Who Is Chekmark Eats?
The 22 year-old who couldn't stop eating and made it her career
I’m trying out a new long-form storytelling style in between our regular bi-monthly Chek Recs. Let me know if you like these, and I’ll do more! Enjoy!
The earliest I can remember studying restaurant menus was when I got to college at UT Austin with only Z’Tejas and Trudy’s to choose from. Food has always been a core memory for me, whether it was visiting my grandparents in San Antonio, where they’d have a whole roasted turkey ready for lunch time and Blue Bell Cookies & Cream ice cream in the freezer, or while in Lockhart, when my other set of grandparents would have BBQ brisket and peach cobbler ready upon our arrival. My mom cooked dinner nightly growing up and baked yellow cupcakes with chocolate icing for me to bring to my class on my birthday every year. Dessert has always been a celebration of happiness for me.
I moved to New York City straight after college on June 25, 2009, when I watched Michael Jackson’s death announcement on Jet Blue, which is a strange way to remember the day, but I’ll never forget it. I ventured to the big city to pursue my love for restaurants through a PR internship and to also continue my love for exploration in a place I had only lived for a few months the summer before. I spent the first few months with my maroon Zagat guide in hand, highlighting all the places I had been, while also making a spreadsheet of where I wanted to go. I walked the streets for hours, getting lost and learning the neighborhoods while looking for the best black and white cookies, tasting babka for the first time, and enjoying burrata, the most expensive cheese I’d ever seen that was flown in from Italy to be served at Lil’ Frankie’s. Here is one of my first Chekmark Eats reviews about Supper from 2012, which just made me laugh so hard.
My boss Randee taught me what it was like to eat two dinners in one night and how to order the whole menu for the table. I was exposed to bone marrow fried rice, red bean paste doughnuts, eggplant, soup dumplings, Gramercy Tavern’s tasting menu (2012 review), squid ink pasta, $50 veal parmesan, $60 truffle mac ‘n cheese from Graydon Carter’s Waverly Inn, cereal milk soft serve, and geoduck, which I’ll never eat again. It just never ended. My stomach grew to be as big as my eyes, and I walked everywhere, no matter the weather.
I actually got fired from my first job, which I didn’t even like, just three months in. This explains why it’s so important to me to choose who I work with and accept as a client now vs. working with anyone who will pay me. I just cannot do it. A week after I was fired, my brother had twins, and then a week after that, our beloved grandparents, Harry and Helen, died 24 hours apart — first, my grandmother (92) and then my grandfather (97) the next day. He made sure he could close his eyes and say goodbye now that the love of his life was no longer with him. Yes, just like “The Notebook.” What a weird string of events, right? Two new family members in and two out. I really wish my grandparents could see what I’ve built now as they were so proud of me for even moving from Texas to NYC.
I attended a talk for Gail Simmons’ book launch, and she motivated me to believe I could do anything I wanted and work with restaurants and chefs the way I wanted to, unlike my first job. I swiftly accepted my favorite job at SHADOW, working with “Top Chef" season 3 winner Chef Hung Huynh at CATCH. The same day I accepted that job, I had opened Gail’s book to read about choosing Hung as a winner, which I felt was a sign that I was in the right place. Since I started this job during fashion week and we represented many club-like restaurants and fashion brands, I had to staff a taping of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” at CATCH. I had zero clue who these people were — I just knew there were three sisters. I remember sitting in the background with the producer, who happened to be from Texas, while we watched the family eat sushi rolls and sit there doing basically nothing as cameras rolled. I looked out the window and there was a mob of people in Meatpacking hovering at the doors because they knew the family was inside. WTF? All of a sudden, two more girls walked in, and I confusedly texted my coworkers because I thought there were only 3 sisters. Turns out it was Kendall and Kylie Jenner. Then, Khloe tweeted a selfie of the two of them, with my face in the background. My boss asked me for the restaurant’s Twitter handle so she could tell the Kardashians to add it to the post or something like that, but I got so flustered that I delusionally thought she asked for MY twitter handle to add in. I thought I was going to get Chekmark Eats famous! Aw, so innocent.
I had started Chekmark Eats in 2011, two years after moving to the city. I ate like an animal for two years, trying new restaurants five or six times a week — not including bakeries — which made me an “expert” for when anyone came to visit and needed restaurant recommendations. When it was someone’s birthday and they asked for my guidance or when friends’ parents were visiting, people hit me up for Chek Recs. I logged on to OpenTable one month in advance to find all the new spots, while always having a restaurant on my agenda for the weekends with friends. One day, my mom told me that I should have another hobby besides eating and working out so I decided to write about those things, as I had just seen the Infatuation guys, who were music PR people at the time, live on The Today Show for their food-inspired side hustle. If they could do it, maybe I could, too?
