Food For Thought

Trip Start Jul 10, 2007

Trip End Ongoing

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Flag of United States St. Petersburg, Florida
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

We are back into the comfortable routine of making our desserts, sauces and bread during the day and taking care of our dinner guests at night, and don't get us wrong, this is what we do and have done for 18 years for ourselves, it is our vocation, and we love it. It inspires us, continues to teach us daily, and still excites us to see customers Ohh and Ahh over dishes we create. What rocks our world, is when our peers, chefs/owners from other establishments have dinner at Elements and say they are inspired by a dish, and there is no greater compliment than when they send their friends to us, knowing their reputation is at stake, if we don't deliver.
So settle back and read our travails, as we continue to check out the Tampa Bay Area's hundreds of restaurants, returning to our favorites and eschewing those where our experiences either in quality, value or service have left a lot to be desired. Catching a glimpse of a restaurant's entire product from the point of few of a restauranteur and chef might seem like a conflict of interest, but our insight is not meant to be a negative, nor do we expect to supplant the area's professional food reviewers critiques. We want to share our personal opinions and tastes, intertwined with both back and front of the house knowledge, that some weekly paper's critics sorely lack, and more importantly, before expressing an interest or dislike in a restaurant's cuisine we will have been a frequent visitor to that establishment and able to measure whether a one time mishap in service, atmosphere or food flavor and execution, was just that. We know nobody is perfect, not even the country's top chefs and restaurants, even those with their own TV shows, cookbooks and restaurants, will often admit their failures, mistakes and downfalls.
Time to get on track and during the coming months display our hopefully verbose talents, starting with some of our favorite restaurants, all vearing away from the bland, cookie cutter, ubiquitous foods delivered on plastic plates with paper smiles, leaning towards ethnic, eclectic and well executed foods with lots of flavor and value to match. We all live in a hectic and oft too serious world, so if we can have even one person slow down for a millisecond, read our blog, smile a little, enjoy a new restaurant, and recommend one to us to try, then we will have accomplished our job, so tomorrow the sharing of culinary experiences both recent and distant, local and international will commence.