Hey, everyone!
I’m so excited to share a new project that we’re launching today: Fresnoland Food. From our very roots, we’ve always aspired to be the home for stories that celebrate the diversity of our culture, neighborhoods, and communities that are often overlooked.
Jumping into food coverage for us feels like a natural extension of that ethos. All civic life goes back to food. So for a public service journalism organization, why not?
Fresnoland Food will be a lot more than just stories about the latest happenings with restaurants. With today’s launch, we profile the father-son duo creating a ‘tacoasis’ in the Lowell neighborhood and have Eastside native Dayana Jiselle’s neighborhood food guide to Southeast Fresno — and so much more.
We’ve brought in Del Rey native Vince Mancini to helm the project as our first contributing food editor. You may have seen his bylines at GQ or The Ringer, but he’s been writing about food on-and-off for most of his journalism career.
To follow along, sign up for Vince’s weekly food newsletter, which we’ve cheekily named FAT City. (Yes, let’s own our airport code!)
We’ll also be updating Fresnoland Food regularly on the site and on Instagram, so you can follow along there for updates.
Lastly, I’m so grateful for our partnership with F3 Local, whose founding sponsorship has given us the runway to launch this new project. Local support is absolutely essential to keeping local journalism alive.
Danielle Bergstrom
Editor-in-Chief and Executive Director
PS: Check out Vince’s inaugural launch of FAT City below. I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along!
Congratulations! You are looking at the first installment of FAT City, the weekly newsletter of Fresnoland Food. Years from now, you’ll be able to tell your friends “actually, I prefer their older stuff.”
What is FAT City?
Put simply, FAT City is the weekly newsletter for Fresnoland Food.
Put more complicatedly, FAT City is dedicated to a few simple truths: That decent food is part of what makes a city livable. That without a great food scene, a city isn’t really a city. And that without great food coverage, no food scene can truly thrive.
We believe that one of the most bedrock functions local journalism can provide is to answer those basic questions, like “Where’s the fire?” Maybe just behind that one is “Where can I get a decent bite to eat?”
For answering the former, there’s Fresnoland. For answering the latter, now, there’s Fresnoland Food (which you can also find on Fresnoland under the “Food” heading, and in newsletter form from FAT City). We’re here because we believe that food and civic health are inextricable.
Food is how we connect, it’s how we innovate, it’s how we celebrate our traditions, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it, when we think we’re just fulfilling our most basic need. I might go as far as to say that eating out is the oldest form of community, in the same way that people say prostitution is the world’s oldest profession.
That’s FAT City. It’s… about food.
FAT is more than just an airport code. It’s a state of mind.
As the fifth-largest city of America’s first-largest state, we’re often overlooked. Of course, flying under the radar isn’t always a bad thing. Ample parking, the ability to get a reservation without being a celebrity, and rarely waiting in long lines because your favorite spot went viral on Instagram are just some of the benefits Fresnans regularly enjoy. Still, there are times when a little recognition would be nice – if not for the accolades, then at least as a helpful guide.
As the nation’s food basket, we’ve been the “farm” in so many bigger cities’ “farm-to-table” dining for years. And yet, we don’t have an outpost of Eater. The travel mags tend to skip us entirely. Michelin doesn’t even send scouts here. For a city of more than half a million people, Fresno is a veritable coverage desert.
That being said, it’s not really our style to whine for attention or demand that outsiders take us “seriously” (self-seriousness, in fact, is our kryptonite). One of the best things about this place is the DIY spirit. If something doesn’t exist here, we just build it. Every weekend, taco trucks spring up anywhere there’s space for a grill. All over the city, mom-and-pop operations take over the abandoned shells of national chains like hermit crabs. Where else can you get al pastor in an auto shop or eat a glorious diner breakfast in a building that used to be a Wendy’s? Only in FAT City, baby! (We won’t try to make that a thing, but it felt right this once).
FAT City is our attempt to bring that DIY spirit to food writing. If the big-name food outlets don’t want to come here, that’s okay. We have good people living here, and we can do it ourselves. You can’t really impart local knowledge without being a local anyway.
Who are we?
