When I traveled to San Francisco in July, I made online reservations at several restaurants using www.opentable.com. It was easy to use -- you can make reservations any time of the day, no waiting until the hostess gets in or leaving a voice mail and waiting for them to call you back to confirm. Plus, OpenTable members can earn Dining Rewards Points for online reservation they make and honor. Points are redeemable for OpenTable Dining Cheques which can be used at any OpenTable restaurant.

When I got back, I thought I'd check it out for use at home. There were only a couple of restaurants listed. Bummer. But in the months since then, an increasing number of Birmingham-area restaurants have signed on to the service. There are now about a dozen, with recently added ones including Cafe Dupont, Jackson's Bar and Bistro, Ocean, and La Dolce Vita.

Although OpenTable has been around since 1999, it really seems to be catching on. The service began in gourmet-conscious San Francisco, with a rapid migration to New York City. It offers free, online reservations for diners as well as guest and table management systems for restaurants and celebrated its 50 millionth reservation last month. The OpenTable network includes 8,000 restaurants around the world, which have replaced their pen-and-paper reservation books with the OpenTable computerized reservation system.

I thoroughly enjoyed this post on Gourmet's Choptalk blog about the 10th annual Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium: "Way Down South in Mississippi."

In this "bizarre alternate universe," writes Francis Lam, "a ham maker can be accorded the respect due a head of state. There, the parsing of barbecue's savage and cannibalistic undertones is an intriguing line of conversation. There, 'frying chicken' can be presented as a slang term for sex. . . and it somehow makes sense."

Normally, he writes, the Southern Foodways Alliance is "a collection of Southern food lovers, scholars, writers, anthropologists, cooks, farmers, artists, artisans, and philosophers." But "during the half-week that is the Symposium, it's more like a roving gang of whiskey-fueled catfish eaters terrorizing the poor town of Oxford, Mississippi."

Lam writes about a presentation on the story Hercules, perhaps the first American celebrity chef -- and a slave. He writes about eating peanuts in Coca-Cola, the fried catfish at Taylor Grocery, meeting Roy Blount Jr., and "much revelry, fried food, and whiskey." Sounds like a heck of a party.

Surf on over to Chowhound.com for this great board thread on cheap eats in Birmingham. "Dax," a new transplant to the Magic City, notes, "While I love to dine at Icon, Gianmarco's, etc. as much as the next 'hound, sometimes such destinations fall outside of my budget.... While I hate to specify cheap, what are your favorite take-out or eat in dishes for say under ~ $7ish? For example, the bahn mi at Que Huong, the carnitas taco at Cantina.."

The suggestions are almost guaranteed to make your mouth water, including Crawfish pie (served only at lunch on Fridays) at O.T.'s, a pesto wrap with turkey at BottleTree, the carnitas at Habaneros (behind John's City Diner on Gadsden Hwy), bacon fried rice and egg rolls at Chop Suey Inn on Green Springs, the gyro at Costa's on Lorna Road, Surin's chicken noodle bowl, wings at On Top Sports Grill, and more. The discussion veers off a bit into the authenticity of ethnic foods in the area, but that's interesting, too.

I just discovered a fantastic section on southernfoodways.com about Greeks in Birmingham. If you've lived in Birmingham long, you'll know that the Greek immigrants to Birmingham have been a major part of the city's restaurant scene since the early 1900s. It's a few years old, but there are transcripts of interviews with Gus Kourtoulakis of Pete's Famous Hot Dogs, Jimmy Koikos of The Bright Star, George Sarris of The Fish Market, John Calamas (who owned the now-closed Yanni's and before that a small restaurant on Valleydale), George Sissa of Niki's Downtown, Pete and Betty Hontzas of Niki's West, Theo Hontzas of The Smoke House, and more. Check it out at http://www.southernfoodways.com/oral_history/greek/index.shtml.