Pim Techamuanvivit, one of the most famous food blogger in the world, was in Melbourne for the Food and Wine Festival last month and she had one thing on her mind: an Aussie pie.
Not just any old bakery pie but the best. And I helped her find it at the Middle Park Hotel; it was a belted Galloway, slow cooked in white rabbit ale and with a ring of bone stuffed with marrow poking out the centre.
It was one of her many discoveries in Australia which she has passed on to some of the world’s top chefs and her global readership.
Back in November 2000 when she started her blog (now hosted at Chezpim) it was the dark ages in blogging terms and she wasn’t focused on food.
Like many her first post was apprehensive: “hmm…my very first blog. — I might be on to something.”
And so she was and in 2009 she published her book The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy and had enough going on to turn down a TV series on extreme eating with The Food Network.
“The blog started as random and very mundane thing,” she says. But nearly 10 years later she is ensconced in the world of Michelin star chefs and food festivals with her partner David Kinch, the chef at Manresa (a two-star Michelin restaurant about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco).
Now based in California, she grew up with a privileged background in Bangkok, shopping in Honk Kong, socialising at the country club and eventually living around the world.
Her blog may not have the highest traffic but it is one of the highest profile in the world with several hundred thousand readers each month dwarfing the traffic of many food websites in Australia.
It was 2001 when she started first writing about food, spurred on by a reservation at one of the most famous restaurant’s in the US, The French Laundry.
Pretty soon she writing about Madeleines and recipes often inspired by her Thai background and soon was reviewing the big name restaurants in Paris. “Nobody took their cameras [to restaurants] back then. It was kind of fun,” she says.
“I’ve always been in search of good restaurants when I visit a city,” she says. “I tell a story about a meal. I write about my meal that night and I say whether I like it or not. But it is not criticism.”
In December 2004 she cemented her position on the A-list of bloggers by instigating the Menu for Hope Blog fundraising event to raise money for the tsunami that devastated communities across South-East Asia and has now become an annual event that has raised hundred of thousands of dollars to help various Third World causes.
While the success of her blog was built on writing about the most expensive restaurants in the world her food philosophy remains down to earth. “Food doesn’t have to be expensive but the ingredients need to be good,” she says.
She reckons that bloggers should post pictures of restaurant food and that chefs should love blogs, especially young chefs, who get to see pictures of food from around the world. “If you are a young chef working in Melbourne how can you get to San Sebastian?” She adds that Albert Adria, the brother El Bull’s Ferran Adria, loves looking at food blog pictures.
Her advice to blog writers is to be succinct: “People writing about restaurants should write it and then cut it by half.”
Pim’s next move will involve concentrating on writing about what she likes in each of the cities she visits.