Mr. Gary Lee

As John has already posted on his blog, we were treated a great dinner at Bennihana’s after our last day of Blog World Expo. I’ve never been to Bennihana’s but I’m very familar with teppanyaki as one of my friends used to run a restaurant while we were in college and it was great getting grilled scallop and shrimp to top our spaghetti dinners. In case you don’t know, teppanyaki is a type of Japanese Cuisine similar to Korean and Mongolian BBQ.

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Japanese Words of the Day:

Teppan: Iron Plate

Yaki: Grilled

You can pretty much grill anything you want on these things, so if you want to make your own and send pictures of your creations, go ahead and I’ll post them back up on this post!

Anyways, back to the dinner. John invited both Danielle and I at the end of the last day of Blog World Expo and it just felt good that we were all going to get together to celebrate one of the most productive weeks of my professional life. As someone who inspired us to all start blogging, I think it was really great of John to treat us to dinner, much like how the teacher treats his students to a special lunch for doing good work in class. Oh, and for those who think we all would treat him like some superstar (ahem Leo!), we all knew that John is hugely successful, but after hanging out with him on the floor at the expo, he just became one of the guys we threw stuff at! The one thing that I was really impressed with was that even though both Shoe and Chow got so much attention from other bloggers, they all took it in stride and never got too big on themselves. Anyways, the amount of networking that I established with people like John, Shoemoney, the guys at Unique Blog Designs, Pit Crew of Blogging the Movie, Darin Carter, Greg Morgan of BCM, Neil Patel, CarZi and Egonitron, just to name a few for now, were priceless.

On my side of the table - Nate Whitehill, Danielle, Neil, Matt, Me, Dave, Vinay and Anthony.

On the other side of the table - Sarah, John, Zac, Reena, Josh, Darin, and Chris

Shoemoney and the UBD Girls were a little late due to delays with alcoholic distribution and consumption, but they were able to stop by to say hi and then went the Bennihana Bar to hang out while we ate.

Best Dinner Moment - An rather attractive Bennihana Photographer comes by to ask if we would like to take a group picture.

Photographer asks - “Would you like to take a picture of your group here at Bennihana’s?”

John responds - “What kind of camera is that? . . . . Nikon? . . then forget it! We use Canon!”

The Photographer is kind of shocked and then walks away as we all laugh at what just happened. I felt bad for the girl, but Dave and I were just trying to hide our faces from laughing so hard at what just happened!

Best Face after Shot - Nate Whitehill

Best Shot Technique - Ms. Danielle

It was fun to just get to know people at the table and see where they’re from and see what they do aside from blogging. Back in LA, it’s hard to find people with the same interests as mine and being to geek out and talk about familar subjects made sure conversations were pretty much going on all night! Again, thanks John for the Good Times!

Photo courtesy of John Chow

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