I've been having a pretty specific food craving of late.
On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, my dad and I went to the butcher in my parents' hometown. My dad turned me loose to pick out a few items to put on their new outdoor kitchen grill for dinner. Along with chicken sausage and stuffed pork chops, I selected bacon-wrapped chicken. The butcher asked if we wanted spicy or regular. Spicy, obviously.
When I bragged about the bacon-wrapped chicken, which contained a jalapeño and cheese in the middle, my friends have inquired "You mean like a crazy wing?"
A message to all the bosses out there: the half-hour lunch, or even the hour lunch are things of the past. The 90-minute lunch is the now.
Oh, I can see how you wouldn't want your employees stretching the lunch break to two hours and beyond, but I'm making the argument for the 90-minute lunch. This is self-serving for our website because we want the good workers of Waco to be able to experience any restaurant in town on their lunch breaks. So that's full disclosure.
But that doesn't mean we're wrong.
A few days ago, a friend and loyal WacoFork follower told me she was so excited about this coming weekend.
Obviously, there are several good reasons to look forward to this long Thanksgiving weekend: time with family and copious amounts of food, non-stop football for four days, Black Friday, leftover turkey sandwiches, etc.
But she meant something else. Something I wasn't thinking of, or at least something I wasn't thinking of at that exact moment. She was pumped to go to the Homestead Heritage Craft Fair.
I will not be preparing Thanksgiving dinner. This should come as no surprise to anyone and somewhat of a relief to my family.
However, having spent a few minutes speaking with good folks at Honeybee Ham & Deli, Crav at Gourmet Gallery and Secret Chef, I'm now convinced, if I were to prepare Thanksgiving dinner, I could knock it out of the park. Not only that, I could bring to the table something for multiple generations, dietary restrictions and dietary preferences.
I don't know about you, but as I made my way through a busy weekend, two questions seemed to be flowing back and forth between the Waco folks I encountered.
Wait, I should qualify this. The main question of the weekend was "Did you rush the field?" referring to the mass Baylor Bears celebration on the Floyd Casey Stadium turf following RG3's game-winning touchdown pass to Terrance Williams.
The other two questions, though, were "Did you make it to the Waco Downtown Farmers Market?" and "What are you doing for Thanksgiving?"
It's 12:37 p.m. and I'm using the WacoFork iPhone app to dial the new Hewitt Jimmy John's for lunch.
Ok, now I'm updating this blog with a little free-flow blogging about the general process of ordering the sandwich. After I called Jimmy John's it took them a second to figure out if my address was within their delivery area. Incidentally, I'm not at my house. My good friend Ronny Higgins allowed me to order the sandwiches from his house so that I might use a location within the Jimmy John's Hewitt delivery area.
When I wrote yesterday's blog, enthusiastically proclaiming the high volume of dining and entertainment options available in our town this weekend, I had an annoying voice in my head telling me I would inevitably leave out something.
That little voice was right. I left out something that could be pretty cool — the launching of the Waco Downtown Farmers Market.
But that adds to my original argument that we live in a vibrant place. I wrote a long list of things going on and managed to not cram everything into it. So I'm taking credit for being right. See how that works?
I love living in Waco. Not many places I'd rather be.
I hope you appreciate the uniqueness of this sentiment because I seem to hear a different story quite often. Whenever I hear people put down Waco, I believe they're doing it to make themselves sound cool. This all reminds me of the Beach Boys song "Be True To Your School."
I mean it though, especially as a weekend like this weekend approaches. And by "approaches" I mean beginning in just a few hours. Perhaps suggesting that the weekend is going to begin on Wednesday night makes me seem like a hard-partying college frat boy. If that's what you think, then a) cut me some slack or b) please withhold judgement until you've read my list of suggested things to do.
The picture accompanying this blog is not a picture of food, but it is relevant to this restaurant website and to people who dine out in Waco nonetheless.
The picture shows a backhoe doing work near Richland Mall at the location where an office building formerly stood. It's also the location where a BJ's Brewhouse will soon begin to take shape.
One thing I like about our WacoFork venture so far is that the people who have joined up with us and written reviews have fairly blanketed local dining establishments.
Go through our restaurant directory either on a computer or on our new iPhone app and see how just about every local restaurant has at least one review. This trend is even more evident when we have a new restaurant open and it almost immediately garners reviews.
Such was the case with Cantina Texas, which opened its doors on Nov. 3 and elicited a quick reaction. As a matter of fact, two diametrically opposed reviews were written within the first week. Response to the new restaurant also erupted in the form of blog comments on a blog I wrote announcing the arrival of Cantina Texas back on Nov. 3.
