There are people who eat to live, and there are those who live to eat. If you spend an hour wondering a neighborhood and reading restaurant menus before you decide where to have dinner, if you are obsessed with finding the best bread, the best produce shop, the best sushi in a city, if eating in tourist traps when you travel is below you, then you are a chowhound. I always thought that my obsession with food was strange and almost embarrassing until I discovered chowhound.com – a collection of web based discussion boards about restaurants, bakeries, gourmet shops, wine shops, markets, and many other food related topics.

Food critic Jim Leff started chowhound.com as a place to discuss great food with others. Most participants on chowhound.com are food-obsessed people, but are not food critics. I find their advice more reliable than anything I read in Boston Globe or Gourmet Magazine. Professional critics stick to better-known restaurants, and stay away from hole-in-the-walls and undiscovered neighborhood gems. They also have to deal with politics in the world of restaurants and food writing, and can't always express their real opinions. Neither do they spend their own money on meals, so no matter how objective they try to be, they can't evaluate the value of the restaurant as well as people spending their own hard-earned dough. Zagat guide tries to deal with these issues. It collects reviews from real diners, but presents them as a hodge-podge of contradictory quotes and meaningless numbers. By the time Zagat finally collects the data and publishes the guide, the chef might change, the service might go downhill, or the restaurant might even close. But chowhound.com comes to the rescue providing reliable, timely, and uncensored information about the food world.

Chowhounds' mission is to discover deliciousness of any cuisine, and in any price category. Chowhounds talk about places that range from Mom and Pop hole-in-the-walls to Michelin 3 star restaurants. From burgers and pizza to foie gras and caviar any dish is worth a discussion. The boards are organized by geographic region, so you can learn about food finds in your city as well as all over the country and even abroad. Chowhound.com is a great traveling tool. With advice from my fellow hounds, I feel like a local in any city. I have also learned about restaurants serving authentic cuisine from other countries. Although there are many Chinese restaurants in any city, authentic ones are very hard to come by. The information from chowhound.com totally changed my perspective of cuisines as exotic as Cambodian, and as deceptively familiar as Italian and Mexican.

Chowhound.com looks like a homemade web site – nothing pretty or flashy about it. However, it has some great features that make it a thriving on-line community. You do not need to register to participate in discussions. The boards are also vigilantly monitored. This eliminates off-topic posts and "flame wars." The result is tons of juicy information about restaurants in all parts of the world, and a friendly place to go for advice and ideas. No good search capabilities are available, but each board lists subject lines, so you can use CTRL+F (the find feature of your browser) to find posts on particular restaurant or in certain areas.

Check it out and discover the chowhound in you. Woof! Woof!
Chowhound.com