Who is Hagan Blount? And where the Hell did you come from?

I’m a gluttonous ex-sales guy with a blog.  Without the sales background, there’s no way I’d be able to set this whole project up; it takes a lot of patience to get 60 food writers and 93 restaurants to do anything. 

How long have you been blogging?

On and off since 2001.  I had a blog called TheDTrain.com where I used to write about stream-of-consciousness stuff; originally started writing to document teaching in China.  It’s still up, but I think I last optimized it for IE3, so it’s pretty much worthless.  I ported the posts over from there to the Wandering Foodie (here’s an excerpt) so people could read them more easily.

You take a more project oriented approach to blogging? Why? What does this allow or disallow you? Was this a conscious decision?

I like to do things that are big and ambitious; things that people hear about and say “Can you really do that?”  I ran into that a lot for my projects in Boston and DC where I filmed myself eating at 24 restaurants in 24 hours. One of the things I think I am missing by doing the project approach is a regular posting schedule.  I think by having two or three new posts a week, I’d have a greater opportunity to touch on topics that attract a wider range of people and could get more consistent traffic.

What is 93 Plates and where did you get the idea?

I didn’t like 24 in 24.  If you can imagine trying to eat at that many places in that amount of time, you know you’d be hating food by the end of the 12th restaurant.  To do 24 in 24 in NYC, you’d need a theme, like Brooklyn or Pizza because you couldn’t possibly take only 24 restaurants and claim it was the best of the city.  I wanted to capture the full flavor of the boroughs in one project.  The only way to do this would be to eat at all the restaurants in the city that people liked to call their favorites.  I don’t remember exactly how the idea popped into my head, but I was interested in doing something that was more of a marathon than a sprint. Thirty-one days in the month of January, three meals a day… 93 Plates.  Adding the food writers was completely selfish on my part; I wanted to meet these people and get a refresher course in NYC (I haven’t lived here since I did a Y2K internship for the NYSE).  It’s funny, ten years ago to the day, I was standing on Broadway and 46th counting down to the millennium, and it took me this long to get back.  How dumb am I?

What do you hope to achieve? It seems like a project oriented towards the food blogging community, what can you tell us about that community?

I put it to one of my friends this way; I’m just going run and hope enough people are handing out gatorade along the path so I can keep running.  My ultimate goal is to sustain myself by articles and projects.

I’m not the best person to speak on behalf of the food blogger community, I’m just excited to talk with all these awesome writers, to watch and listen to their reactions to the food, and maybe learn a thing or two about what it takes to be excellent in this field.

Where was the worst place you ever ate? the best? What was on the menu?

Worst place?  I couldn’t say; I tend to repress.  Best place?  If I had to have one thing before I died—one item off a menu—I would have the Chili Half Smoke at Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C.  If I had to pick a restaurant that simply exuded excellence, I would pick Petit Louis Bistro in Baltimore.  I worked there for a while, so I am partial, but if you have a chance to eat there they serve the best roast chicken I’ve ever had.  My most recent “wow” came from O Ya in Boston, NYT’s Best New Restaurant of 2008.

What’s next for Hagan Blount? What are you thinking about these days?

Like NFL coach Rex Ryan; I’m not focusing on anything but the next meal.  I’ve got 93 to go.

Image Source: FoodMayhem