Getting a Handle on Georgia’s Restaurants
As someone who has observed the development of Atlanta and Georgia restaurants over many years, I am fascinated by the burgeoning number of Atlanta restaurant bloggers. There are 20 on my blogroll, and I read all of them at least once a week.
Urban Spoon ranks 38 Atlanta restaurant and food bloggers based on the number of total visits to their blogs with Jennifer Zyman’s “Blissful Glutton” blog ranking number 1 with 18,185 visits to her 188 total posts and “The Traveling Gourmet Pig” ranking number 38 with 39 visits to his 1 post.
Atlanta is no different from any other U.S. metropolitan area with a young, hip, affluent population and its fair share of business entertaining. The national interest in restaurant blogging is so pervasive that these two food journalists, Brooke Burton and Leah Greenstein, recently proposed a code of ethics for food bloggers be adopted. Their proposal was deemed of sufficient interest to enough people that the New York Times “Dining Out” blogger Kim Severson wrote about it. That’s a lot of interest in restaurant blogs.
The Brown’s Guides approach is to continue putting ALL of the state’s restaurants on the website – all Atlanta restaurants, as well as restaurants in the state’s other eight travel regions - and categorizing them by city and type of food so you can find them easily.
For restaurants without a website, we are offering them an opportunity to create a “web presence” here on the Brown’s Guides site that will include an extensive profile about their food and atmosphere, a photo gallery and a menu.
Our goal is to have on the website EVERY Georgia restaurant - from all-you-can-eat country cooking, to coastal crab shacks, to 5-star dining at the Cloister and Buckhead’s Ritz-Carlton - EVERY Georgia Restaurant, all indexed and searchable by city and type of food.
The next big thing coming is a “comments box” where restaurant patrons can write their own “blogs” about their experiences at a particular restaurant. Then, we’ll see where it goes from there.