By most accounts, 12 years is a long damn time.
Unless, of course, you are having fun.
It feels strange to measure our run on local television in this market by major milestones, yet here we are. When we started this website and then TV show, my daughter was in grade school. She just started her junior year at NYU two weeks ago.
There have been ups, downs, this ways and that ways, yet here we are stronger than we’ve been at most points of this decade-plus trek through our local food scene and beyond.
By way of quick recap for those that are not familiar with our television show, pretty much every weekend for the last dozen years, we’ve aired a show in this market dedicated to food in the South. With a significant focus on Savannah/Bluffton and Hilton Head Island, of course, because this is home.
The show debuted on Saturday morning, September 24, 2010 on WJCL-TV where I was working as a News Anchor at the time. A few years later, we moved to WSAV-TV. A few years after that, we moved to our current home WTOC-TV and are very glad to be here. High noon on Saturdays.
Officially the show is called Eat It and Like It with Jesse Blanco. Season 13 will debut this Saturday, September 17, 2022.
The show’s focus was (and frankly remains) great food in the South. Not necessarily Southern food. Huge difference, no?
It regularly amazes me how many of you I meet on the street refer to some of the early days of the show. Making reference to something I said or did almost a decade ago. But you do. All of the time. Still, there are so many of you who have never seen the show and only follow what we do with our food scene on-line. That’s fine too. We are grateful for any support. And there is a ton of it.
If you are familiar with the show, then you know the format well. It was a focus on a particular dish. Maybe it was bacon, maybe it was biscuits, maybe it was sushi. For 30 minutes we highlighted 3 spots doing great things with that particular dish. That format served us very well for a long time. Sometimes, it presented challenges.
What would say if I told you we had a 3 or 4 day pow wow in January of 2020 about what the future of the brand would look like and put a plan in place? I can chuckle about it now, but how many people made big plans for 2020 in the first two months of that year? Yes, the deck has been shuffled several times since then.
So enough looking back. What can you expect going forward? The short answer is everything. I really don’t know how to describe it. Eat It and Like It with Jesse Blanco will continue to be about food in the South with an emphasis on Savannah, Bluffton and Hilton Head Island because this is home.
We will have features on great new restaurants. Great dishes and the great people that make it all work. There will no longer be a singular focus on a dish. You may see a feature on a great new chef followed by another on a local farmer. You may see a new coffee shop followed by an oyster harvest. Very little will tie them together anymore. It will be more of a snow globe effect, which we feel will provide a little bit of something for everyone on the regular.
At the same time, we will have an entire episode on Savannah’s pizza scene, which is growing faster than a chia pet. There will be an entire episode on the labor shortage that continues to plague the industry. There will also be an entire episode on what I am calling “Old School Bluffton.” I’ve been told so many ‘back in the day’ stories in that town. I cannot wait to share them.
There’s also a peanut butter pie on Hilton Head Island we’ve got our eye on. Yes, we are going to have some fun with that too.
Finally, we’ve got trips to Florida and Charleston planned in the short term. That was always part of the formula and it will continue to be.
Our original intent 12 or so years ago was to sprinkle in some food porn with some wanderlust and make you want to take a ride for some good eats, whether that was across town or across the South. That will remain the case as long as we are producing this particular show. If I find something delicious in my travels, I may share them with you.
Before I let you go, one important point to share with those of you who are not familiar but are curious enough to tune in. We do not do reviews. Never have. Do you really want me to spend 4 minutes on television telling you why you shouldn’t visit a restaurant? That’s kind of silly. That said, I can tell you I eat a lot of nasty food in search of food worthy enough to share with you.
We hope you will enjoy the ride.
If there is something you thing we should know about, we ask you to email us. tips@eatitandlikeit.com. It may take a few days for that email to reach me, but I will respond.
Thank you again for your continued support. See you on TV
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