We’re expecting a new ZenKimchi team member in December. Her current name is “Alkongi,” or “Eggbeany.” Looks like a lizard right now, but I hear that he’ll become a cute baby that cries and poops.
Category: Who’s Who
Fatman’s Back
It’s been a long time coming, but Fatman Seoul has finally recovered from a nasty hacker attack that had them red listed by Google. Everything’s been cleared now, and from what I’ve been told from the source, there’s a lot of pent up food blogging waiting to splooge out onto their pages.
Did I mention that I hate hacker attacks?
New Blog: A Frog in the Kitchen
I’m always on the look out for new Korean food blogs, especially ones with unique angles. A Frog in the Kitchen takes a French approach to Korean cuisine. Written by French expat Tiffany Bernard in both English and Korean, the blog tackles a good bit of lifehacking (my new catchall word these days) by making French foods with Korean ingredients and then some. She even makes a mold out of a Korean butter package so she can stack ratatouille in tower form and garnish it with a glorious strip of bacon. Girl has mad knife skills, too.
A Frog in the Kitchen
Profile: Moon Sung Sil
Image from Tamin.kr I’ve been wanting to introduce people to the Korean side of the food blogosphere. So every now and then I’ll toss a Korean language blogger your way to add to your subscriptions. Even if you don’t read Korean, the blogs are worth having around. Most of the Korean language food blogs are picture heavy anyway with sparse commentary–like Seoul Eats without the dog pictures (ha, ha–just kidding Dan).
Moon Sung Sil has a lot. She’s one of the original “wifeloggers,” and her specialty is home cooking. She’s also one of the more financially successful Korean food bloggers out there. With a handful of cookbooks published (we own one of them, and it’s not too bad), speaking gigs, product partnerships and some recent fame on Korean TV commercials, she’s doing pretty well.
I’ve been a fan of her since the Joshing Gnome posted something about the K-bloggers and wifeloggers going at each other a la West Side Story. I’ve been subscribed to her blog ever since. She’s cute, peppy and practical. So what if she hawks things? Bloggers are allowed to make money too. Just filter past that, and you have a nice informative blog.
Here’s a little video of her promoting the cookbook we use in our house.
Here’s her new commercial for Finish dishwashing detergent.
Roy Choi of Kogi in the WSJ
The Wall Street Journal has a profile of the man who started the gourmet taco truck craze and was inadvertently one of the big boosts to Twitter in the early years (early as in late 2008)–Roy Choi. Yes, the same Roy Choi of the Kogi Taco Truck. The story goes into his Korean-American background and the all-to-familiar themes of pressure to perform at school with subsequent rebellion.
It also gives some hints to what his upcoming rice bowl restaurant will be like. They say in the article that there’s no name, but I could have sworn that I read somewhere that it was going to be “Scoop.”
[HT to Edward]
The King of the Streets Moves Indoors
A Little Love for Maangchi
It looks like our favorite YouTube Korean cooking diva Maangchi has been getting some press lately, in both Korean and English.
Maangchi shares:
Dakshana Bascaramurty wrote about me in The Globe and Mail last week, which is Canada’s biggest newspaper. Ever since then I’ve been getting so many interview requests from newspaper reporters and TV and radio broadcasting companies.
All major Korean newspapers and internet news portals have been reporting on the Globe and Mail article for days. I’m surprised at the tremendously powerful effect of the Globe and Mail newspaper!
These are the articles that I found on the internet (hehe, sorry, you can’t read it because it is written in Korean, but at least you can see the photo of my face on the kimchi video):
- http://www.torontolife.com/ (in English!)
- http://news.hankooki.com/
- http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/
- http://www.asiatoday.co.kr/
- http://www.seoul.co.kr/
- http://www.koreatimes.net/
A little trivia about her I didn’t know. “Maangchi” was her name when she played online games, so she used that for her cooking videos.
New Kid in Town: Seoul Food
There’s a fresh cool Korean food blog out there that just started in June called Seoul Food. Even though it’s a couple of months old, it has a good buffet of posts to keep your lunchtime happy.
Serious Eater in Seoul. Give her a call.
