He and She said:
This post is now in the archives, so we thought we’d add it as a page, in case you were wondering where the hell all the photos were:
Actually, you’d think we’d love porn. After all, we like spiciness at least as much as the next blogger. And really, who’s a bigger sucker for a lacquered breast or a coulis-drenched thigh than we are? Heck, we won’t even turn our noses up at a bit of underage veal every now and then. How’s that for racy? Asian, Middle Eastern, Ethiopian, or Latin, when it comes to food we’re pretty inclusive, willing to do it all, if you know what we mean.
So, while we’re not saying it’s culinary Sodom and Gomorrah in our house every night, it sure ain’t Pilgrim’s Progress.
But, if you read us at all, you may have noticed something strange about us: We don’t do food porn. While this is certainly not by design, we’ve become aware that we seem to be perhaps the only NOLA food bloggers who don’t post photos of the food they eat. If you’re old enough to remember the days before Sesame Street started to care about self-esteem and feelings and crap like that, you might remember a little bit they did where the TV was divided into four squares with a kid in each one. Three kids were happily bouncing a ball or picking their noses or whatever, but the fourth kid was just sitting there, looking like someone had just shot his puppy. This lovely vignette was accompanied by a pithy, instructive song with the concluding couplet: “One of these kids is doing his own thing/ One of these kids just doesn’t belong.” (For those of you too young to remember, we are not making this up; it actually happened. In heavy rotation.) Anyway, we’ve been looking at everyone else’s sites and feeling like that little sad kid with no puppy, and that’s no way to feel. So we had a long talk about it. It went something like this:
She Said: Do you think we should do food porn?
He Said: Did someone just say porn?
She Said: Food porn, Mr. Wizard. Should we take photos of the food we eat?
He Said: Ummm, will you, and therefore by the transitive property of marriage, I, be unhappy if we don’t?
She Said: Just answer the question.
He Said: You are aware it’s the fourth quarter, right? Can we talk about this later, like February?
As you can see, dialogue in our house is a little like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. If Lincoln and Douglas had both ridden the short wagon to the little log schoolhouse, that is.
We’ve heard some opine that the whole food-as-art phenomenon is just an excuse to provide small portions. Given that we find it easy to spot the Americans in Europe by the size of their asses, this strikes us as a little funny. We have our problems in America, but we’ll go out on a limb and say tiny portions are not one of them. On the contrary, we believe that the aesthetic of the food on the plate can be a significant part of the experience of dining out. Design, we believe, is really, really important. Anything else we could say on the topic has surely been said better by Garr Reynolds. Check him out. Just trust us. Without question, there are restaurants in New Orleans putting food on the plate that is not only tasty, but beautiful as well. And just as surely, many of our brother and sister bloggers are routinely posting high-quality photos of these creations. If you haven’t before, check some of them out in our links. (As a matter of fact, research for this article turned up the amazing photography in Fork, Spoon, Knife, a NYC blog whose creator just took a food trip to our city New Orleans. How she got the food to pose like that is beyond us.) So, let it not be said that we lack an appreciation of the visual artistry that takes place in many of our local kitchens. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There are really two reasons why we’re your porn-free, g-rated (kinda) food blog. The first is that we simply can’t figure out how to do it. We love and celebrate the experience of dining out; no matter how many times we go and how many places we visit, we both love walking in the door and soaking in the whole adventure. We tip our hat to all of our cohorts out there who do such a good job of it, but we can’t see how to take photos without diminishing the experience. We struggle enough to discretely take notes, whether on a blackberry or iPad or actual paper, while we are actually trying to, you know, eat, and the idea of adding a camera to the mix is terrifying. We’re just not real good multitaskers, apparently. However, we do have the crack He Said/She Said R&D team working feverishly to develop a discrete 100 megapixel camera-spork, with very good f-stop (whatever that is), so this could change. But we’ve had to downsize the team, which now consists only of our two Boston Terriers, so it might take a while. They stay pretty busy managing our social media; we’re just trying to get them to work it in.
Basically, we’re trying to resist the tendency for the dining event to become a meta- act. One of the unintended consequences of writing is that you can start to spend more time evaluating what you’re doing and less time actually doing it. Over time, we’ve become more observant, and that is a good thing, but we sometimes need to put on the brakes and resist the urge to begin mentally composing a review while we’re at dinner, and instead just eat the food. Just be in the experience. We think photos move us further from that, not closer.
The second reason is that we do see this as a writer’s blog. As our approach evolves, we are becoming more and more interested in attempting to convey a sense of place, more intrigued by the challenge of trying to capture the unique zeitgeist of a restaurant, the ‘it’ that makes it what it is.
Hmm, maybe we should just start doing reviews in haiku form? We’ll have the marketing team review the concept. When they finish with the spork.
Anyway, the less we can show, the more we must tell, and we certainly find it a consistent challenge to try to improve in that area. We don’t think the best we can do has hit the page yet, but we continue to work toward that. One way or the other, our little blog will remain a porn-free zone for the foreseeable future, and we rarely drop the f-bomb, so we can go after the whole youth demographic before they develop any food blog brand loyalty. Tune in next week for our take on the best places to eat chicken nuggets and fried cheese sticks and a review of the latest Justin Bieber CD.
