This is an extremely deep metaphor for what happens here.

It’s the 3rd anniversary of my first video, and that makes it time for my annual State of the Bacon address, on how things have worked out and what might lie ahead. Needless to say, I feel pretty good about a year that brought a Beard award, and getting national press as one of Saveur’s Sites We Love, and just this week, this in the Reader’s Best of Chicago:

In some ways that’s the coolest of all, though it doesn’t frame as nicely as a Beard award. But there were no nominees in these categories; this is, as we say in the ad biz, unaided recall, top of mind awareness, people who, asked to name a top food blog, said Sky Full of Bacon with no prodding. To come in third behind a well-publicized arm of a national publication and a site with hundreds of users of its own, as one of the sites people think of first in this category, is a pretty great testament to the fact that my work here has gotten through and made a splash on the local food scene. That people actually watch and read this stuff.

When I started writing for publications about food, one of the things I knew I would need to do, as a dad with kids and thus much less free time than the many young people checking out new restaurants and bars every night, was find ways to stand out beyond simply doing every assignment I could land. I knew I needed a project that would help me be seen as having a particular point of view and the capabilities to bring it to readers and viewers. I chose doing videos about food because I felt it was something I could do that few others were doing and that would get attention— and I thought I could do it well.  Two of my particular ambitions for it when I started were getting an ongoing gig of some kind (or more than one) using video, and winning a James Beard Foundation award for it, which in turn would hopefully serve to open other doors when I could call myself a Beard Award winner.

So this is a big year in that both of those ambitions were realized. The phone finally rang with an editor at the other end, wanting to talk about the prospect of a series of chef challenges— Key Ingredient for the Chicago Reader. And literally our very first work— the first three videos/print pieces in the series, from last November and December— won a Beard. Add to that other notable work (such as the Eater videos about Next and Aviary, which have now had over 10,000 views) and milestones (such as getting published by probably the magazine that I most dreamed of writing for when I started all this) and I believe that I have sort of completed the first stage of this process, graduated from one level of food writerdom.

Now I just have to take those accomplishments and figure out how I use them to go to the next level. Whatever that is.

The next level.

Alas, there is a melancholy part to this anniversary, which is that the other Reader-cited “blog” (not exactly) that I helped start, LTHForum, is at an unfortunate crossroads in its own existence. In a few days it will be sold as an asset in the bankruptcy of just one of several founders— possibly to a group of LTH insiders (who also have some responsibility for LTH being in this mess, but nevertheless, are presumably its best hope for continuing). Or possibly to… who knows?  Will it exist a week or two from now?  No one can say for sure.

I haven’t told the story of how that happened, and don’t intend to start now (though I’ll answer questions), but if this next week brings down the curtain on LTHForum as that community’s outlet, I will still be proud of the impact our community had going back to Chowhound days in awakening Chicagoans to the real diversity of ethnic cuisine all over the region. As I am also proud that in the end, when I felt I needed to walk away, I didn’t just sit there and nurse a grudge but took what I had learned there and raised it to the next level with my own new creative pursuits.  (And with a URL people could actually remember.)

Thank you, if you read this far, for going along on that journey with me for these past three years, and for reading and watching. The best is yet to come, I promise.

A poster mentioned on LTHForum the other day the clever logos that “someone” used to do a few years back, repurposing various forms of food-related vintage art. Needless to say, that someone was me, at least for the first few years; here’s one that I never got around to running before I left, and thus has never appeared at LTHForum.