Chocolate thingy from Bouchon
Part of me wants to really just take this blog in a new direction. I want to make it more personal and focus less on food. It might seem humorous to some of you that a food blog could get any less about food than this particular one. By any definition, I live a good life. My apartment has electricity and heat. It's got cable TV. I can spend free time watching NBA playoffs. Spending a little money on food for the blog isn't outside of my budget. And especially compared with living standards of all the six and a half billion people, I, like most folks in the U.S., have it good. There's a part of me that wonders about if there is better though. This blog has probably gone as far as it could under the current structure. To make it better I would have to hustle hard and self-promote. And if you read Wesley Yang's most recent article in NYMag, you would know that's hard for an Asian! But I'm generally of the belief that creme rises to the top, so if this blog has gone as far as it could, it's limiting factor is obvious, it's me. When I look around in the food world to see chefs with expanding empires talk about seeing the big picture and striving for excellence, I realize that my blog simply doesn't reflect the world that I wish to cover. Take this chocolate thingy I got from Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center. One - I don't know the name of it. Two - I don't know how much it cost, although my Chink brain thinks it was around $3.80 after taxes. What kinda food blogger am I?!
Let's talk about Bouchon Bakery for one minute though. They're opening a new store in the Rockerfeller Center, which would be Thomas Keller's second Bouchon Bakery in New York City. Generally the prices at BC are too inflated for me. Their treats are very well crafted though. Keller has been quoted before to say that many of the treats there are simply things he likes to eat. So if he likes to eat what is essentially a flaky chocolate-creme-filled eclair, then I'm down with that. If you share this with someone else, your experience with the chocolate thingy would be too brief. Eating one alone might be richness overkill, but sometimes you owe that to yourself. Life passes by too fast and chocolate slows it down for you. Eat it as you walk through Central Park and try not to let the pollen attack you. It'll be grand.
Back to being a food blogger. So the idea is whether I should even keep doing it after the domain expires. Goddamn it, I renewed it last year for three more years! But the web hosting expires before 2012! See in sports sometimes there's this phrase called, "Stay your lane." Self explanatory but in sports, this just means do something at which you excel. An expert three-point shooter who lacks dribbling skills shouldn't try to break down the defense in the lane. Instead, he should catch and shoot, and not miss so much. In 2011, this guy was James Jones of Miami Heat. There was a stat this year that said over 95% of his shots were taken without a dribble, which meant that someone threw him the ball and he jacked it up. And that no one else took as high of a percentage of shots without dribbling. That's a guy who stays his lane. He does well. Should I stay my lane?
The other school of thought is based on this book I started reading that basically says IQ is a process, and that inherent talent is really bogus. Talent is taught. What does this mean? Let's take David Chang as an example. He has often mentioned that he played juniors golf, and that he trained all the time, but he saw guys like Tiger just dominate. Well, Tiger also played all the time and might have started playing before David did. The most important idea (based on what I'm reading about targeted practice) is that Tiger Woods got more out of his training than most players. David Chang stopped playing golf and later became a restaurant mogul who's in charge of some badass restaurants. So even though his love of golf and his practice couldn't take him where he wanted to go, his love of food and his practice there took him to the top of the food game. Let's remember that for a minute.
See food is one thing... and David Chang started relatively young when he opened Momofuku Noodle Bar. But when we look at the examples in the sporting world, the margin of error one can have between making it and not making it takes years of hard work. Even Michael Jordan couldn't go from dominating the NBA to making it in professional baseball. If you're on one track in sports, you stay on that track and hope to succeed. If you don't, then trying another sport is impossible. However you could walk away from juniors golf and fifteen years later open, what turns out to be, one of many restaurants. How should regular people do it?
If training and practice and hard work is what it takes to "make it", then it opens up a whole world of possibilities. The one catch is, you don't know how much training it takes. As MJ found out about baseball, it takes more than just being a supremely gifted athlete and one year of training. At 29, my ability to do grind it out work probably is not the same as it was ten years ago. Also, I know that really successful entrepreneurs often start up a ton of companies before (if they're lucky), getting a big success. Now I've narrowed the key elements to three things... One - pick someone I love and work super hard. Two - hope that what I pick doesn't take decades of practice and hard work to come to fruition. Three - have realistic exit strategy and know after a short while whether it's the right move, otherwise repeat steps One and Two.
Number Three is also know as the 'try lots of things' rule. What I see is that people my age and older just don't blog all that much. There is no future in blogging unless you know your exit strategy. Do you want to be the next Eater or Grub Street? Do you want a book deal? Do you want to be a professional writer? I haven't worked as hard as possible on this blog, and it probably is a signal that I don't love it enough. I just don't know what is next.
Bouchon Bakery
10 Columbus Circle.
New York, NY 10019
212-823-9366
(I invite you to follow me on Twitter so you can get more of my non-sense in another medium.)
If this is in reference to the food blog proposal you recently mentioned in email... I'd be on board. Although I don't think the internet really wants to read a site with multiple Asian guys writing about stupid shit like basketball and burgers all the time.
As for staying the course? Fuck that. When I was 12 I wanted to study sharks. I knew everything there was to know about sharks. I would've made a pimp ass shark biologist. From there I went to violin -> engineering -> research -> law -> well... you know the rest. Sure I could've been an awesome shark researcher, but it was just a flame of the moment type of thing. If you want to change your blog to something else... just do it. Even if you don't know where it'll end up, if you know it doesn't feel right, right now, make a change.
Nicholas
May 11, 2011 12:38 pm
@Nicholas,
Wow, shark biologist huh? That woulda been a badass job. Working for the googs is kinda an upgrade though. haha. The blog proposal I referenced earlier probably takes some planning. I'm not sure that's the direction I want to go, since the revenue split probably won't work out. Time to go back to the drawing board!
