mediabistro.com Job Applicant for Restaurant Writer (76952)

Job Application Copy

See Job Details: http://www.mediabistro.com/joblistings/jobview.asp?joid=76952

I understand that your firm is looking for a writer to compose short articles on restaurants, and I'd like to be considered. I've done similar work for a dozen or so publications including Dining Out, The Onion A.V. Club, Austin Monthly, America Online, Chow Baby, Destination Dallas, and for various book-form city guides. I'm based in New York.

Along with the attached resume, I've pasted some recent samples below. Please take a look and let me know if you'd like to discuss this further.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown

Bonnell's Fine Texas Cuisine

Some chefs aim to take dishes and make them their own; Chef Jon Bonnell takes dishes and makes them Texan. The menu at Bonnell's Fine Texas Cuisine is made up largely of items that have been modified that they might better appeal to Texas dining sensibilities, and which are conjured up from ingredients hailing almost exclusively from the state and its shores. Among appetizers, the Texas Bruschetta makes good use of avocado-pecan relish, tortilla chips, and fire roasted salsa in addition to the more universal herbed goat cheese, while the Oysters Texasfeller proudly trace their parentage to the Gulf of Mexico. Among the entrees, one finds such things as the Buffalo Tenderloin - a pepper-encrusted buffalo filet that's pan-seared, topped with whiskey cream sauce, and served alongside asparagus and truffled pommes frites and Elk Mini Tacos consisting of spicy elk meat served in corn shells and supplemented by pico de gallo, queso fresco, and the utterly improbable green chili cheese grits.

Craft

Like many great restaurants, Craft operates under a menu dictated largely by the earth's tilt. Whereas a visit on one particular month may find the diner confronted with guinea hen galantine or Muscovy duck served in cherry sauce, another visit could very well involve Nantucket Bay scallops with rhubard molasses or venison saddle served in huckleberry sauce. Whatever the season, though, fresh vegetables tend to play an unusually prominent role in most dishes here, the intrepid diner will find Jerusalem artichokes, Colorado arrowhead spinach, baby bok choy, and shishito peppers along with a range of other, slightly less exotic greens. Craft also offers the sort of brunches one might rightfully expect from the sort of place that offers half a dozen varieties of oyster; the roasted Scottish salmon with picked beet puree and frisee competes with the humble biscuits and gravy for one's mid-morning attentions.

Ounce Prime Steakhouse

In the short time since it first appeared on the ultra-competitive Dallas red meat scene, Ounce Prime Steakhouse has established itself as the city's most admirably contemporary alternative to those area steak purveyors who may have become a bit set in their ways. Ounce bucks tradition with such innovative, bar-raising sides as lobster mashes potatoes, as well as equally inventive entrees like beef carpacio with Dinon aioli. Typical steakhouse seafood supplements such as Alaskan king crab legs also make the menu alongside other, more surprising items like champagne miso Chilean sea bass. And in a nod to the unorthodox, ice cream sandwiches make the dessert list. But Ounce sets iconoclasm aside when culinary tradition happens to be right; thus it is that the resident steaks are aged just shy of a month and broiled at 1,800 degrees, with the happy result being timeless Chateaubriand and Wellington that compete favorably with most any cut on the market.