David Hammond wrote:Not sure I follow. Could you define "bourgeois restaurant"?

I guess what I'm getting at is the lack of elitism. A review of Cheesecake Factory is just as useful to yelp users as a review of Alinea. Whereas any review of a chain restaurant here usually descends into predictable chain-bashing. I get the very distinct impression that only independently owned, "mom & pop" restaurants get the LTH nod of "cool". Because, yes, they usually are the best. But there's no need to immediately demean a bigger restaurant.

I don't know. It's hard to qualify. I really like LTH, because the reviewers usually are extremely well informed about food and have an amazing range, both in cuisine they eat and areas they travel (I sometimes wonder how many miles some of you put on your car strictly for eating purposes!). But I always detect a faint whiff of food-snobbery beneath a lot of the posts here, which leaves a faintly vile taste in my mouth (similar to the burgers at TGI Fridays).

jlawrence, i guess I got my Marxist reference backwards. But the point was the same - as Marxists looked down upon the bourgeoisie, so do LTH'ers look down upon the chain restaurant eaters.

jonjonjon wrote:Whereas any review of a chain restaurant here usually descends into predictable chain-bashing. I get the very distinct impression that only independently owned, "mom & pop" restaurants get the LTH nod of "cool".

I tend to agree that chains are looked down upon on LTH (although within the last fifteen minutes someone recommended an LEYE restaurant, without immediate reprisal ).

To use your line of reasoning and terminology, can you name a single chain restaurant that YOU would consider "cool"?

One of the problems with chains is that they are striving for consistency across the country or world. Thus once you've talked about one, you've pretty much talked about them all (with exceptions, but that seems a valid statement for 99% of chain experiences). They are not fertile ground for discussion. They are everywhere and they are, ultimately, dull. What's to talk about?

And I'm just talking about talking about chains on LTH -- I'm not even getting into the damage they do to the marketplaces they enter, squeezing out the interesting little regional places that cannot compete with the marketing muscle of a franchised empire. You want to get Marxist? Have at that example of ruthless capitalism!

Food snobbery? Sure. It happens. But I don't think that's why most of the people on LTH dislike chains.

Hammond

zu jonjonjon:

But that's an assumption(and you know what they say about making an ass out of you and me). And pretensions, hardly...there's this rubicon of incisiveness and rigor which once crossed (godforbid ....every quantity be it culinary or entertainment must sucumb to the LCD)...which once crossed makes a certain demographic for whom ingratiation is the password(dude! bra! bro!) extremely uncomfortable. No! To sublime LTH(or CH, for that matter) as a demesne wherein dwell those self-described soldiers of the mom 'n pop *is* the extremity of mediocrity. It's de rigeur in these times to posit an us vs. them in whatever forum: "how dare you slather your negativity on my pad thai?!"

Idiots think in binary oppositions: "well, bra! that's soooooo ostracizing...they actually *appear* to think about food.........and grub's cultural context(s)!"

"dude! I'm much more comfortable complaining that the wings at Buffalo Suzie's are getting salty(ier)."

---I should just quit...---

suffice it to say...this misapprehension is part and parcel of those who close themselves off from new experiences in order to foster tribal affiliations...

and, if that's pretentious...

thbtt!

As someone who works pretty hard steering this ship, I can't help but take a few digs personally. Sometimes, I feel the need to step up and defend our little project:

jonjonjon wrote:And from a usability perspective alone, Yelp blows LTH out of the water. Imagine a search function that doesn't require massaging, and reviews sorted by cuisine!

I'm pretty sure they blow us out of the water in the "operating budget" department too.

jonjonjon wrote:When posting on LTH, I always feel the need to be super-careful because I know that posts are often pulled (with no room for debate)

I've worked on, and run quite a few other community-based websites (both commercial and free) and I can say that LTHForum pulls fewer posts than any of them, by a huge margin. We have the fewest rules and we respond to every single pulled post personally with a reason why we pulled it. No other site does that. Period. Whenever possible, we moderate on the board, in public for everyone to see. The other moderators that I work with here are the most thoughtful, careful, and judicious moderators I've ever known.

And no, there's no debating moderator decisions. We don't do this for a living. Sorry.

jonjonjon wrote:if posting about a restaurant that's been covered already, other posters are wont to chime in with links to another, years-old other thread, rather than initiate discussion in a new setting.

