So when you think “food vlog,” a couple of things come to mind – really pretty close up photos of goat cheese and arugula, a self-indulging monologue on the slow-food movement. We Eating TV is definitely not one of those shows; hosted by San Francisco-based Style Beyond Compare deejay Big Jon and The Homie Gus of the JunkYard Gang, the two bring in a video camera and review their neighborhood food spots. Are the videos as polished as, say, Check, Please! Bay Area? Of course not. But it feels a lot more real, and that’s what really counts for me.
Here’s the thing about San Francisco; there’s the Bay Area that a lot of people move to as adults from other parts of the country — a lot of them friends and co-workers of mine in the Internet industry — and there’s the Bay Area where I grew up. And the Bay Area I grew up in didn’t have internet culture or social media mixers or Valleywag; it was middle-class, multi-cultural and we watched Dominique di Prima rapping on Home Turf every morning on Channel 4 and all knew how to do the running man when Heavy D came on. Fuck, even the social pariahs like me knew how to do the running man. (I didn’t listen to “alternative rock” until I was a sophomore in college.) That scene still exists, you just have to know where to look for it; the Bay Area is big enough for everyone to just barely tolerate each other.
I guess this is why I really like this food vlog — because first of all, they don’t call it a fucking vlog and second, these guys are like the people I ran with in college, interviewing places I would eat at after I’ve gone out with my co-workers to some pretentious dinner. Also, it’s Style Beyond Compare; I remember them playing shows on KMEL growing up.
