Best Food Writing 2011 Page 19

  Sharing food finds is one thing; disclosing one’s dietary addictions and inhibitions is another. The most popular feature on the food blog Grub Street is the New York Diet, in which celebrities and cultural figures like writer Jonathan Lethem and actress Alicia Silverstone (and F&W’s Dana Cowin) chronicle a week of their eating lives. While it’s reassuring to read that Miss USA Rima Fakih likes Shake Shack and Michael Pollan buys prepackaged sushi (in a pinch), the real fun begins in the comments section, where the anonymous jury enthusiastically voice their approval or (more likely) criticism. “Food obsessives enjoy the opportunity to judge people based on their diets,” explains Grub Street editor Daniel Maurer. “It’s the one time when you can look at a gorgeous model and say, ‘No way would I ever want to be like that if it means eating flax bars every day.’ On the other hand, people enjoy feeling like they have something in common with a favorite rock star or chef, even if it’s just that they go to the same banh mi shop.”

  Bill Rugen doesn’t invite commentary on Consumed, but that doesn’t stop it from reaching him: “I meet people, and they say to me, ‘Man, you do not eat well. How are you still alive?’” He says he’ll aim to eat in a more well-rounded way in 2011. “My doctor says I’m very healthy,” Rugen says. “But I haven’t shown him my website.”

  Three weeks and dozens of Tweets into my own food journal, I had zero followers. Frankly, I was somewhat relieved that nobody had analyzed my weakness for Swedish Fish or attacked my lopsided food photos. But I was critical enough on my own. I found myself styling food in restaurants and abstaining from second helpings at dinner parties, lest someone re-Tweet my gluttonous ways. I may be an anomaly in this era of oversharing: a person who is too private to feel comfortable revealing his half-eaten banana muffins to the world.

  But this digital exercise has had its benefits. Despite my food amnesia, I’ve always believed that if a meal is memorable, I’ll remember it. But I don’t. Thanks to my digital record, though, at least I won’t forget the best beef ribs I’ve ever tasted (at the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que near Austin). And I’ve become aware of some dietary quirks previously unknown to me. (Like Rugen, I apparently enjoy cookies—a lot.) I’ve also found myself paying more attention to my food. And when I’ve eaten a meal alone, I’ve had fun composing a Tweet or taking a picture and posting it online as a way to share the experience with friends.

  Now that my digital food experiment is ending, however, I’ve decided to take my diet offline and record my meals the old-fashioned way: cave paintings.

  EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

  By Ike DeLorenzo

  From The Boston Globe

  A software engineer turned food writer, Ike DeLorenzo—who reports for the Globe and Atlantic.com, as well as his own blog TheIdeasSection.com—offers more proof of the internet’s growing power in the food world: The big social media sites want in.

  Restaurant dining has new bookends. The experience often begins and ends with the Web. Before you go out, you find a good place to eat; after you dine, you post a review. Millions of diners are now civilian critics, letting Chowhound, Yelp, Citysearch, and others in on their recent meals.

  The domain of criticism was once the preserve of magazines and newspapers. This year has seen a flurry of activity for restaurant review sites, and for some new approaches to public critiques. Two big players—the biggest actually—want in on the action. Last week, Facebook began mailing door stickers to restaurants asking diners to “like” (there’s no “dislike”) and comment about restaurants with Facebook pages. Google recently launched Google Place Pages, also with door stickers, which allow diners with smartphones to point the camera at a bar code and instantly display a comments page. All of this is enough to make restaurateurs worry about every single diner.

  In the same way that travelers use various websites to find evaluations of hotels, diners are now turning to online food sites for advice on where to eat. As staggeringly fast as participation in food and restaurant websites has grown, so has the attention being paid to amateur critics. Comments and ratings from any one diner may, of course, be biased or even false. Many Internet pundits believe in something called “the wisdom of the crowd.” The theory is that with many people commenting, you eventually get to the truth about a restaurant. As the public posts about the food, the service, the ambience, the bearnaise, the baguettes, a fuller and more accurate picture is supposed to evolve. The amateurs are not going away, which restaurateurs once might have hoped, and they are making chefs nervous.

  Yelp, a social networking site where users post their own reviews, in March had 31 million unique visitors, up from 20 million a month last year. Since Yelp launched in 2004, 10 million reviews, mostly for restaurants, have been written. Similar sites also show strong growth. But because they hope to profit from what is submitted, these sites have goals that may be at odds with the restaurants, and even with the commenters. Yelp and its aspirants are in the business of making money by brokering information.

  But there are suggestions—well, allegations even—that the natural ratings that should result are being manipulated. Kathleen Richards, a reporter for the East Bay Express in Oakland, Calif., wrote a widely circulated story last year about Yelp’s advertising and editorial practices. According to Richards, Yelp sales representatives would routinely cold-call Bay Area restaurants asking that they agree to a yearly contract to advertise on Yelp ($299 per month and up). Part of the pitch involved promises to remove bad Yelp reviews or move them off the main page. Richards also presented evidence that, in some cases, bad reviews had been written by the Yelp sales representatives themselves to force a sale. Failing to agree meant prominent bad reviews.