This is really a community-developed standard, and there's actually some thought and utility that goes behind it. A lot of us value the existing information in conversations and like to keep those conversations going. There's a lot of great information from people in existing threads and I stand firmly against letting those threads langusih. I want that information added to, challenged, amended.

Also, believe it or not, people think they're actually being helpful when they point out existing information. We know how annoying it can be to search this site sometimes and when people read a new thread about TAC, they might like to read one of the 30 others that relate to it. It makes our "database" more valuable.

Finally, the more we read about what other people have to say, the more we get to know each other. The more we know each other. The more we know each other, the better our recommendations get. LTHForum is an ongoing discussion where we're trying to explore and learn. It's a give-and-take. It's not a bathroom wall where people just scrawl whatever they want on the wall and walk away.

Best,
Michael
not for the moderators

Christopher -

I'm not an us vs them person. I'm just merely trying to bridge the gap, explaining why LTH may make some Yelpers uncomfortable (and vice versa).

Hammond - I've got to say that Ruth's Chris is one chain that I'll eat at whenever the opportunity arises! On a more "plebian" friendly budget, Ted's Montana Grill seems to be a chain that actually is pretty decent - good quality product in their dishes and what appears to be a genuine commitment to "good eats" - although being owned by Ted Turner makes supporting them supporting perhaps even more controversial of an empire than McDonalds.

And for the record, I'm not a chain apologist or even fan - I'm just saying that to dismiss them all out of hand is as silly as saying all yelpers are dumb (or that all LTH'ers are snobs).

Regardless, I think that Yelp & LTH are more like apples & oranges. One's strictly a message board (LTH), where general discussion is mixed in along with reviews. And the other has a dedicated review section which keeps people mostly on topic; while there's a message board area that's almost completely off-topic all the time. And there's the "myspace-ish" phenomenon on yelp of people posting zero content besides message board posts and collecting friends (there's a few users with 1000+ 'friends' and less than 50 reviews). And ultimately, yelp is a nationally-reaching startup with VC funding - while LTH is a locally run and shoestring budget operation.

Both have their goods, both have their bads. Like everything, take from it what you can get!

eatchicago wrote:Michael
not for the moderators

Michael,

Too many points to respond to, but I agree with you almost entirely. I think i clarified where i was going with all this in my latest post. They're apples & oranges in many respect. And finding 4 year old posts is always both amusing (for the wayback machine factor) and informative, I agree. It makes LTH into some sort of canon of chicagoland eating.

Regardless, no offense intended!

After what I thought was a very articulate and fair-minded assessment from Dmnkly that went up this morning, the whole thread on Yelp has been deleted with the notice:

This conversation has been flagged as inappropriate by the community and has been removed.

I found this exchange very instructive, and was sorry to see it go, but perhaps all that could have been said, was.

Yeah, it was interesting to me that the meaningless name calling was allowed to hang on for half a day, but when I actually tried to apologize for perhaps coming in a little hot and make a serious, polite discussion of it, the thread was pulled.

Just bad timing, maybe... but interesting.

what's funny is that the people doing all the shit-talking on Yelp were those with hardly any reviews. most of the regular contributors stayed out of it.

Aah.. yelp. This exchange has been interesting for me to re-evaluate what's good and bad about both of these forums!

Dom,

Could you repost here, please?

-ramon

Ramon wrote:Dom,

Could you repost here, please?

-ramon

Cripes, man, I spent an hour writing it the FIRST time

(I was trying to pick words very carefully so as to keep things completely civil)

jonjonjon wrote:if posting about a restaurant that's been covered already, other posters are wont to chime in with links to another, years-old other thread, rather than initiate discussion in a new setting.

eatchicago wrote:Also, believe it or not, people think they're actually being helpful when they point out existing information. We know how annoying it can be to search this site sometimes and when people read a new thread about TAC, they might like to read one of the 30 others that relate to it. It makes our "database" more valuable.

FWIW, that's one of the things I love about LTH forum. Any time-pressed person should love the fact that information about one restaurant or types of restaurants is condensed into as few threads as possible. Chowhound gives me a headache what with the gazillion threads about the same thing.

