McFoodie

McFoodie is looking for food bloggers and amateur writers interested in contributing a column or a piece on anything related to food, restaurants, entertainment, or New Jersey. Please email us if you are interested or have any questions.

1. Babette's Feast

2. Big Night

3. Woman On Top

4. Like Water For Chocolate (the book contained recipes) / Chocolat

5. Sideways

 
Honorable Mention: 9 1/2 Weeks (you know the scene!) & Mostly Martha (we haven't yet watched the latter but suspect it will make the list once we do)

 
Any others?  Post a comment or email us here.

Living on the Shore, each summer we are guaranteed many out-of-town weekend guests. Recently, our visitors have asked us whether we may tend to view (and review) local Monmouth County restaurants through rose-tinted lenses judging them on a different scale than those in foodie meccas such as NYC or Montreal. Well of course we do! After all, when we were growing up locally our only dining choices seemed to be mall food-courts and "NJ-style" Italian joints like Vic's, Tuzzio's and Illiano's (the latter is still a family fave). Nowadays, it's only natural that more recent ethnic and haute-cuisine additions to the local scene such as Bistro Ole, Taka and Copper Canyon get us excited to dine in Monmouth County once again. So, if you're visiting from out of town, be sure to take our reviews with a grain of salt and remember what a wise man named Einstein once said: everything is relative.

We have already posted a link to New York Magazine on our Links page but we thought it warranted some extra attention.  If you haven't already checked out their amazing online restaurant section, you are totally missing out.  We're not fans of the weekly magazine per se, especially since their stagnant restaurant section reprints the same useless info on the same crop of restaurants in every issue, but the magazine's amazing online searchable database has become our go to place on the 'net for reviews and info on NYC restaurants.

In particular, we have made it our mission to eat our way through Adam Platt's listing of 101 Best NYC Restaurants.  Our only criticism of the list is that you have to click through to get a restaurant's coordinates. Hmm, perhaps some good advice to apply to our own site?!