Melissa Renahan, Neighbor

As it says above, I'm Melissa Renahan and I guess it is fair to say that I am a professional journalist. I have a degree in Communications and Business from Loyola University in Maryland. For the last six years I have worked in journalism as a production manager, an ad designer, a writer and an editor in both Washington State and New York. I enjoy the creativity, the variety and, most of all, the lack of an 'office' that I must report to every day. 

I've always liked going out to eat. According to one of my mother's favorite stories, I once requested surf and turf in a restaurant at the precocious age of three and when the waiter asked my parents if they were sure, they responded, "Yes, we think she'll eat it." And eat it I did, down to the last morsel of lobster meat dripping with clarified butter.

Now, as an adult, I still enjoy a meal out – be it breakfast, lunch, dinner or even some appetizers and drinks at an unconventional hour. But it is more than just my penchant for ordering off a menu that makes me fit to be the foodie…

I adore food and I adore cooking. I get excited when my three cooking magazines arrive in the mail each month and a trip to a high-end grocery store is enough to make me jump up and down while clapping my hands. A bite of something sumptuous will leave me speechless and yet in the next breath, I will be wondering aloud how I can get more.

I will always decline eating at the Olive Garden because it lacks any trace of authentic cooking, despite what their commercials may try to make me believe. The same goes for most chain restaurants where the menus either lack creativity or are a 100-page tome that spans every culinary style, despite not mastering any.

I will eat anything, at least once, and that also goes for trying new exotic foods that I cannot pronounce. I do not order the same thing if I go back to a familiar restaurant and I certainly don't have a standard dish.