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Send me your culinary queries for new Ask Addie feature
If you haven’t noticed, there have been a few changes around here.
Mike Sutter, the Statesman’s restaurant critic for the past few years, took an early retirement offer from the newspaper last month. His voice, humor and observations on the Austin food scene will be missed, but I’m looking forward to reading the reviews of Matthew Odam, a film and features writer who will now be writing a few restaurant reviews a month.
Odam is another funny guy. You might have read his blog, The M.O., which he put to bed when he took on movies earlier this year. He now mostly blogs on Austin Music Blog and will contribute restaurant posts now and then on Relish Austin. (And before you and your friends get in on the “To Catch A Critic” silliness, yes, his photos are up all over the Internet. He’s not making any claims to be anonymous, and I’m sure he’ll explain in due time.)
For as long as Mike was reviewing restaurants, I tried to stay out of his way to let him cover the restaurant beat, but now that Matthew is covering both movies and restaurants, I’ll be picking up a lot of the non-review restaurant coverage, so you’ll be seeing more restaurant posts and stories from me on Relish Austin and in the print edition.
But for the past three years, I’ve really grown to love the non-restaurant side of food writing. (Yes, there is such a thing. I wish I had a dollar for every time I told someone I write about food and they replied, “Oh, so you review restaurants?”) Learning more about ingredients and cooking isn’t just fun, it’s more relevant to my day-to-day life. My husband and I cook at home far more than we eat out, and cooking food, as opposed to reheating it from the freezer or melting cheese on toast, is an empowering skill that I’m determined to help pass on to others.
Which leads me to a new Q&A feature on Relish Austin called Ask Addie, which makes it debut in the food section tomorrow.
Cook and restaurant Q&As are certainly not new, but I think they are a valuable source of information for readers. I’ll be answering both cooking and eating-out questions, but unlike the Dale Rice column that ran for many years in the newspaper, the focus of the restaurant questions won’t be giving recommendations for where to host your rehearsal dinner or take your visiting in-laws for brunch. I’m thinking more along the lines of how do you use one of those daily deal coupons at a restaurant without feeling like a cheapskate or how to sniff out a fake Yelp review.
As for the cooking questions, if you’ve always wondered about something, chances are, someone else has been wondering the same thing. (My mom recently asked me, for instance, what flavor paprika really added to food.)
Send your questions to abroyles@statesman.com, and, depending on how many I get, I’ll try to post the questions and answers that don’t make it in print on the blog.
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