Burgers versus buffets: Donald Kennedy (left) and Guy Alaimo

Credit: ANDREW AUGUSTINE

Uncultured Foodies

Biting into the world of local food blogs

I have to confess that I haven’t been as diligent as I perhaps should have been when it comes to exploring the burgeoning world of food blogging. From time to time, while Googling ingredients or restaurant reviews, I do bump up against its swollen edges, and quite often it’s a blogger or their ireport-style kin who fill in the blank that’s bugging me. I do have one—The Wednesday Chef, where New Yorker Luisa Weiss tests new recipes as they’re printed in large American dailies—that I’ve bookmarked and return to from time to time, but largely I’ve tended to limit my contact with blogs to random chance. But it isn’t either snobbery or technophobe anxiety that’s kept me away; it’s simply the bewildering array of choices and the feeling that, once started down this appetizing road, I’ll never get off it, sniffing from place to place like a crazed dog let loose at the world’s largest smorgasbord.

Despite that sense of size and activity, I realized after arranging to interview two Victoria-based food bloggers that I had come across their writing before in my day-to-day meanderings. What are the odds of that? On consideration, pretty good I guess. Since they live where I live and write about things I like, it was only a matter of time before fate and search engine algorithms threw their blogs in my path. Maybe that’s how a good blog gathers its audience: not through advertising or even necessarily through word of mouth, but just by being the exact thing that people need from time to time. So where do you turn when you need a little straight talk about southern Vancouver Island burgers? Try Donald Kennedy’s Victoria Burger Blog. And if you’re a (perhaps closeted) buffet aficionado, looking for the lowdown on price vs. quality and quantity in the Greater Victoria area, sooner or later you’ll find yourself reading Guy Alaimo at his Victoria Buffet Blog. It happened to me.

Friends and recent graduates of Camosun College’s Applied Communication Program, Alaimo and Kennedy created their online food niches after Kennedy began reading the American blog, A Hamburger Today, and was inspired to turn his attentions to patty quality in the Victoria area. He gave the bug to his pal Alaimo and together they’ve been faithfully adding weekly entries to their blogs for more than a year.

Both Kennedy and Alaimo are humble about the growing popularity of their respective blogs. They don’t make any money and they’re not after fame; they’re invested in their projects out of interest alone. “I’m an uncultured foodie,” says Kennedy, “I don’t have formal training. I just enjoy food, and burgers in particular. When I started out, there wasn’t a lot of consensus on where to find a good burger in Victoria. A while ago the Times Colonist picked Milestones as the best, and I didn’t agree.”

So it was time to put up: in the last year Kennedy has written reviews for 50-60 area burgers and the current champ on his list is served up at Aura in the Laurel Point Inn. “It’s a supplier patty [as opposed to house ground], but it’s still juicy and fresh. They make their own bun and use wild B.C. mushrooms.” There’s a brief pause in the interview while we both wipe drool off of our chins. What kills an otherwise good burger for Kennedy? “I don’t like things that overwhelm the flavour of the beef too much. Ketchup and barbecue sauce can really ruin it for me.”

When I asked Alaimo separately about his own critical skills, he was quick to back off from the notion that he employed any sort of special expertise. “I’m not a connoisseur,” he admits. “I enjoy buffets and if people find that entertaining or if it helps them find what they want then that’s great. But I just write what I think.” Like Kennedy, he tries to update his blog once per week, which is no great hardship since, “I eat at a lot of buffets.” It’s Kennedy who gave Alaimo the idea to start his blog and Alaimo still draws on his friend for support. “Donald tends to be a motivator. He forces me to work and to post my writing.” When he first started blogging, Alaimo tells me, his site attracted five hits a day—“and that was all from myself”—but now he’s up to 60-100 hits per day, mostly, he figures, from people like me who find him through Google searches. His writing is plain and frank and, as more people are exposed to his blog, he sometimes gets negative comments posted on the site.

“They make me feel bad about myself for a minute, I suppose,” he says. “But then I just flame them right back.” Best value buffet in the area, according to the master (come on, if you aren’t a buffet connoisseur, Guy, then who is?): May Gold Village in Langford. And it’s not just about the unlimited supply of that amazing yellow steak sauce either.

Both Alaimo and Kennedy have finished school now and are out in the world trying to scrounge up work in a troubled economy. But I didn’t get the sense that their enthusiasm outside of the shelter a student’s life can sometimes provide had dimmed at all; on the contrary, both of them have recently begun to bolster their blogs by including content submitted by family and other interested readers. Alaimo expects to have regular buffet reviews coming in from the Southern Ontario region and Kennedy has just posted his first reader-submitted review from Tacoma. Way to go, guys!

Now my only question is, can you bring in someone to keep me up to date on were to find the best pizza between Victoria and Nanaimo? M

Read the Victoria Burger Blog at vicburgers.blogspot.com and visit vicbuffet.com for the full scoop on Victoria Buffet Blog