The end of this blog.
On January 3, 2015, after golfing with friends, we went to Buffalo Grill in Little Rock. While sitting there and talking the idea out with them, I decided to start documenting every meal I eat at restaurants — every single one — and ranking them on a monthly basis. I kept it up for six months before deciding there was no audience for such a thing, so I quit. But after 18 months of not doing it, I realized I didn’t care about not having an audience as much as I cared about having a reference to every meal in every restaurant in every city that I’d eaten. I started back New Year’s Day 2017, and I’ve been doing it ever since. Altogether, I’m approaching eight years of meals, documented and ranked. And I eat out a lot — last year I ate 421 meals at 234 different restaurants.
I had no intention of ever stopping until earlier this week when I came home inspired from a good conference. I told Liz that maybe I would be done with taking pictures of my food, but I wouldn’t stop until the end of June so I could say I’d done it for eight full years. But then last night when I sat down to rank a recent meal, I told her I didn’t want to. Maybe I’m already done, I said.
I don’t go to Buffalo Grill often — four times in eight years, to be exact — but the boys and I ended up there today. Out of habit I pulled out my phone to take a picture of my salad so I could rank it later. It hit me that I was in the same place that the blog had started. What more poetic end could it reach? So instead of taking a picture of my chef’s salad, I pointed my phone at my boys, eating their cheeseburgers, and I felt a tremendous burden that I loved for so long lift from my shoulders.
Thanks for tolerating my rankings over the years, and for listening to me air my culinary-related micro-grievances. If you’re ever feeling nostalgic about things I ate, feel free to dive into the archive at icleanedthisplate.tumblr.com. You can also keep up with me on my photo-a-day blog, which is still going strong after 14 years.