Dmnkly wrote:(I was trying to pick words very carefully so as to keep things completely civil)

Oh, in that case, never mind.

-ramon

Christopher Gordon wrote:zu jonjonjon:

But that's an assumption(and you know what they say about making an ass out of you and me). And pretensions, hardly...there's this rubicon of incisiveness and rigor which once crossed (godforbid ....every quantity be it culinary or entertainment must sucumb to the LCD)...which once crossed makes a certain demographic for whom ingratiation is the password(dude! bra! bro!) extremely uncomfortable. No! To sublime LTH(or CH, for that matter) as a demesne wherein dwell those self-described soldiers of the mom 'n pop *is* the extremity of mediocrity. It's de rigeur in these times to posit an us vs. them in whatever forum: "how dare you slather your negativity on my pad thai?!"

Idiots think in binary oppositions: "well, bra! that's soooooo ostracizing...they actually *appear* to think about food.........and grub's cultural context(s)!"

"dude! I'm much more comfortable complaining that the wings at Buffalo Suzie's are getting salty(ier)."

---I should just quit...---

suffice it to say...this misapprehension is part and parcel of those who close themselves off from new experiences in order to foster tribal affiliations...

and, if that's pretentious...

thbtt!

Well...at least I can sorta follow what I posted.

...and for the record I was responding to jonjonjon, but not singling it out
for criticism...more just a wad of incoherent immediate thoughts hurled in the direction of Yelp...

to boil it down it's the tendency to descend into

*OMG!!!FER realz! heartheartheart...yadda yadda yadda...vegan pad thai!

that keeps me off those sorta boards(I don't find the amount of stuff you have to slug through in search of content worthwhile)

...for better or worse, I crossposted the above quoted post on my blogsite which makes it even further unreadable debrided of LTH's context...

aschie30 wrote:FWIW, that's one of the things I love about LTH forum. Any time-pressed person should love the fact that information about one restaurant or types of restaurants is condensed into as few threads as possible. Chowhound gives me a headache what with the gazillion threads about the same thing.

Well, on CH, nxtasy is on a quest to help with that, and a few people seem to be following her (his?) lead. It's not a "oh my god, will you just look at this thread already" but more of a "hi, that's a good question, and you might want to look at what people have said about this just a short while ago over on this thread..." So far the CH mods seem to be leaving these consolidation posts up, so one can hope...

Dear Yelpers,

Please feel free to come and visit us at LTHForum. Like elderly relatives in nursing homes, we really appreciate it when you come to see us. The conversation may not always be of interest to you - we will be talking about weird, old and just boring stuff at excruciating length, but not because we are not interested in what you like, just because we don't know about it. If you take the time to educate us - please talk to us very slowly - we will be happy to talk about things that interest you, even if we still don't, and never will, get it.

Of course, as you now know, we are not really all old, slow, grumpy and boring - some of us are actually you, and some of you are us, so clearly some old people like to just hang out and talk, and some young people really like to discuss this weird, old and boring stuff in painful detail.

Don't ask me why, because I can't explain it, though I have enjoyed visiting Yelp, and I might very well do it again soon (well, after my nap anyway).

And as to how we moderate, whether we are snobs, and all that other stuff - let's get together for a bite and discuss it. The answers are gently, yes and no, and there really is a lot of thought put into this. That does not mean the right decisions are always reached, but the mods work hard to do as little as possible, and generally do it well.

But we really like to eat well and socialize, and, Yelpers and LTHers, at that level it turns out we really are the same, doesn't it?

Peace. (Aging Hippie smiles a beatific, and profoundly stoned, smile - people turn away in dismay.)

some of my better reviews come from there...which really isn't saying much.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/TjlypHXquJGnRKzNEd4ysQ

David Hammond wrote:After what I thought was a very articulate and fair-minded assessment from Dmnkly that went up this morning, the whole thread on Yelp has been deleted with the notice:

This conversation has been flagged as inappropriate by the community and has been removed.

Google Archive still has it.

LAZ wrote:

David Hammond wrote:After what I thought was a very articulate and fair-minded assessment from Dmnkly that went up this morning, the whole thread on Yelp has been deleted with the notice:

This conversation has been flagged as inappropriate by the community and has been removed.

