The Short Exact Guide…

Yes, contrary to popular belief, Short Exact is actually still alive!

I wasn’t really planning on such a long hiatus, but the time off has been useful and productive. Life has been very busy, and in the meantime, I have started writing another blog on a topic completely unrelated to restaurants. I’ve been enjoying working on that other project, but it became too difficult to maintain two blogs while doing everything else, and something had to give somewhere. Unfortunately, Short Exact turned out to be the something that gave. If you have been checking in all this time, I would like to apologize for my silence and to let you know that I appreciate your readership.

The good news is that I am planning on calling an end to this hiatus, and it will be nice to get back to writing restaurant posts again. With everything that is going on, it will be difficult to post as often as I sometimes have in the past, but at least, I will try to keep to some sort of regular schedule. If you haven’t already done so, subscribing to the feed is a good way to to be notified about any updates.

At any rate, it’s nice to be back. Please check back in tomorrow, as I’ll have a new review posted — for real.

UPDATE (April 11, 2007): As expected, the full-time debut of the T-Third has been somewhat of a disaster, as Muni copes with the challenges of adding a new rail line to the Metro system. However, Nat Ford, Executive Director of the SFMTA, has posted an official apology on the website. Eh, it’s something, but hopefully service will be set right soon — that’s better than any apology.

UPDATE (April 12, 2007): Ford’s official apology has been removed off the website. Surprise, surprise. Muni finally shows some class and apologizes, but then… they revoke the apology. Anyway, to read more about the unfolding disaster, check out this article from the Chronicle. Or pretty much any blog or official news source, since it seems just about everyone is discussing this.

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We’re very happy to announce here on the Short Exact Guide that San Francisco Muni (the agency which operates the buses, light rail, and cable cars in San Francisco) — at long last, after years of anticipation (as well as construction errors and budget overruns) — is officially opening its new T-Third Street (or “T-Third”) light rail line for full operation, starting this Saturday, April 7, 2007. This is a very substantial change for Muni, an agency generally for known for cutting service rather than adding it. The new T-Third line, which contains over five miles of brand spanking new light rail track, runs from Sunnydale Avenue (in Visitacion Valley) on the one end, to Castro Station on the other end.

With the addition of the new line, Muni is making other service changes. Most notable is that the 15-Third bus (which essentially duplicates most of the T) is being chopped entirely, while the 9X-San Bruno Express now has an expanded route running full time, and the J-Church will run past Embarcadero to serve the ballpark and Caltrain station area at peak hours only. The S-Castro Shuttle is also effectively being discontinued, but it never came half the time anyway, so this might not be such a big loss. At any rate, click here to read about all the service changes and to see a map of the new route.

We know what you’re probably thinking: “Muni? Light rail line? This is a food blog. I came to read about restaurants and look at pictures of food, not to hear about a new Muni line. What combination of drugs is this guy on — and, might he be willing to share some of it?”

We claim that even though this post is not a restaurant review, it is still relevant to this blog. Regular readers have probably guessed that Short Exact is a bit of a public transit nut (and you would be right), since at the end of each review, we eschew providing more typical information on the parking situation, and instead suggest the transit routes you can use to reach each restaurant. Of course, the substantial service changes going into effect on April 7 render many of our old transit “itineraries” obsolete. The other point of this post (besides sharing our excitement about the new light rail line) is to let you know we have updated each and every one of our old reviews so that they are consistent with the new Muni service that starts on Saturday.

At any rate, we’ll be back to our usual programming soon, with a follow-up review of the newish FiDi Italian restaurant Perbacco. See you soon, and have fun “riding the rails”!

If you’re like us, you are probably simultaneously excited and frustrated by the food blogging scene based in the San Francisco Bay Area — excited, because there are just so dang many of them, ranging in topic from recipes to restaurant reviews to food travels to just some good, old-fashioned (and new-fangled) food porn — but also frustrated, because, once again, there are just so dang many of them. New ones seem to pop up everyday, and there are so many good ones, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with them while simultaneously leading a life that includes a few iotas of time away from the computer and the Internet. (I know: life not on the Internet? To be honest, we’re not actually sure that this mysterious other-world exists, but there is increasing evidence which suggests that it does. We promise that if we learn something definitive, you will be the first to know.)

Fortunately, a new website called Blogsoop has finally launched in San Francisco. The site is the brainchild of Douglas Cress; Doug lives in New York City, so, naturally the first site created was Blogsoop New York. Just a few months later, though, he has tackled another major food blogging epicenter, and Blogsoop San Francisco has finally officially launched, and it’s already looking mighty spiffy.

Blogsoop is most easily described as a restaurant review site. In particular, it collects the restaurant reviews that bloggers post and then organizes them by restaurant, creating a fast and efficient way to read lots of material about a given restaurant of interest. We know what you’re probably thinking: “finally!” — because that is exactly what we thought when we first heard about Blogsoop. In general, we’ve found that because food bloggers are truly passionate about their choice of topic, blog restaurant reviews tend to be more useful and thorough than those found on sites like Citysearch and Yelp, which often contain short (and completely unhelpful) descriptions like “the food was good, but the service was only so-so,” without elaborating about what was good or what was so-so. Blogsoop may list fewer reviews for a given restaurant, but the quality of those reviews tends to be higher — and blogger reviews also often include food porn not found on those established review sites. This makes Blogsoop an excellent resource, because the writings of many bloggers are available instantly, without having to do any long Google searches.

In reality, though, Blogsoop is more than just a restaurant review site. There’s a forum and chat aspect as well, which we hope will build more community among food bloggers, as well as between food bloggers and their readers. In addition to finding the restaurant reviews that bloggers post, the site also makes available the complete feeds of these bloggers, even for posts that are not, strictly speaking, restaurant reviews. In the short period of time we’ve perused this site, we’ve already:

• Been alerted when bloggers we read regularly wrote new posts
• Re-discovered bloggers that we once ran into but had forgotten
• Discovered new blogs we hadn’t seen before

So really, you can just use Blogsoop as an alternative (or at least a healthy supplement) to the “food blog” section of your feed reader — and this is exactly what we intend to do.

As you’ve probably already deduced, Doug has graciously included reviews from the Short Exact Guide as part of the website, which is one reason why we’ve written this little spiel about Blogsoop. (Note: in addition to this post, we’ve added Blogsoop to our blogroll and to the Promotionals page.) But if you are sitting at your computer reading this post then you already know about Short Exact, so we definitely encourage you to check out Blogsoop to discover new bloggers you may not have read before. We’re very excited about this new development in the San Francisco food blog scene, and we can’t wait to dive in.