Tabélog Meet and Greet

A few months ago, I was invited to a “Tabélog Meet and Greet” event. Now, before I proceed, allow me to tell you what Tabélog is. Tabélog is an online restaurant guide. It’s sort of like a posher version of yelp. The company originally started in Japan, but has come stateside.

I was asked to join Tabélog as a blogger/reviewer about a year ago. One of my good friends from college was working with the company and was helping it get set up in New York. Knowing that I am a massive foodie and needing help to launch the website in New York City, I joined up and began blogging and writing restaurant reviews.

When I first started, I was very active with Tabélog, frequently posting pictures and writing reviews of restaurants, however, as school began to dominate, I stopped contributing. Despite this, the Tabélog team always kept in contact with me, inviting me to many of their social events. I was also asked to participate in their “Tabélog” awards, as a judge, was a very cool.

Anyway, although school always keeps me very busy, I decided to be social and attend a Tabélog meet and greet. It was quite an experience. The event was held at a Scandanavian restaurant called “SKAL”, located downtown. When I arrived, I immediately felt super uncool. I was surrounded by all these super trendy looking people who seem to all know each other. I very much felt like a fish out of water!
I was able to meet the core members of the Tabélog team, which was nice. (Finally putting faces to names). Incredibly, although I have not published any of the personal information and go by the username “studentfoodie5489”, a couple people recognized me. (By recognize I mean, they looked at me and went, “Oh my goodness! You must be studentfoodie5489! I love your posts!”) I didn’t know whether to be flattered or a little freaked out that they knew who I was….

Anyway, at the risk of sounding like a snob, I will admit, I thought the food at the event was ok. I will definitely give it creativity points, but I can’t say I was blown away. I did however enjoy my cocktail. It was a modern twist on the classic “Manhattan” cocktail, where SKAL added a bit of red berry juice. That was absolutely delicious!
I think my favorite part of this get together was watching all of the food bloggers. It’s kind of funny to listen to all of my co-foodies (?) and co-bloggers giving their opinion of the foods being tasted. Sometimes I thought people were spot on in their analysis of taste, other times, they had me laughing on the inside because some of the comments were so pretentious or ridiculous. Of course, because we are all food bloggers and take pictures, Tabélog made sure to have a separate table strictly for food pictures. This means, each dish was set up so we could all take pictures. How considerate!
the tasting menu
Overall, an interesting evening…

Also, if anyone is interested in checking out Tabélog, here is the NYC website: www.tabelog.us

If you want to follow me on Tabélog, my username is: studentfoodie5489. My profile picture is a picture of my black cat, Jiji.

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