The obligatory, long winded, awkwardly worded introduction post

            I think that I was doomed to start a food blog. I started to develop an interest in food and restaurants from my early adolescence.  A childhood in Flint, Michigan presented a bizarre nexus of social classes—a blending of blue and white collar cultures.  My parents divorced in 1980, and my mother moved to Florida in 1984.  This left my brother and I in the custody of my father, a local attorney who specialized in family law.  As Flint’s economy began its downward spiral in the 80’s, and local divorce rates skyrocketed, his practice was brisk—often entailing twelve and fourteen hour days.  As a result, dinners were usually either takeaway or eaten at restaurants, both because he could afford the luxury and enjoyed dining out himself, but also because he rarely could afford the time to cook after a long day.  Dad grew up the son of a service station mechanic—my grandfather owned a Sunoco station on South Saginaw, and my father operated the wrecker as a teenager.  Having blue collar roots and a white collar lifestyle, dinners with my father were always a roll on the socioeconomic roulette wheel: three star sit down one night, and a greasy spoon Coney Island diner the next.

However, in spite of an upbringing that saw me eating out frequently, I had a source of grounding from one of the least likely places: my father’s first ex wife, Sheila.  My brother and I were the byproduct of Dad’s second marriage.  Years before he met my mother, Dad and his high school sweetheart married in the Flint tradition for many Baby Boomers—a forced arrangement in the wake of adolescent carnal experimentation gone overboard.  The marriage produced two daughters before they divorced. Sheila remarried, and both she and her husband took jobs at the Shop, helping to drive Flint’s doomed automobile manufacturing economy.  Growing up, my father made sure that his children never saw each other as half siblings, but as full-blooded relatives. My younger brother and I spent many hours visiting our sisters at their mother’s home—usually for parties and other food-centered gatherings.  Odd as it might have seemed to an outsider, it was more of an extended family relationship between his then-wife and his ex wife. Thus, when my mother moved to Florida, Sheila stepped into a surrogate mother role for the duration of my time in school, and I was embraced as a member of her family.  As a result, a holiday like Christmas might begin with carefully choreographed meals, served on reserved china at a grandmother’s or aunt’s house, but end with paper plates and a spread of comfort food delicacies served on a table-sized buffet at Sheila’s.  From a foodie perspective, I guess you could say that I was a mutt.  My palate was less interested in trends, blends, and culinary bends, and more about the primal question that drives us all around food: how does it taste?

Even my employment history was intertwined with food for my teens and twenties.  My first job was working the grills and fryers at the McDonalds on Fenton and Hill Road, in Flint.  After that, I took a job as a busboy at a restaurant that my sister managed down the road—a rib joint on Hill and Saginaw that vanished in the mid-90’s.  As an undergraduate and graduate student in Florida, I prepared and delivered pizzas for Dominos.  Having spent so much time working in restaurants, it seemed as if I was predestined to be a foodie…at least the lower case variety.  One of the perks of a food job is always the food, after all.  Moreover, one of the perks of a food job is being able to play with the combination and preparation of the food, back in the kitchen—out of the customers’ eyes.  A fat teenager in a McDonalds’ kitchen and a fat adult on a Dominos prep line can come up with some combinations that would never make it on the menu…

            I suppose that because my natural inclination for dinner as a teenager was to look at a restaurant directory, it became my default inclination as an adult…simply scaled down for the economic realities of living on my own as a professional undergraduate and (later) graduate student.  Since I was delivering pizzas during most of the mid-90s, I’d simply bring home food from work…doctored appropriately with items from the prep lines.  Other nights, I’d grab a sack from wherever happened to be open when I got off at two and three in the morning.  This also adjusted my palate a bit.  Having lived for most of my life as what could best be described as “working poor,” most of my meals were fast food or buffets.  For years, Taco Bell was my preferred fast food vendor for several reasons: the food was cheap, they were almost always open at least until 3am, and in recent years, they were the only place I could get Baja Blast Mountain Dew.  Then, this past August, the love affair soured when I tried their Cantina Tacos, the company’s attempt to bring Mexican street food to the American masses.  After paying my $1.50, bringing the bag home, looking at the contents of the foil wrapping, and channeling my inner Clara Peller, my only thought was that I wished I had been warned about what a colossal disappointment the product was—both the lackluster taste and Lilliputian portion.  From the burn of bad fast food, the seeds had been sown.

            So now, I’m looking at a food blog...  

Every blog needs an angle—something to make it unique, especially with the ubiquitous nature of food blogs on the Internet.  In doing some reading and researching, it seems that there are more than enough blogs out there written by Foodies (note the capitalization), with the decidedly elitist snootery that Steve Dublanica cites in Waiter Rant.  The ‘Net doesn’t need yet another pretentious examination of the latest, hippest fad-food eateries.  I’m not a big fan of the “quest” food blog, wherein a writer tries to map a trail of themed meals and restaurants either.  I’m a Gen-X’er with a Millennial’s attention span, raised on MTV and weaned on Internet-driven instant gratification.  If I can’t sit through most twenty-two minute television shows without something to distract me, a quest to eat at every gastropub in Raleigh would disintegrate within two weeks.  So I thought and wrestled with the notion of trying to think of some sort of slant to keep this from being just another food blog.  Then, a realization hit me…

“Write where and what you eat.”

I’m a fat guy—not like “cut the wall open and forklift him out” fat, but at least big enough to have been accused of periodically generating a gravity field in the presence of domestic animals and small children.  The one topic I seem to excel at in life is mass consumption.  Ever since I was a kid, I’ve made wide-scale digestion into an art form.  I was a comfort eater who found more than a few nights of solace at a buffet line.  In August 2009, I relocated from Orlando, Florida to Raleigh, North Carolina.  My midlife crisis started early, I suppose.  As I was making my “farewell tour” of favorite eateries in central Florida, I was thinking about the culinary playground waiting for me in the mid-Atlantic.  While I was in Orlando, I had my “places.”  I had a Chinese place.  I had an Italian place. I had a sushi place. I didn’t so much fall into a rut, as I fell into a pattern of familiarity.  Last month, I realized that as I was starting my second year in the Raleigh area, I was falling into a similar pattern of familiar dining places.  My partner and I already had our Italian place—I inherited it when I fell for him.  They were a package deal.  But I also noticed that I was eating at the same places again and again.  So before habit set in, I decided to use this blog (at least part of it) to chronicle my culinary travels—both locally and while traveling.  I’m looking to explore local restaurants that offer moderately priced fare (like one or two star dining) as well as a few things I’ll run into in the wild—things like prepackaged food or even a few things I’ll cook for myself.    Of course, my inner fatboy won’t shy away from a buffet either…  Again, write where and what I eat.  While I know I’ll wind up finding favorite places in the area, I want to try and keep from falling into a pattern of restaurant ruts.

             So I'm in a new town, six hundred miles away from my usual restaurants.   What better a way to get to know a place then to get to know its eateries?  Hope you enjoy the ride...