Broadly speaking, we’re locals who’ve been around a bit. Hopefully we understand what Fresno is, but also have dreams about what it could be. Many of us have spent enough time living in other places to see things that other cities have and wonder why couldn’t we do that here? FAT City – and Fresnoland Food, more broadly – is part of our attempt to do that.
Speaking for myself, I’m the type of person who wakes up in the morning thinking about what I’m going to eat for lunch and dinner. As an older lady once told me, “I have a finite number of meals left to eat on this planet and I don’t want to waste any of them on a bad one.”
I don’t know if I’d take it quite to that extreme (I’m an overworked dad, I eat plenty of drive-thru too), but I understand the sentiment. I live to eat good food. I want to know what’s in it, how it was made, where it comes from, and hear all the cool little stories about the people making it and all the history behind why they’re doing it precisely that way. Most people would rather serve you a meal than tell you about themselves. I’m the same.
I spent the first 18 years of my life in Fresno County. I grew up in Del Rey and graduated from Reedley High. Before I left for UCSD, Fresno was “the city.” After four or five years in San Diego, I went to grad school in New York, lived in San Francisco for almost a decade, and even spent a year or two in Los Angeles. During that time, I launched a pop-culture mag, traveled the world, and wrote for some national publications like GQ and The Ringer. I’ve interviewed every Top Chef winner since 2015, as well as celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck, Marcus Samuelsson, and Jacques Pepin (my personal food hero, putting me into a pleasant trance with his calming French lisp and casual deftness with a paring knife). Along the way, I’ve rhapsodized Fresno’s taco scene for a national audience, sampled 30 tacos to judge Taco Truck Throwdown, and eaten all 35 of the Cheesecake Factory’s cheesecakes (clearly I am not above a food stunt).
Eight or nine years ago, Fresno’s siren call (aka my stunning and brilliant wife who lived here) lured me home. Meanwhile, my first job in media was writing restaurant profiles for the Del Mar Times. So covering local food for Fresnoland is sort of a full-circle moment. And for as much as I love interviewing celebrities and going to fancy food events (and trying to eat 20 or 30 of something without puking), my favorite part of the job has always just been talking to people who are doing cool things, and writing about them for other people who want to know about people doing cool things.
The simple premise of FAT City is that the Fresno area has lots of those (people doing cool things, that is).
When I used to live in other places, part of me always dreaded telling people where I was from. After years of it, I learned to anticipate the crinkled noses and the knee-jerk derision. And while I’m not here to tell anyone that Fresno is the Venice of San Joaquin Valley, I can say in all genuineness that the vast majority of the scorn directed our way tends to be based on misconceptions, views shaped by, at best, having driven through the stinkiest corner of the place a handful of times.
Fresno is more than that. There’s a lot of cool stuff here, even if we haven’t always spent enough time crowing about it or telling people where to find it. That’s a big part of what I’m hoping to do with FAT City. Not just to help outsiders see us in a better light, but to help make it a cooler, more connected, more vibrant place to be for those of us who call it home.
What will you find here?
In a sentence, stories that matter for people who love food.
Does that mean a straight restaurant review or announcements about which restaurants are opening or closing? It might, when relevant. More often, it will look like guides to where to get a decent shawarma wrap or a bowl of pho, rankings of the best local whatever, and profiles of the people who are doing interesting things in the world of Fresno food. The people taking pride in cooking simple food for an honest price will always matter as much to us as the glitzy grand openings and the chefs winning awards. A thriving restaurant isn’t just fodder for a press release, it’s a node in the local economy.
Occasionally it might look like an easy weeknight recipe, or a story about what’s in season and some ideas about how to use it (I love gardening and cooking at home as much as I love eating out). The idea isn’t so much to validate anyone with a thumbs up/thumbs down-style consumer report-style. Review culture is everywhere, and easily gamed. The idea is to show you all there is to discover in local food, to guide you through it, to help you make the most of what we have, and maybe make Fresno a little better of a place to be in the process.
To that end, I’m pleased to introduce our first course of stories. Your guides to the best shawarma and baguettes, a spotlight on the Southeast, profiles of Jimmy Pardini and Don Tacha Taqueria, and much more, with even more to come.
— Vince Mancini, Contributing Editor, Food
