From the Desk of F&I...
In September of 2007, as a way to keep my foot in the door of the restaurant business, I decided to launch Portland Food and Ink. I had recently had a baby, closed the doors of my restaurant and moved from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to Portland, Oregon. My head was in a very different place from when I had left Portland 6 years earlier and although I had gotten out of the business that I lived and loved for 15 years, i didn't want to completely let it go. So I decided to write about two of the things that I am passionate about, one being Food and the other Tattoos, two things that Portland has plenty of. So I had my "in" with a lot of Chefs already and with the tattoo spin of my website, it was pretty easy to get to know people in the industry, and I must also mention that Portlanders are awesome and want to see other Portlanders succeed.
So here we are 2 1/2 years later, with almost 100,000 hits to my blog and for the time being, living on the opposite coast about 3,000 from Portland in Richmond, Virginia. So with the change of venue, I decided to drop the blog and turn Food and Ink into an online magazine that will give me the opportunity to step out of writing only about regional food and tattoos. Now I can take F&I on the road and with the help of other writers and photographers, be able to cover much more ground.
I'm not a blogger anymore, I'm not taking one of my cameras with me every time I go out to eat. I will write about amazing meals that I have on my travels, but I'm not going to tell anyone to not go to a restaurant because of one bad experience that I have. I have started thinking that bloggers far too often report too much of the bad and sometimes snap a shot with their phone or update their blog while they are pissed off and thats not what I'm going to be doing. I love everything about the restaurant business. It's pure insanity and if you get into it, you really must have some seeded issues that haven't been dealt with yet, many of my closest friends I met while working in kitchens and yes, we do have some screws loose, but we all have one thing in common and thats a love for food. I hope that old readers enjoy the changes to F&I and I hope that new readers dig what we are doing here. I hope to hear from you all.
Editor In Chief
Travis Mason