The Breakfast Blog
 We first came across Jamie Wodetzki's mouth-watering breakfast blog over a year ago and fell in love. We don't make a habit of featuring sites with a narrow local focus, but Jamie's culinary critiques transcended the Melbourne, Australia breakfast scene.
His evocative breakfast reviews accompanied with a side of pleasing photos provided his blog with universal appeal. He proves the maxim that no matter how tiny the appeal of a site may seem, it's all about interesting content executed in an appealing fashion. We lobbed a few questions about blogging and breakfast at Jamie and he was kind enough to hold court... Hey Jamie, what was the impetus behind the blog? I was curious about blogging, so I decided to start one. At about the same time I was moaning about the pathetic coverage of breakfast by mainstream food critics. All they really care about are those other meals. So I decided to fill the gap and start a blog dedicated to breakfast reviews. It also seemed like a good way to force myself to go out a try new places. Did you have prior experience with restaurant and/or food reviews? Total amateur. Your pictures are always delicious. Did you have a photography background or are you just good behind the lens? Maybe it's genetic. My father is a photographer. How have you kept up the passion for updating the site with fresh reviews? I think blogging is mildly addictive. So that's a partial explanation. The other part is that I actually do love eating breakfast. The real challenge is to keep the blog from sounding tired and boring. In your time running the site, has anything happened that surprised you? Quite a few surprises, actually. I'm surprised that it has so many readers (over 1,000 per day now). I'm very surprised it won a bloggie. And I was totally surprised when a waitress quoted my blog back at me one day when I was ordering. That was funny. What was the most gratifying moment you've had as a result of the site? Getting a restaurant to change its menu. That was cool. Can you imagine? They served fancy home-made sausages without any condiments. Outrage. What area of the world would you most like to visit and review? I really need to do a serious road trip through the U.S. some time soon and find some good diners. Tips on breakfast hot spots across the U.S. are warmly welcomed. What other food blogs do you enjoy? There are plenty of good ones. I check out tomatom.com for local Melbourne food news. The London Review of Breakfasts is always pretty witty, and good for London breakfast ideas. A recent discovery was The Wine Doctor, which came in very handy during a recent visit to Burgundy. Your dream breakfast? Your dream breakfast guest(s)? I think I would go with the Iron Chef format. It would be a breakfast/eggs theme, with a cook-off between Iron Chef French, Michel Roux, and Gordon Ramsay as the challenger. The guests, who would also be the judges, would include AA Gill (very funny and scathing food critic for The Times), Shakira (apparently she likes to do paintings of fried eggs in her spare time), Eva Green (just because), and Christopher Hitchens (because nobody said you can't talk politics over breakfast). What do you do besides run the site? Do you have a day job? I run a software company called Exari which allows just about anyone to write complicated documents (contracts, sales proposals, etc) by answering a bunch of questions in their web browser. So, as you can see, writing food reviews has absolutely nothing to do with my day job. I think of it as weekend therapy and entertainment. Thanks Jamie! May your eggs always be sunny-side up.
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