Finding fellow foodies online

Joel Solish has a hard and fast rule for dining out: no one eats until a picture of each plate has been taken. This documentation is common among well-wired food lovers, who share pictures and critiques of each meal eaten out with their fellow foodie followers on twitter and the blogosphere.

Solish opened his twitter account last February, fresh out of his corporate tourism job and new to work as a marketing freelancer. He says it offered the perfect distraction. He chose the handle @Foodie411 because he says he’d become a personal Yellow Pages for friends looking restaurant recommendations, and wanted to connect with other foodies online.

It wasn’t hard to find foodies to talk to. Soon after joining he started jumping in on conversations about local restaurants, farmers markets, and hot button issues, like factory farms. After attending a #meetup bake-off, Solish started hanging out with food tweeters on a regular basis.

Of the bake-off, Solish says, “It was incredible. It was the first time I met so many people that I interact with on a daily basis.” In December, he decided to host a meet up of his own, and tweeted an open invitation to Toronto’s foodies to attend a meat themed pot-lock at his home near Bathurst and Dupont using the tag #meetluck.

Now Solish is hooked. He’s got to know Doss and Chiu, who organize #foodiemeet, as well as other meet up regulars, a group whose tastes are so similar that only a match-making service like twitter could have brought them together. “They’re my friends. I’ll participate in anything they do,” he says. “That’s the thing twitter has been so successful with: pointing out who you should be hanging out with.”

Solish’s love of food began early. Every Friday night when he was a young boy, Solish’s parents would drop him off at his grandmother’s house, where he would stand in the kitchen for hours in awe as she cooked without ever consulting a recipe. “That’s where the passion came from,” he says. “And it’s nice to connect with people as an adult that share that passion.”

“It gives you an inner calm to be around people who are the same as you,” he says. “You don’t have to explain yourself. They get it.”