The Los Angeles Times reports that in the last few months some of the bigger names in food across the country have joined the online chattering class, posting their innermost thoughts, with photos and recipes, just as home cooks have been doing for years.
Do any of them ever write about food safety issues?
Laurent Gras, an Alain Ducasse protégé and former executive chef at the Fifth Floor in San Francisco, is now blogging almost daily at L.2o Blog on the run-up to the opening of his own restaurant in Chicago.
In New York, Michael Laiskonis, the pastry chef at Le Bernardin, started blogging in January, and his lengthy disquisitions on desserts and how he creates them are windows with photos into a wildly creative and contemplative mind.
Other chefs have latched on to the apron strings of established websites — Traci des Jardins of Jardiniere in San Francisco (right) and Rick Bayless of Topolabampo in Chicago both blog for the Epi-log at Epicurious.
But as Des Jardins notes, keeping up with a blog is the hard part. She has been writing for Epicurious since December and says she is loving the freedom of expression, with editing only to "clean up my bad grammar," but has seen chefs let blogs "get old and stale."