Yup! Site's not going anywhere. Just me :-)

IG... do not discount the possibility :-)

Oh dear, Karen! I have no such childhood ties to this cuisine, and it makes ME weak in the knees... I can only imagine how you feel :-)

I would LOVE to tour the Bourbon Trail! Sadly, I think the odds of that happening anytime soon are slim to none... but you bet I'll drop you a line if I get out that way :-)

'Fraid not, peterme... I never read any others :-) But thanks for the kind words!

Ah, excellent! Thanks, Yao! It looks like you're San Diego-ish based... is this a place you get to with some frequency? I'm really curious to know if this is typical of their omakase, and how different the experience is with Joe and Morita-san.

Anon Man... It's true, I'm completely ignorant of the context. I know it's been around a long time, but I really don't know anything of the history, so that angle is completely lost on me. It's interesting you bring up Superdawg. Foodwise, that's actually a great analogy. There are better hot dogs to be had in Chicago. But it's distinctive and it's been around forever. And part of the Superdawg charm is how *little* it's changed even with the renovations over the years. Is that the case with Hodad's, too?

Aaalex... To me, it feels like a lifetime ago. I miss home.

Susie... thanks! Duly noted for Skillet Doux redesign that was sidelined by this little endeavor :-) (The photos look so nice on this background! :-)

xwave21... Yeah, I know. Phoenix isn't anything like NYC. In NYC, instead of it being like a completely different city with a completely different culture every five miles, it's a completely different city with a completely different culture every five *blocks* :-) I hear what you're saying. You're not the first person who's told me this. But not only do I not buy it, it's not my experience. You're suggesting that that gulf between me here in Arcadia and somebody down in Gilbert is a chasm so impossibly deep and wide that we can't sit down at a table and get excited about food together? You're telling me in this city of 4.2 million people, we can find a crowd that wants to discuss food in depth? I'm not saying everybody has to agree. That would be flipping boring. All they have to do is care enough to *talk* about it, intelligently and at length. I'm not trying to suggest that the whole city is going to take on a singular food identity. That doesn't happen ANYplace. What I'm saying is that I think there are a lot of people out there who feel the way I do with no outlet to express that passion. I meet more and more of them every month. You could be right. Time will tell. It's only day one. We seem to be off to a pretty good start. But in the end, the bottom line is that if I'm wrong, I'd rather go down swinging.

On the nose, Mike. Z-Grill was the only one for which I could locate a website. Given how that area is, I can't say I'm shocked, exactly, but yeah, it does seem like a stretch with a weirdly low web presence.

Aaaaaaaand I may have overreacted as well. Let there be peace! Thanks, Ally :-)

Seriously, Ally? I did a presentation for Ignite Phoenix (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0CEVb-EIP4&feature=plcp&context=C411180fVDvjVQa1PpcFMl1nRQ9Cdb6XThc-m9kphtBbGP13ey-JE=). I thought it would be a cute and fun theme for a five minute presentation. I was hoping to get a good community board going (launched, in private beta at phxfoodnerds.com) so we can get some serious food discussion going in this town rather than all of the fragmented blogs and twitter feeds, etc. where nobody's actually sharing information or learning from each other. The whole point of this thing was to try to get the food discussion OFF of Twitter. Really? A temporary 56 pixel tall banner at the top with an admittedly silly name trying to get something going for serious community food discussion is the difference between whether or not you feel any of this is worth reading? I don't know if my traffic is down or up. I don't watch it. I've never given a damn about traffic. You know the kind of talk and discussion I care about. I don't think that's changed here... do you?

And yet, it works...

LemonGinger, your comment is hilariously well-timed! I just did a presentation last night and spent about half of it talking about Grace Garden. Go figure :-) Of COURSE it was a Mandarin/Cantonese problem. Ugh. Oh, well. Thanks for solving the mystery, anyway. Someday I'll have those chiles... someday..... someday.............

Anon Man... D) All of the above :-) If I could bring myself to just try one dish and move on, I could plow through three of these in one long lunch hour. I should probably be a little more cursory... this is kind of a scouting survey, after all. But I keep hoping to find something awesome, and I'm trying to at least poke around a little bit. Bisharo is the only one where I was in and out by myself. One stop, app and entree... yeah, moving on.

Nikki... Though I think I used the disclaimer about seven or eight times when I wrote about G&tG, I would like to stress again that I was there just a few days after they opened :-)

I think it's hard to argue that Stephanie isn't the most successful winner in terms of going the auteur chef/owner route. The Girl and the Goat is a wild success with national attention. Blais has his hands in an awful lot of pots. They seem more like consulting gigs than a traditional on-site EC role, but between Flip Burger and HD-1, he's opening joints. He's working on some project called The Spence that I don't know anything about. Hosea is also supposedly on the verge of opening his own place, but as Stephanie's journey demonstrated, these things can take longer than expected to come to fruition. Ironically, the other winner who's seen a lot of success is Ilan. The Gorbals is, from what I understand, pretty well-regarded and well-reviewed.

"Am I the only one who hates the double service of judges? I get that it's meant to prevent judging bias based upon whose food the judges ate first, but how do you judge sometimes when certain judges got DIFFERENT food?" I actually like this. One of the toughest things about running a restaurant is consistency. It's one thing to make a great dish. It's another thing entirely to make it just as great fifty times in a night. It's a good test of a real aspect of a night's service.

Gilmore... when somebody who doesn't normally trade in risotto makes one that the judges criticize, I'm inclined to believe their risotto is off (didn't take more than a glance to know that this was the case with Tre's). When it's Tony Mantuano's right hand and it happens twice, I'm inclined to believe we're probably looking at a matter of preference/style.

See, this is the problem... you argue about something long enough, and you forget why you started in the first place :-) FYI, I wasn't calling you out, Ally... yours is a view shared by a lot of people. Also, antigriddle. REALLY cold. Not surprised that somebody who's never used one was thrown off by just how cold it made her sformato.