Danny
May 11, 2011 1:21 pm
I read your blog not because it provides the same things as Eater or Grub Street, but because you manage to have a unique voice with regard to food in NY (and with so very many voices on the topic, it's hard to find a distinct one sometimes). Also, I use google reader and didn't know you had your own domain name until now.
Hilary
May 11, 2011 1:23 pm
@Hilary,
Thanks for dropping by the blog! It's always good to get new folks to comment. That's interesting about google reader... it never showed that it linked to this blog's URL? I should go see how it works in there!
Danny
May 11, 2011 2:38 pm
Yeahhhh sharks. Before that was snakes. I was a fickle child.
RE: your proposal. I am disappoint man. I thought you were in it for the love of the game, not the money/glory associated with being a kickass food blogger.
Your post got me thinking though (a bad thing), about why exactly I'm blogging. I have no particular niche, I have no desires to parlay this into a book deal - not that it'd ever happen, I really have no clue why I post on a semi-regular basis. I'm really curious as to what direction you plan on taking with this whole change thing... possibly because I'm curious about your overall motivations for blogging haha.
Nicholas
May 11, 2011 4:51 pm
@Nicholas,
One part of it is to just have fun, right? That part is still there. I do enjoy it. It does seem to take some effort to post semi-regularly and have some sort of standards for your photos. Not saying mine are great, but to kind of keep a consistent style and quality to it, takes some energy.
I started to see if I could do it, and to work on my programming skills. Obviously eating is fun so it ballooned from there. Doing it because you like it is good enough of a reason in my book. So it's not all about fame and glory, but to achieve something at a level that you feel is a personal best, that's the goal. So if I suppose that this blog here can't go any higher, then the logical conclusion would be, 'What is the next goal?'
Also, in addition to being cheap, I'm greedy. haha. Although not so greedy that it kept me from entering the life of a mid-level web programmer.
Danny
May 11, 2011 4:58 pm
I'd be interested to see what you'd do next, but at the same time I'd be sad to see Food in Mouth disappear. This is one of the few blogs I read consistently. Why? Cuz it's honest and doesn't kiss ass like other sites. Good luck though on whatever you decide to do.
bionicgrrrl
May 12, 2011 12:23 pm
Herro!
I only stumbled upon your blog today because I was snooping out competition for a food blog that my friends and I have just started. (Unlike you we aren't so well off so we kinda wanna make money out of all the food we stuff into our mouths, so that we can continue ... stuffing food into our mouths.).
Anyways, I think your blog is very humorous and ... well tasty! so I am having a hard time trying to get off here. But this post made me think, so after my friends and I make a decent enough money off our blog (which is most likely a while) ... then where do we go?
I guess you feel like you don't have anywhere to go with this blog? and you don't have the passion for it as you used to?
Anyway i just wanted to comment that your blog was very interesting and i hope you continue to blog (even though you are our competition) haha
Annie
May 12, 2011 4:01 pm
Please don't stop writing this blog. I have about 140 bookmarked food blogs and this one is in my top ten.
May 13, 2011 8:21 pm
I feel ya on this, man. I've been feeling really restless and somewhat useless on the blogging front lately, and I get the feeling that people in our position are hesitant to really go all in on something that is highly unlikely to pay the bills. Food blogging is a fine thing to put real effort into, but I feel like it's much more enjoyable when it's not a hounding commitment or an investment that's supposed to yield increasing returns.
Anyway, I've been thinking a lot on how to take blogging experience and content and do something useful and hopefully concrete with it... we should shares ideas next time we meet up!
James
May 14, 2011 4:09 pm
Blogging is such a big commitment. The 'successful' ones are really created by individuals who either wanted some revenues from out their works or just have a lot of time on hand. I had a resolution to post at least twice weekly, but that never worked out. Sometimes I end up READING more blogs than writing my own. My fault.
kim
May 16, 2011 9:21 am
@Tia,
Rest assured, this blog wouldn't disappear outright. Even if I turn it into something else, I still like food blogging to some degree. I think if I kissed ass, it would increase traffic though. haha
@Annie,
A word of caution, most food bloggers, even with revenue, come in with net loss. Just because there's advertising, doesn't mean it covers web hosting + food. Haha. It pretty much just covers web hosting. Best of luck to you though.
@anon,
Thank you, I'm glad that you bookmarked this site and come back regularly :)
@James,
We should do lunch at some point. I don't have any ideas yet though. haha. I feel like food blogging is not a hobby the way bird watching or fly fishing is a hobby. Or maybe it is and I'm getting it all fucked.
@kim,
even twice a week is a huge time commitment. And then for what? I could go collect baseball cards or something else pointless. haha.
Danny
May 16, 2011 10:16 am
Some words of inspiration from Robert Krulwich to represent the less cynical side until next time:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/05/12/%E2%80%9Cthere-are-some-people-who-don%E2%80%99t-wait-%E2%80%9D-robert-krulwich-on-the-future-of-journalism/
James
May 16, 2011 1:24 pm
Blogging does get stale from time to time. Lately, I often find myself not wanting to take photos of what I'm eating so I can just enjoy the meal and company. But I think life getting in the way is more of the reason behind the lack of older people. There is a serious commitment required, and a good amount of people don't have the time or energy to keep a blog going.
You do have a unique take on the world and food, I'm sure you'll figure out what the next step for Food in Mouth is.
Blondie
May 16, 2011 1:30 pm
when you first started this blog, wasn't it supposed to be about your photography? the reality is, you are always going to love eating whether you blog or not, so why not document what you eat anyway?
I just read the Wang piece in NY Mag. Very refreshing.
Ang
May 17, 2011 10:15 pm