Google Archive still has it.

LAZ, thanks for bringing this to the attention of the board. This is, indeed, yet another cool Google feature.

Wow, what a freaking train wreck!

jesteinf wrote:Wow, what a freaking train wreck!

There is something to be said for "letting the community set the standard." In theory, I agree with that position. However, this whole exchange has a Lord of the Flies feel about it that seems about as far from productive and communal as I would want to imagine.

jesteinf wrote:Wow, what a freaking train wreck!

Jeebus Krist

is it ironic? is it post-ironic? do I hafta dig out my post-ironic baby-t's ca. 1990?

wtf?

I joke about gen y....but, jeezus christ...the myopia!

...and this is why I'd rather choke on a mini-burger than post on one of these blindered, self-congratulatory, entitled, post-milllenial sites: ahhhh....those youngsters!

Christopher Gordon wrote:

jesteinf wrote:Wow, what a freaking train wreck!

Jesus Krist

is it ironic? is it post-ironic? do I hafta dig out my post-ironic baby-T's ca. 1990?

wtf?

I joke about gen y....but, jeezus Christ...the myopia!

...and this is why I'd rather choke on a mini-burger than post on one of these blindered, self-congratulatory, entitled, postmillenial sites: ahhhh....those youngsters!

Well, I actually congratulate the Yelpers for their bravery. All the crap they spew will not only be open for the excoriation of old farts from LTH, but will also be recorded and searchable by Google for the foreseeable future by their future mates, parents-in-law and au pairs. Whereas the crap I spewed between the ages of 16 and 30 thankfully all got spewed pre-World Wide Web and therefore only fell on the ears of a select few who have now either disappeared or managed to forgive and find a way to respect me as an adult (the minority). Do please continue your ululations, Yelpers and Yelpettes. You are Spartacus.

JimInLoganSquare wrote:

Christopher Gordon wrote:

jesteinf wrote:Wow, what a freaking train wreck!

Jesus Krist

is it ironic? is it post-ironic? do I hafta dig out my post-ironic baby-T's ca. 1990?

wtf?

I joke about gen y....but, jeezus Christ...the myopia!

...and this is why I'd rather choke on a mini-burger than post on one of these blindered, self-congratulatory, entitled, postmillenial sites: ahhhh....those youngsters!

Well, I actually congratulate the Yelpers for their bravery. All the crap they spew will not only be open for the excoriation of old farts from LTH, but will also be recorded and searchable by Google for the foreseeable future by their future mates, parents-in-law and au pairs. Whereas the crap I spewed between the ages of 16 and 30 thankfully all got spewed pre-World Wide Web and therefore only fell on the ears of a select few who have now either disappeared or managed to forgive and find a way to respect me as an adult (the minority). Do please continue your ululations, Yelpers and Yelpettes. You are Spartacus.

ahhhh

but...see

I think it's all copacetic until you start posting your...um...Jack or Jill...on the internets(which this gen. y? is happy to do)

language(LTH) is open to interpretation: unfortunately images aren't.



and...this is sorta 'bout food...if one aknowledges the intrinsic voracity vis vis any image.

language(LTH) is open to interpretation: unfortunately images aren't.

Oh, really?

"yelp"???

who else, but a 'pup'... would demonstrate an urge to "yelp"?

Apparently, I happen to be one of those few on this board who feels Yelp serves a purpose. It may not be your purpose or my purpose, but for some...most definitely.

A few of the conversations I've read on Yelp remind me of the formula for reality television shows my teenage daughter watches: bunch of young people get in a room and say mean things to each other. That, to many, is entertainment.

Hammond

C'mon, Hammond. I'm not young.

YourPalWill wrote:C'mon, Hammond. I'm not young.

Point taken (but as you keep shrinking, it's getting harder to know that ).

this thread sucks. wish it died yesterday. buncha self-righteous, i-write-tongue-in-cheek-lacerations-better-than-you-hence-i'm-allowed-to-mock-you folks perpetuating the age old divide of generation gap.

with age (and income), Yelpers interested in gastronomy will evolve themselves onto LTH and a new group of youngsters will continue to pontificate on what they care about: shopping, partying, drinking, and sometimes eating.

eat and let eat?