Everything you've ever wanted to know about Lori Midson in 300 words

Those of you who follow this blog have likely read my weekly Chef and Tell interviews, wherein I pepper local line monkeys with a syllabus of prying questions. We run a condensed version of their answers in print, while the entire interview runs over the course of two, sometimes three, days on the Cafe Society blog. The interviews are time-consuming -- really time-consuming -- for both the chefs and me, but their words give our readers a rare, intimate glimpse into the lives of Denver's culinary wizards. And while there's been more than one chef who's likened those interviews to homework -- or worse, the SAT -- the half-hearted whining disappears once they've read the interviews in their entirety.

But I imagine if I took those chefs off the line for two to three hours at a time, then condensed their 2,000- -- and usually more -- word interview into 200, they'd want to burn my ass with bacon grease. And with good reason.

Yesterday, during our weekly Cafe Society meeting, I mentioned to my editor that a local pub -- 303 magazine -- had interviewed me for its Denver dining issue: an interview that amounted to nearly thirty questions, took up a good two hours of my time and ended up being close to 1,700 words.

And, yeah, I expected the full interview to run in 303's dining issue, if for no other reason than I was never told it wouldn't. But when I picked up a copy, flipped to the page where the headline read "Food Critic" above my name, I was all, what the fuck? An obscenely, embarrassingly large, in-your-face black-and-white photo takes up three-quarters of the page, while my 1,700-word "interview" was reduced to scrap -- 300 words above a fat rectangle of white space.

To be fair, Frank Bonanno was interviewed, too, and there's a lot more white space below his interview than mine; and Lon Symensma, the owner and chef of ChoLon, who was also interviewed, looks swell, as usual, which may be why his photo takes up most of the space on his page.

In any case, during that meeting, my editor bribed me with beer in an effort to convince me to publish the entire 303 interview that fell by the wayside of the World's Largest Photo.

By the way, today is my birthday, so be nice. Y'all can tell me I suck candy canes tomorrow.