Josh Wagy’s love affair with food began when he was only a kid, often tagging along with his mother for a meal at a dive in New Orleans, the city where he spent his formative years.
Standing near the kitchen, a powerful odor of spice struck not just his nose, but his eyes, too. “There was something coming out of the kitchen that was making me cry,” he remembers. Wagy, unusually for a child, was up for a challenge, and decided to order the very dish inspiring his tears.
Today, the 33-year-old Wagy, a slim engineer clad in preppy blue gingham and modern metal eyeglasses, is taking a break from the tongue-scorching meals and sipping from a container of coconut water instead. While he’s happy to share food stories of years past, Wagy is most apt to talk about his future, as a food blogger. He’ll debut his new website, Smash Toledo, on Sunday, March 24th, an ambitious project that aims to curate the best of Toledo’s dining. (“Smash” is slang for eating with gusto.) Just don’t call it a review site.
“I travel a lot. I use Urbanspoon, I use Yelp,” he says. “The problem with those is people leave bad reviews for the wrong reasons sometimes.” After reading the review of a friend who’d visited a beloved restaurant frequently but didn’t write a review until having one bad experience, Wagy committed that Smash would only feature restaurants he believed in. “That was the nail in the coffin for me.”
The lack of critiques suits Wagy just fine. And his contagious positivity (“phenomenal” is a favorite adjective) has won him fans among local chefs and restaurant owners, like Sandy Spang of Plate 21 and Tony House of Burger Bar 419, who appear in an initial sneak peek YouTube video endorsing Smash (bit.ly/XTYs91).
The initial response was “unbelievable,” Wagy says. His social media audience is growing, and calls have come in from Ann Arbor and Cincinnati asking to franchise the site. Wagy hopes to monetize, but is waiting for the right opportunity. “That’s everybody’s question: how do you plan on making money?” For now, he’s happy to sacrifice sleep to run Smash Toledo as a personal project (he spends days as an operations manager at Fuse Tech, Inc.), rather than as a source of income.
“I have a huge passion for food,” Wagy says, “[And] I just want to celebrate what cool people are doing in this town.”
Smash Toledo will celebrate its debut with a launch party on Sunday, March 24. For more details, visit the Smash Toledo Facebook page. www.smashtoledo.com.
