ogg, having invented the wheel. People were very impressed at my amazing achievement, until Ugg came along, invented fire, and burned it.

But I feel a strange and unnatural exhilaration when a website actually links to this blog!

There is someone out there who actually still believes this is a blog about food in Montreal! But it's really just a random diary about things that happened to me between meals and at meals with the magical addition of the snow that's making everything amazing at 7:50 on a Monday two days into my 52nd year. Now THAT's something to write about.