  On its blog (and elsewhere), Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman forcefully denied these claims throughout the year, maintaining that Yelp only offered restaurants a chance to “feature” a review of its choice, and that any removals were done by “automatic filters” designed to detect fraudulent posts (from, say, friends, relatives, or known adversaries of the establishment). At the same time, more restaurants and other businesses, now from around the country, came forward claiming they had received similar solicitations from Yelp sales reps. To say the food blogs have been abuzz is an understatement.

  The situation culminated in a dozen businesses, mostly restaurants, filing a federal class-action lawsuit against Yelp in February, a year after the story broke. The strongly worded suit accuses the company of “extortion.” Last month, in a bitter blog post, Stoppleman announced some changes. Restaurants can no longer select a “sponsored review” to appear prominently on the top of its Yelp page, and reviews suppressed for any reason are now available on a separate, though somewhat obscure, “filtered reviews” area of the page.

  Grover Taylor, owner of Eat at Jumbo’s in Somerville, says his ratings dropped sharply last year when he declined to advertise on the site. “They called every week, telling me I needed to pay $500 a month to advertise. When I said no, a lot of one-star reviews started appearing on top. And then the phone would ring. Hi, this is Art from Yelp. We can make them disappear.” Taylor says the calls slowed and changed tone when he told the Yelp agent he was joining the class action suit. “Art stopped calling. A new guy from Yelp is calling now.”

  Individual restaurants now spend a lot of time handling existing reviews. “It basically eats many hours, on a weekly basis, going through Yelp and trying to address all the posts,” says Peter Rait, owner of Beacon Hill Bistro in Boston. Like many Boston restaurateurs, Rait has engaged an outside company to help his staff understand and react to Yelpers on the site itself. Rait thinks continuing the conversation with customers after they leave his restaurant can be a distraction. “I’m a little bit old school. We take care of each customer who comes in. We want to concentrate on quality while the diner is here, not somehow creating the perception of quality afterward.”

  But Erica Pilene, general manager of Finale Park Plaza, embraces the challenge. “We are constantly monitoring Yelp to see how
we are doing. When we see a comment—say a server was being rude—I’ll take the server aside and say, we need to talk about this. It makes you more on top of your game than you ever have been. The feedback doesn’t go away, you can’t erase it, and everyone can see it.”

  Since Yelp and Citysearch are stand-alone services, it’s easier for people who want to game the system to sign up for many accounts with various e-mails, cast many votes, and create a suspiciously large number of positive (or negative) ratings. In these cases, the sites have conflicting motivations: more accounts make for impressive numbers, fake accounts create false ratings. Now that Yelp has been forced to abandon removing and shifting reviews, setting the bar for other sites, it also may be forced to be more aggressive in rooting out counterfeit opinions.

  A partner, such as Google or Facebook, who has a better handle on account-holders’ identities, could help moderate reviewer vitriol and reduce duplicate reviews. For them, ad hoc and additional accounts are easy to detect (no Facebook friends, no messages in their gmail box), and so they may have an advantage. In 2009, Google made overtures to purchase Yelp for a reported $500 million. Google was ultimately spurned, perhaps now driving Yelp into the arms of Facebook. Recent partnerships between Yelp and Facebook, and coy statements by their CEOs, have industry insiders speculating about a purchase.

  But why is Yelp so valuable? The reason is simple. Tweets and status posts about what you ate this afternoon have limited shelf life. Thoughtful posts on a restaurant, accompanied by a star-rating, have lasting worth, and aggregate value as others weigh in. Whichever company owns this data then owns the Web gateway many people turn to for information. And tying your tastes to your identity is the holy grail of Internet marketing. Leave a long review of an Italian restaurant and you are bound to get spam from an Italian food importer.

  Neither 200-pound gorilla is standing still. Google and Facebook both are trying to get existing users to review restaurants. Google’s large restaurant sticker dwarfs other website stickers already on the door, and has its next-generation technology angle.

  Sites like Yelp and Citysearch will be hard to defeat. Both have elevated those frequent contributors who are heavily “liked” (in the social networking sense) to a status akin to a traditional restaurant critic. Yelp calls them the “Elite Squad,” and Citysearch calls them “Dictators.” In both cases, they are presented as those users who are the authoritative tastemakers for a given city, their reviews are most prominently featured, and they are invited by the site to special events in their local cities. Only the online names of these users are known to the two companies, which is a lot of influence to delegate to people you know little about. The practice helps sites compete with traditional media by creating cheap (as in unpaid) experts.

  Some restaurateurs and staff who do not have a favorable view of these sites spoke to me under condition of anonymity. “There’s sometimes a faceless nastiness on the sites,” says one. “People will sometimes attack chefs personally in a way that’s baseless and cruel.” A well-known restaurateur who refused to put a Google sticker on his door says, “They collect personal information and sell it. Why should I help? They can manufacture popularity with these sites, but it can go the other way.”

