The new face of derryX Dines

You’re probably wondering what the hell I’m talking about from the title.

Don’t worry. I’m still writing up the restaurants and other great things I learn about.

I figured I’d take this chance at a bit of an explanation. I’ll let you in on an inside joke.

Several weeks ago, you may have noticed the addition of a new buddy to the top of the derryX Dines pages. If you didn’t, that’s alright; now you will. Click the link to see what I’m talking about.

Back in the days of Windows 3.1 and Clipart, there was a piece of chef “art” that you used to find all over every deli or pizzeria menu.

One night, when going over a few design elements with my good buddy, MetalFrog, who you know does most of the web design work that I ask him to for this project, I told him about this ridiculous chef icon making the ok sign. He didn’t believe me, so we googled it and found the new face of derryX Dines instead.

I am pretty much obsessed with ridiculous beards, so this little piece of art in which someone took the original and just used MS Paint to scribble on a beard generated so much laughter between the two of us that we had to find ways to incorporate it into the site. MetalFrog messed around with it for a few minutes and he came up with what you now see at the top of every derryX Dines post or when you click the “derryX Dines” tab at the top of each post or page.

I had MetalFrog sandwich the derryX.com logo between the bearded and beardless chef to head my “derryX Cooks” posts. It’s like they’re facing off against each other in a game of Mortal Kombat.

We couldn’t stop there, though.

After a surreal dining experience together at a place where the Yelp! reviews are absolutely useless (big surprise, right?), we both sat down for some more design work, and, instead of focusing on what we needed to do, MetalFrog was dragging the mouse around and fooling around with different things. He quickly came up with this:

You’ll now notice that it’s now on the right of every post and page underneath a header, “The Official derryX Dines Map.”

That brings me into another part of the story. I’ve been working on getting the dining posts organized by location. It’s not a trivial exercise, but Google Maps recently launched features that make this relatively easy to do. What’s better is that once you save the map to your places, you can access them on the go, which makes this pretty useful if you’re out and about and are trying to remember what I said about a specific place or to see if I’ve even visited that place. Definitely check this feature out; it’s something I’m going to be updating constantly as I complete write-ups.

I think the whole play off of the “I love NY” theme is pretty fitting, as I’ve been putting a great deal of emphasis on highlighting some of the things that are great about NY from the culinary perspective. I’m still learning about things that I never knew existed, and the amount of things out there that are good in their own special way seems to be endless.

So anyway, if you’re out and about and you see the bearded chef icon, you now know what it means.