The Best Food Blogs

People like to write (and read) about food almost as much as they like to eat it. These top blogs offer a daily dish on everything from restaurants to recipes.

By Zanne Schmalzer for MSN City Guides

It was hard to resist the call of the food blog. In 2002 when I launched Eat, Drink and Be Married, there were a handful of reasons to keep a blog, but I did it primarily to record the transition my (then new) husband and I were experiencing as we became a family at the table. We planned our meals, posted recipes, published crazy-intimate details about our fledgling union and linked from our reservation to other food bloggers. We even had occasion to meet some of them in person.

As far as I’m concerned, the community that a blogger creates with by linking to other pages is where it’s at. The multidimensional rabbit hole is the fun of the Web. Oh, the places you’ll go!

But I couldn’t keep it up.

As with any blog, frequency of posting is one of the key success factors. No one likes stale content, no matter what the subject. Relevance and timeliness are essential. The information should be useful and presented in an original voice. Interactivity, like user comments (click and scroll to read the comment from David Eyre’s grandkid) or the ability to rate a post, is the icing on the cake.

But the hallmark of a great food or dining blog is language. A food blog must be fresh. In the words of venerable cookbook editor Judith Jones, “food writing at its finest must be sensuous, immediate and sharply observed.” Inspiring photography—and in some cases video—seems to be a critical component.

In the end, though, fun is the most important ingredient of a compelling food or restaurant blog. To guide you through the gastronomic blogosphere, we’ve enlisted an expert. Josh Friedland, publisher and editor of the much-praised food, wine and travel “meta” blog The Food Section, weighs in on some of the blogs highlighted below.

Restaurant news blogs

A city guide Web site, with its massive database of restaurants reviews, is often the first place folks go to find out more about a restaurant, bar, theater or nightclub. But even large resource sites can’t always stay on top of breaking restaurant news. So it’s good to know someone on the ground. Eater (with an Eater: L.A. spin-off) has all this and more on its radar. “They track openings, closings and industry gossip,” Friedland says. “There is a lot of orchestrated notices about restaurants, created by PR firms, but blogs like Eater get in front of all that,” gathering  breaking news on the ground. According to Eater, their Plywood Report “dishes intel on restaurant and bars that aren’t yet ready to open their doors.”

Of course, debate and controversy are always winners. Recently the editors at Eater loaned the mic, so to speak, to chef Mario Batali, who had a thing or two to say under the heading “Why I Hate Food Bloggers.” Whether or not you agree with Batali, there is no arguing with the wisdom of one Eater reader: “Never pick a fight with a man who can cook every part of you perfectly.”