All you need is love

This month we are celebrating our 100th edition of 225 magazine. It’s incredible how fast time flies and how the capital region has evolved since we published our first issue in November of 2005.

That was the year the Shaw Center for the Arts openedand on its top floor, Tsunami arrived in Baton Rouge. City Year Louisiana was founded and began to serve our community that year, too, while the planning commission gave approval to Perkins Rowe and Willow Grove, Hibernia National Bank was bought out by Capital One, Bistro Byronz opened on Government Street and Hurricane Katrina made landfall that August.

It’s amazing to reflect on all the changes in and around our city. Recording it all has been a blast, and the next 100 issues will be even more exciting.

Thank you to all who have been a part of our growing city and our publication. We love Baton Rouge and are proud to have helped our readers “Discover, Experience and Celebrate” our community month after month for more than eight years now.

So how does a magazine celebrate its 100th issue? By sharing the love. Late last year we began asking readers to tell us just one thing they absolutely love about Baton Rouge, and the response was overwhelming. An outpouring of appreciation came in the form of tasty restaurant recommendations, colorfully fond memories, deep thoughts on the heart and soul of the community, and much more.

Starting on page 55, we’ve chosen our favorite responses and thrown in a few staff picks, too.

Looking back, our gallery of all 99 past issues begins on page 95. You can also view each cover online at 225batonrouge.com/pickyourfavorite. We’d like to find out which one our readers like best. Email your vote to [email protected], and if the cover you chose receives the most votes, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card to any restaurant featured or advertising in this issue of 225.

The statistics for obesity in America are alarming, but just as dangerous is our modern culture that equates being healthy with being thinat all costs. From advertisements to television shows and movies, women especially are told that to be healthy, happy and beautiful, they must be a certain weight. In many cases and for a lot of women, that means becoming unrealistically skinny.

Through her organization Southern Smash, McCall Dempsey is fighting this trend and the negative effects, including eating disorders, it can trigger among young women. Read contributor Jennifer Macha’s account of Dempsey’s personal battle with eating disorders and her efforts to aid others in similar fights in the Baton Rouge community, starting on page 45.

Baton Rouge is fast becoming a greater culinary community, one that draws on our state’s rich history but also pushes those influences into the future. One hidden gem of an eatery in the Red Stick is City Caf on O’Neal Lane.

This casual, family-friendly place has all of the classic Southern comfort foods you could want, plus a few surprises, too. On a recent visit there, I enjoyed some of the best char-grilled oysters I’ve ever had. And I grew up in New Orleans! Read our food critic’s review of City Cafe starting on page 103.

I remember the latter part of the 1990s, when I moved to Baton Rouge from New Orleans, as a time when many people I encountered would say there wasn’t much to do here on the weekends. Well, I’d say that today, you would have to work pretty hard to be bored in this city.

So much is going on that you need to mark your calendars early and often to make sure you don’t miss a thing or have to make the difficult decision between two great events that fall on the same day.

Besides watching some fun LSU baseball in March, here are a few fantastic events going on this month you may want to consider:

March 5, 7-9 p.m. at Manship Theatre.

March 13-16 at Manship Theatre.

March 15, 10 a.m., Acadian Thruway at Hundred Oaks Avenue.

March 12-16 at theBaton Rouge River Center.

March 20-23 at the Country Club of Louisiana.

March 22, 7 p.m. at LSU Rural Life Museum.