Artisanal cheese taste-offs, cupcake bake-offs, beer experiments: These events now dot the New York (to be fair, mostly Brooklyn) cool calendar, attracting the kind of DIY-inclined urbanite who trawls Chowhound message boards, watches Top Chef, and traipses through the outer borough hinterlands in search of "authentic" fare. All the while, of course, vehemently insisting that he or she is definitely not a foodie.
One such DIY-inclined Chowhound-trawler is Matt Timms, whose cook-off events, the Chili Takedowns, have launched a bumper crop of underground culinary expos. Puttering along on his moped in a star-stickered helmet, Timms, who is 37, might be geek chic's answer to Rod Kimble. To judge by the reaction of the barista at the coffee shop where we meet to talk, Timms might also be something of a hero. She's the sous chef to the People's Choice Award-winner at Timms's Bacon Takedown, and she longingly recalled her teammate's "Baco-Avo Goat-Lato" and all of the people who were "super-stoked about the bacon and the booze but definitely took their voting seriously."
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