  Talented civilian reviewers who outgrow review sites are creating alternatives. Successful writers on Chowhound and eGullet (a popular bulletin board for food discussions) have gone on to create compelling food and restaurant blogs. In this area, there’s North Shore Dish (www.northshoredish.com), Eat Boutique (www.eatboutique.com), The Boston Foodie (www.theboston foodie.blogspot.com), Fork It Over, Boston (www.forkitoverboston.blogspot.com), and Table Critic (www.tablecritic.com).

  Placid amid a storm of Internet recommendations, restaurateur Rait puts it this way: “They might tell me to make hamburgers for dinner, and we could sell a lot of hamburgers. But that’s not the experience we want to offer.”

  Still, his diners are newly accessorizing the table setting: fork on the left, knife on the right, iPhone top center. It’s chew and review, toast and post.

  NEW ORLEANS FAMILY OYSTER COMPANY DEVISES NEW BUSINESS MODEL TO STAY ALIVE

  By Brett Anderson

  From The Times-Picayune

  As restaurant reviewer for New Orleans’ big daily paper, Brett Anderson already had one life-changing story to cover in 2005, as Hurricane Katrina shattered this famed food city. 2010 brought fresh tragedy: the BP oil spill’s devastating impact on Gulf fisheries.

  In mid-September, Al Sunseri sat two raw oysters on a table next to the coffeemaker in the offices of P&J Oyster Company. The specimens were not up to his standards, but P&J, which Sunseri runs with his brother Sal, was selling them anyway. The company had no other choice.

  “You see?” Sunseri said after feeding the oysters to a visitor. “They got a good oyster flavor. They just don’t have any salt. And they’re small.”

  Sunseri blames these deficiencies on the fresh Mississippi River water diverted to protect Louisiana’s delicate coastal marshlands from the oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico from the ruptured BP oil well for most of the summer. Still, “they’re decent oysters,” he said. “People want to buy them.”

  P&J has dealt in oysters, both as a distributor and processor, for nearly 135 years, making it the oldest oyster processor and distributor in the United States. The disaster triggered by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on April 20 brought that tradition to a virtual standstill. On June 10, the Sunseris, having conceded their regular suppliers could no longer provide them with the volume and quality of oysters necessary to operate their business, ceased regular operations at P&J. They laid off 13 full-time employees.

  “The bottom line is that our guys that we purchase from are not working,” Sal Sunseri said on the day of the shutdown.

  The freshwater diversions, mass commercial fishing closures and redeployment of fishers to aid in the clean-up effort proved, at least in the short term, to be as damaging to the Louisiana seafood industry as the spill itself. But no sector of the industry has felt the pain more acutely than oyster fishers and purveyors, whose fragile resource has been damaged by fresh water, partly from the diversions, and will take years to rebound.

  Louisiana is currently producing oysters at about a third of its pre-spill rate. According to Mike Voisin, a member of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force and the owner of Motivatit Seafoods in Houma, the dockside prices for oysters are 50 percent higher than before the oil spill.

  And the news didn’t get any better on Thursday, when the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Commission announced that public seed grounds east of the Mississippi River and in Hackberry Bay would remain closed. According to Wildlife and Fisheries, the grounds east of the Mississippi account for roughly 28 percent of the annual Louisiana oyster harvest. They were scheduled to open Nov. 15.

  Before the oil spill, Al Sunseri said, P&J would process 30,000 to 35,000 shucked oysters a day, along with another 20,000 to 30,000 half-shell oysters to sell to local oyster bars. Today, with the shucking operation still on ice, the staff reduced to two full-time employees—Al and Sal—and the distribution business cut to an eighth of what it was, P&J’s headquarters, which is spread over two buildings straddling Toulouse Street in the French Quarter, appear from the outside to be well-kept properties in need of a buyer.

  But the June 10 operations stoppage forced the initiation of a new business model at P&J, which remains in place today. The Sunseris call it “improvising,” with the ultimate goal being to keep P&J in a position to one day resume business as usual.

  “There are still a lot of unknowns in terms of how our business is going to be two, three, five years from now,” Sunseri said as he settled into a leather couch separating two facing desks in an office just off P&J’s idled shucking facility. “Are the oysters going to spawn and set like they always did? Are we going to have the same supply of oysters? Are some people just going to get out of (the oyster business) and not deal with this
anymore?”

  By “this” Sunseri was referring to waking up at an ungodly hour—he gets to work an hour or so before his brother Sal, who usually arrives at 5 a.m.—without ever knowing what the day will bring.

  The manual labor of receiving, storing and delivering heavy sacks and boxes of shell oysters is often part of the early morning agenda, but with the Gulf oyster supply depleted and many fishers still wary of investing the money to harvest what’s there, the Sunseris can never be sure how much product, if any, they’ll have to sell to their customers.

  “My fear is that the courage it takes to stay in business and be in business is really being tested in them,” Voisin said of the Sunseris. “New Orleans wouldn’t be New Orleans without them.”

  The Sunseris’ predicament requires them to carefully ration their limited oyster supply among their existing restaurant customers, many of whom display the P&J brand on their menus. There is pride in serving oysters from a historic local company with a longstanding reputation for quality. The Sunseris are fiercely protective of P&J’s brand recognition, making it particularly painful to turn away the eager buyers who rattle their cell phones all day, every day.