I wrote restaurant reviews about WHERE to eat, not where NOT to eat, because that wasn’t going to help anyone find their Saturday night dinner spot. After one year, The Huffington Post recognized me as one of the best restaurant blogs in the city, alongside New York Magazine’s Grub Street and Infatuation. I woke up to so much traffic on my site that I thought it was a mistake! I owe my discovery to Jordan Blumberg, who was the editor at Daily Candy at the time and sent my website to the woman writing the Huff Post article. I had only been writing for one year, but yes, I dined out at least five nights a week, and I wouldn’t go to bed until I had a review published. I also carried around a digital camera and used a flash! Wow, I feel old saying this.
By the time I left NYC in 2016, I had published 600+ blog posts and restaurant reviews. Writing about restaurants by night and working in restaurant PR by day, I also started posting my food pics on Instagram, which had only been around for a few years. Working on more than 50 restaurant groups, chefs, and openings in NYC taught me how to understand chefs and the entire industry. It also really put me on their side as a team player instead of someone who sat across the table from them as a publicist only. I was in the kitchen with them tasting, talking, smelling, and sharing details about what other new restaurants were doing, intel I gathered as I was always out and about while they were in the kitchen working, unable to explore. They thought of me as one of them and appreciated my love for their craft.
I remember walking down the street, recognizing Chef Marcus Samuelsson by his incredible fashion and turning red because I was so excited and introducing myself to Bon Appetit’s restaurant critic Andrew Knowlton at STK, feeling like I had a chance to make him a contact. Funny enough, years later, we became friendly when he moved to Austin, and I couldn’t believe he actually knew my name. I took Alison Roman, who was also at BA at the time, to breakfast at my client, Black Seed Bagels. I remember her saving half of her bagel for lunch in her purse, and I knew I loved her because I always had my bag full of desserts. One of my favorite nights in the city happened when my old boyfriend and I accidentally crashed the James Beard Awards after party at the downstairs bar of Acme. We walked in before the party started, and no one said anything! We started noticing lots of famous food people coming in after us, like David Chang, and then each table was hooked up with bottles of Patrón and Milk Bar cookies by Cristina Tosi. We left by stuffing cookies in my coat and sneaking a bottle of Patrón out in his. That was also the night we decided to be “boyfriend and girlfriend.”
I think I got to see every chef, from Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert at a food festival to Mario Batali biking down the street on a scooter in his orange Crocs. These chefs and editors were on my bingo card as my first boss even asked me to make flashcards for editors — since I didn’t know who Tim Allen was — so that if I ever saw them out, I’d know who they were. It did feel like a punishment at the time, but it ended up working for me.
One night, Chef Thiago Silva made a taxi cab-looking cake for a DKNY Fashion Show party with Iggy Azalea and Rita Ora performing, and the craziest thing happened — we couldn’t fit the cake through the door!! I remember running through Wall Street, trying to get in touch with the building because we also couldn’t bring it in through the front door. We somehow found a way in, but things like this happened every week in order to make things successful. Restaurant PR in New York City was wild, especially at times when we, for example, had to call the paparazzi to see Katie Holmes and Suri outside Sugar & Plum, which was an agreement with her team for US Weekly press.
Anyway, while all the celeb hoopla was going on, I was really the chef whisperer. That’s who I cared about, and I wanted to secure press on their food and on them as people. Once Instagram started, I found a community of other food bloggers, like Jeremy from Brunch Boys, Jackie from NoLeftovers, Rayna Greenberg, who now has one of the best podcasts called “Girls Gotta Eat,” Alexa from EatingNYC, and more. I asked my boss if we could invite them in for free meals in exchange for posting on their feeds. That became the start of influencer marketing, and I’m really proud of that! After I got Black Seed Bagels in the Wall Street Journal and made my own special Chekmark Eats collaboration dessert with OddFellows Ice Cream, I had a change of heart when I hit 29. I think I was ready to work for one restaurant group instead of at a PR firm that had me hustling every night of the week. At this time, I met Larry McGuire of MML at Cafe Select in Soho, and a job with him moved me back to Texas… To be continued!
LOVE!!!