Content partner West and Clear earns “Best of 2008 Award” from Fort Worth Weekly

by Kevin Buchanan of West and Clear

The new Best of 2008 Awards are out from the Fort Worth Weekly. I’m very, very proud to say that both West And Clear and sister site Fort Worthology found their way into the awards, thanks entirely to our readers. West And Clear won the Readers’ Choice award for Best Web Forum, and Fort Worthology won the Readers’ Choice award for Best Blog. I think I speak for everybody here at the shop when I give a very sincere and heartfelt “thank you” to all of you out there in Readerland. You’ve spoken and given us this honor, and we are very grateful to you for it. Really, guys and gals - thank you.

Now, I’d like to speak a bit about something that bugs me about the FW Weekly Best Of awards.

Amongst the various categories, the Weekly picks a “Sign of the Apocalypse” award. This time around, their staff chose the price of gasoline. Gas is expensive, costs a lot to drive now, and all that, right?

Seems curious, because the Weekly gave out countless awards to businesses that aren’t in Fort Worth, or even Tarrant County in some cases. It seems a bit of a mixed message - gas prices stink, so here’s a ton of places you should visit that require you to drive out of town to them!

Perusing just the restaurant section of the awards, I noted all the categories for which the Weekly staff picked a non-Fort Worth restaurant. Just from my quick counting, here’s what I found:

That’s just in restaurants, not counting any other categories.

Now, I’m certainly not an expert on every category. I’m pretty much a vegetarian, and I don’t really do seafood or wings or other categories like that. On some things, though, I’m pretty shocked that the Weekly decided to go out of Fort Worth city limits for their picks. Gas prices are too high - but we’re going to pick a tamale shop in Cleburne, some 30 odd miles south of town which requires a car to get to in a long drive, when just off the top of my head I can name Hot Damn, Tamales! on Magnolia as being pretty friggin’ outstanding and located both in Fort Worth and in a place accessible by transit (or even bicycling or walking if you’re in the Near Southside). Not to mention that Hot Damn! Tamales is a locally owned and operated place, which you’d think would fit the Weekly’s local alt indie street cred. (Incidentally, the Readers’ Choice award went to Hot Damn! Tamales.)

Breakfast - a place in Arlington? Just too cool to pick Ol’ South or Paris Coffee Shop or another Fort Worth entry? (Another case where the readers picked a Fort Worth spot.) Ditto on Tex-Mex Over $10 - the gas prices the Weekly bemoans won’t be doing you any favors when you take another trip to Arlington to visit their pick in this category, after you’ve bypassed nearby Fort Worth institutions like La Familia or newcomers like Yucatan Taco Stand. (Pretty sure the readers stayed in Fort Worth on this one, too.) Italian - who cares about going someplace in Fort Worth that’s local like Nonna Tata or Margie’s when we can get in the car and drive out of town to Richland Hills (readers picked - you guessed it - Nonna Tata, here in the good city, and locally owned & independent). And I’ll be switched if I’m going to drive to Arlington or Mansfield just to go to a coffee shop when I could stay here and go downtown to the Four Star or to the Near Southside to Gallery Art Cafe or down Camp Bowie to Eurotazza.

It just becomes a bit depressing after a while. It’s kind of confusing when you list the price of gas as a sign of the apocalypse, then switch to pretending you’ve changed names from the Fort Worth Weekly to the Tarrant, Dallas, and Johnson County Weekly and encouraging us to spend money on those high gas prices to get to non-Fort Worth establishments that require a car and bypass countless awesome places run by Fort Worth locals here in town to do so.

Perhaps it’s my very Fort Worth-favoring attitude, but it just seems all a bit weird to me. I believe there are more than enough great places in Fort Worth that the pages of an awards issue shouldn’t be filled with out-of-town (and out-of-county) choices. I prefer keeping it Fort Worth first - how about you?