EatingRichmond.com Starts Today

Food blog readers in Richmond are in for a treat. A few of us have gotten together to launch a compilation of local food blogs at www.eatingrichmond.com. This new site will enable cooking/eating hobbies in a major way. But, it's as much for bloggers as it is for blog readers.

Gordon Ramsey: I've got your menu, but for the life of me, - I don't know where to start. It's 23 pages long, man! For Christ's sake, pare it down. Your customers are drowning in choices. Bollocks."

Am I the only one who's got Gordon Ramsey in my head, berating me 24/7. Did his caustic Kitchen Nightmares show give me post traumatic stress disorder? The popularity of food blogging in Richmond has been evident on RVABlogs for a long time. There's nearly enough food flying around on there daily to support a local online foodie magazine and the culinary posts net a lot of clicks. Personally, a great deal of my traffic came from Ross Catrow's stellar aggregator (so, I should probably ask him to swap out my old URL for my new one). Among the nearly 400 blogs, some of the food bloggers were clearly touching a nerve with their critiques and recipes. While I've really enjoyed my hobby of throwing my thoughts into such a large and diverse collection, sometimes my most proud food posts got lost in the shuffle, and I was too often tempted by the popularity contest that takes place on the "popular posts" list. Nonetheless, RVABlogs, in my point of view, is clearly the primary inspiration for this new niche site, and it'll probably continue to be my primary local alternative media vice.

So, for my own sake, I wanted to see all the food posts all together and on EatingRichmond.com you'll find fifteen of those bloggers aggregated together. I'm sure you'll recognize some and others may be new to you. Either way, now you can get your arms around it all on one screen, so dig in: www.eatingrichmond.com (is that better, Gordon?) Whether the blog posts are gossipy or informative, personally, I'll be breathing a sigh of relief. No longer will I feel obligated to blog about food (although that's clearly what my readers prefer - personally, politricks and baby pics just happen to compete for my mental space). Now, I actually won't be obligated to blog at all (my life is exponentially crazier right now than most any time I can remember). It's a blogger's bailout. An infusion of socialism (not really - rugged individualism will probably win out among the food bloggers). Nonetheless, there are plenty of more experienced and informed people than me in this town sharing their culinary knowledge on a daily basis. EatingRichmond.com is a tribute to their past and future online contributions. Chances are, you will find yourself enriched in some way each time you set mouse into one of their humble cyber abodes.

So, with that, I leave you in the good care of www.eatingrichmond.com

Jason/RVA Foodie

ps: Yes, my wife, Karen, worked on the graphic design (her freelance gig: Darling Octopus Design). She's also a food blog junkie as you'll notice if you check out her Twitter posts. We'll probably be taking advantage of her kindness for some time to come. There are lots more pretty bells and whistles on our wish list (like the obviously missing food porn), but all good things in time, right? For now, I hope people just enjoy seeing this site do what it does: make you hungry and never at a loss for recipes or restaurant suggestions.