50 Best Websites 2007

This hip food site, owned by CNET, serves its content like a five-course multimedia meal, with audio and video, photos, blogs and boards. The recipes and party tips, cooking guides, primers and gear reviews are skewed to a younger audience than, say, Epicurious and other mainstays of the genre. The articles cover food, food culture and food trends; there's a section on cocktail party canapés ("Killer Apps") and an in-depth look at milk ("Mapping the Mustache: a Chow taste test"). The video section includes dozens of tutorials, from how to cure salmon to how to butterfly chicken to how to open a bottle of wine; one feature clip shows a Chow reporter asking random people on the street, "what's for dinner?" Photo montages like that of Delhi street food are listed along with podcasts of chef interviews. The Chow messages boards are from Chowhound, a site that started up in the mid-90s and has been inviting anybody anywhere to post a restaurant review ever since. Now that it's also a CNET property, Chowhound is doing its business here, and has brought its entire archive along with it. Another new food site to watch: Foodbuzz.