My friend K sent me a link to Foodcult Wiki. According to the frontpage, the concept goes a little something like this:
Foodcult is an experiment in collaborating with foodies to determine where to eat, shop & cook in Melbourne, why we have particular preferences and how our interactions with food shape our identities (national, cultural, gendered, etc). Lists and criteria will be wide and varied (and editable as well as edible!) but I'm going to start with:
Generally the best
Best Overall
Cheapest Good Eats
Cheapest Dumplings In Melbourne
Best Service
Most Interesting Service
Best Toilets
Intrepid Steaks
Best Pizza
Best Breakfasts
Best Coffee
MESP-723 Biker Brekkies
Nationally-specific restaurant reviews
[lists lots of different cuisines]
Other Food Favourites
Favourite Markets
Favourite Grocery Stores
Favourite Recipes
Quick and delicious
Ye old standards
Serious labour of love
Desserts
Untested Recipes
Places To Try (untested)
Cheap
Medium
Expensive
What Were They Thinking?!!
Don't Go There
Like everything else here, you may want to change some things on the list or add others. I have learned to relinquish control of editorial and let democracy rule! Vive la gastronomie!
The wiki is still in its infancy and I haven't had a chance to look through it properly yet, but the "Best Toilets" category raised a smile: when my sister was a little kid, she always used to judge restaurants based on how nice the toilets were, giving them a score out of 10. Even now that she's grown up, family members will still enquire "Score out of 10?" when she's returning from the loos at a restaurant... :)
There are already tons of Melbourne food blogs and groups on sites like facebook (eg "top melbourne restaurants", which I mentioned in a recent post)... so what do you think of the concept of a collaborative wiki related to Melbourne food?
ps For those who may not have heard of it yet, Ed from the widely-read blog Tomato is trying to organise a meet up dinner for Melbourne bloggers. Here's hoping they end up having it on a Tuesday instead of a Monday!
Friday, 12 October 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Great link! I too will be exploring the site in great detail!
Lots of potential to this. Nice to read about it:)
Thanks for that post - v.thought provoking. I admit I have mixed feelings though.
I'm a fan of ChowHound forums and of TripAdvisor(where I have added a few detailed pages on the food scene). But over time I have come to realise that in terms of restaurant recommendations, the scope of what people believe is good, is vast and unreliable.
What you appear to end up with is a confusing and contradictory melange of opinions, some of it informed but also there's bitchy ignorant muck, some obviously interfered with by trolls...and in the case of MyRestaurants often just a place to make public grievances about a venue.
I find blogs more reliable as a Blogger's commitment, taste and depth of knowledge can be proven by reading their archives.
I shall watch and see, I suppose only time will tell. Hope I'm proved wrong.
Thanks for the thoughts, stickyfingers! I agree that with a blog people will generally put in more time and care, and that you can get a good feel for whether a blogger's opinions are relevant for you by browsing through their archives.
That's why I like food blogs best :)
Post a Comment