Robyn Lee of megablog Serious Eats is in town to cover the 7th Annual Ddeok Festival. Feel free to welcome her to Seoul by giving her a text message. She has posted her temporary cell phone number (010-8061-5215) on the Serious Eats web site.
Korea-based foodies…send her an SMS and tell her who you are.
Foodbuzz Publisher Community Launches
The ad network and community Foodbuzz has officially launched. They have been so good to me this past year, including–well–including ZenKimchi in their “24, 24, 24” global dining event (BTW–feel free to “buzz” ZenKimchi as much as you want).
Here’s the press release for more information:
LAUNCH OF GLOBAL FOODBUZZ BLOGGER COMMUNITY
LEVERAGES REAL-PEOPLE, REAL-TIME POWER OF FOOD PUBLISHING
San Francisco — October 13, 2008: Foodbuzz, Inc., officially inaugurates its food blogger community with more than 1,000 blog partners, a global food blogging event and an online platform that captures the real-people, real-time power of food publishing in every corner of the world. At launch, the Foodbuzz community ranks as one of the top-10 Internet destinations for food and dining (Quantcast), with bloggers based in 45 countries and 863 cities serving up daily food content.
“Food bloggers are at the forefront of reality publishing and the dramatic growth of new media has redefined how food enthusiasts access tasty content,” said Doug Collister, Executive Vice President of Foodbuzz, Inc. “Food bloggers are the new breed of local food experts and at any minute of the day, Foodbuzz is there to help capture the immediacy of their hands-on experiences, be it a memorable restaurant meal, a trip to the farmers market, or a special home-cooked meal.”
Foodbuzz is the only online community with content created exclusively by food bloggers and rated by foodies. The site offers more than 20,000 pieces of new food and dining content weekly, including recipes, photos, blog posts, videos and restaurant reviews. Members decide the “tastiness” of each piece of content by voting and “buzz” the most popular posts to the top of the daily menu of submissions. Foodbuzz currently logs over 13 million monthly page views and over three million monthly unique visitors.
“Our goal is to be the number-one online source of quality food and dining content by promoting the talent, enthusiasm and knowledge of food bloggers around the globe,” said Ben Dehan, founder and CEO of Foodbuzz, Inc.
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The Foodbuzz blogger community is growing at a rate of 40 percent per month driven by strong growth in existing partner blogs and the addition of over 100 new blogs per month. “The Foodbuzz.com Web site is like the stock of a great soup. The Web site provides the base or backbone for bloggers to interact as a community, contribute content, and have that content buzzed by their peers,” said Mr. Dehan.
Global Blogging Event
Demonstrating the talent and scope of the Foodbuzz community, 24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs offered online food enthusiasts an international, virtual street festival of food and diversity. The new feature showcased blog posts from 24 Foodbuzz partner bloggers chronicling events occurring around the globe during a 24 hour period and included:
· Mid-Autumn Festival Banquest (New York, NY)
· The “Found on Foodbuzz” 24-Item Tasting Menu (San Francisco, CA)
· Aussie BBQ Bonanza — Celebrating Diversity (Sydney, Australia)
· The Four Corners of Carolina BBQ Road Trip (Charleston, SC)
· Criminal Tastes — An Illegal Supper (Crested Butte, CO)
· From Matambre to Empanadas: An Argentine Dinner (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
· A Sweet Trompe l’oeil (Seattle, WA)
“24 Meals, 24 Hours, 24 Blogs” captures the quality and unique local perspective of our food bloggers and shared it with the world,” said Ryan Stern, Director of the Foodbuzz Publisher Community. “It illustrates exactly what the future of food publishing is all about — real food, experienced by real people, shared real-time.”
About Foodbuzz, Inc.
Based in San Francisco, Foodbuzz, Inc., launched its beta Web site, foodbuzz.com, in 2007. In less than a year, Fooduzz.com and its community of over 1,000 exclusive partner food blogs have grown into an extended online property that reaches more than three million users.
Guess Which Chef Is in Korea?
Been involved with hooking this show up with restaurants, guides and research and suggestions the past few weeks. If you read the other blogs, you know which show this is.
Can’t reveal much more until it airs. There will be some fun behind-the-scenes tales and tons of pics after it broadcasts.
Note to Jennifer L.: Yes, that’s your man on the right.
