Oh, hi. Welcome to the latest iteration of my meanderings about all things food in St. Louis (and elsewhere, for those infrequent times when they let me leave town).

I suppose it’s about time I entered the blogosphere. My P-D forum, Eat at Joe’s, has been around for about five years now and is inhabited by lots of interesting folks, including a cheesemonger’s wife, several long-time waiters and restaurant owners, one of the leading wine distributors in town and various and sundry other sweet-dispositioned or sometimes-grumpy foodies.

But most forum junkies don’t like it when posts are more than a ‘graph or two long, so this format allows me to be expansive without interrupting the flow of discussion that a forum facilitates. I can also get stuff out more immediately than the once-a-week format of News à la Carte in the dead-tree edition allows.

So I’ll be blogging about stuff like random food and restaurant news (Les Bourgeois Winery, for example, just won a Best of Varietal Best of Class gold medal at the Jerry D. Mead New Work International Wine Competition for its Riverboat Red), as well as things I stumble upon in my daily travels (I had a Special bahn mi — pâté, “pork patty,” “ham & hock” and head cheese — for lunch today at BBC Bahn Mi Boba Tea and Creperie, 243 North Euclid, across the street and down a door from Liluma in the Central West End. While there, I discovered that Sansui on West Pine has apparently been bought out by the staff and now is known as Kampai Sushi Bar. (”Parked” website for now, but they have it on their promotional literature, so it should be up soon.)

In true “information must be free” Internet fashion, I’ll also link to interesting stuff I find on the Web. For example, if you’re reading this, you’ll also be interested in Ian Froeb’s RFT blog, Gut Check and Bill Burge’s always amusing and full-of-info stlbites.com. Warning: Bill’s blog currently has a seven-letter word for a non-edible body part at the very top of his page. IMHO it’s perfectly appropriate — kinda like when it, or a similar word, appeared in our newspaper when the Rev. Larry Biondi said it during an interview — but don’t click the link if you expect a word censor on all the blogs you regularly read.

I’m looking forward to the opening of the Clayton Farmers Market this weekend, although I’ve already had several good market weeks at Tower Grove and Ferguson (and Soulard, where I got some great morels two weeks ago). I also want to hit Land of Goshen in Edwardsville soon, although gas prices are cutting into my willingness to do a 60-mile round trip.

If you have suggestions for this blog, feel free to post a comment. If there’s something specific you’d like me to write about (here, in the paper, or both), feel free to send it over the virtual transom to jbonwich@post-dispatch.com. See you around.