I still enjoy reading the newspaper daily(I am 38), always a nice way to relax, while eating lunch.

I read the Sun Times, and have not purchased, or looked at a Tribune since 1993(not gonna give any of my money to support the cubs), even if it is just .50 cents.

Yes, certain columnists -- who don't necessarily report straight news -- are still a major draw. There's no substitute for expert analysis which is a function of years or decades of experience. Still, if I can read that analysis 4 hours after the Bears game instead of the next morning, I'm that much happier.

It's the container here, not the content, that is becoming obsolete, nostalgia issues aside.

=R=

ronnie_suburban wrote:It's the container here, not the content, that is becoming obsolete, nostalgia issues aside.

Perhaps. But there's a perception that online readers don't care for the lengthy, in-depth coverage that paper readers enjoy. The length of paper stories has been abbreviated as news holes shrink, but online versions are still shorter.

For example, when this story on low-cost entertaining appeared in print, it had a sidebar of tips and an extra recipe that are not posted on the website.

LAZ wrote:

ronnie_suburban wrote:It's the container here, not the content, that is becoming obsolete, nostalgia issues aside.

Perhaps. But there's a perception that online readers don't care for the lengthy, in-depth coverage that paper readers enjoy. The length of paper stories has been abbreviated as news holes shrink, but online versions are still shorter.

For example, when this story on low-cost entertaining appeared in print, it had a sidebar of tips and an extra recipe that are not posted on the website.

What a shame. I'd call that a misperception, not a perception. It's still the same readership, only now it's divided into a couple of different venues.

=R=

LAZ wrote:For example, when this story on low-cost entertaining appeared in print, it had a sidebar of tips and an extra recipe that are not posted on the website.

Was this an oversight?

I usually find the opposite, that stories on-line tend to have (if anything) more content.

ronnie_suburban wrote:Yes, certain columnists -- who don't necessarily report straight news -- are still a major draw. It's the container here, not the content, that is becoming obsolete, nostalgia issues aside.

In the case of the new Trib, I wish I could agree with you Ronnie, but the old columnists, analysts, reviewers, feature writers, etc., are now writing worse--i.e., on a seventh-grade level, rather than, say, a twelfth-grade level--clearly on instructions from their corporate masters. So it is, sadly, the content that has degraded, in addition to the container. And nothing will make content obsolete faster than degrading its value to the reader.

As is probably true of all of us here, I enjoy reading news/reviews/analysis on the web and in print. There has been a place for both in my life, which is why I have an ISP and a subscription to the Tribune. But the print Trib is obsoleting itself faster than changing times are, with a gun pointed squarely at its foot.

In response to her post on The Stew, the Chef at brand-new Farmerie 58 takes some shots at Monica Eng and others. I'm going to Farmerie 58 tonight, and will be sure to report back. I've got to say, the place sounds like it has quite a bit of promise. On a related note, Eng says in the article that the chef hails from "Emeril's Commander's Palace" in New Orleans. Did Emeril take over the historic Commander's Palace recently, where the head chef is Tory Mcphail and ownership has been in the Brennan family forever?

Kennyz wrote:In response to her post on The Stew, the Chef at brand-new Farmerie 58 takes some shots at Monica Eng and others. I'm going to Farmerie 58 tonight, and will be sure to report back. I've got to say, the place sounds like it has quite a bit of promise. On a related note, Eng says in the article that the chef hails from "Emeril's Commander's Palace" in New Orleans. Did Emeril take over the historic Commander's Palace recently, where the head chef is Tory Mcphail and ownership has been in the Brennan family forever?

I have no ideas to all of the references specifically discussed, but Emeril was the chef at Comander's Palace for an extended period during the 1980's. It's where he made his name in NOLA.

Thanks, VI. I wouldn't think that being an employee 20 years ago would make it his Commander's Palace, but maybe that's just me. More likely, it's just a typo - she probably meant to write Emeril's AND Commander's Palace, since the Farmeie 58 chef worked at both restaurants.

I am in sympathy with Chef Alexander's complaint that he shouldn't have to provide the provenance of each item on the plate. I, too, find this name-dropping to be pretentious and will criticize restaurants that go to excess. However, Chef Alexander seemed less willing to defend the food he produced: and that is the more serious charge. Monica Eng is a respected critic and if a chef is willing to admit that the food was insufficiently hot that is fairly damning - if it is a consistent problem. The legions of critics out that means that any one voice can be balanced by others. So a chef will have second chances until a consensus develops.

We are ethnic cheap eats junkies. These places do not get the press,hype or reports from the usual media sources. We used to drive in different neighborhoods trolling for new ethnic dives. Lth forum posters discover and report (good and bad) on these places. Once in a while major media papers will do a major cheap eats feature i.e. the Trib's stroll down Milwaukee Ave. was very good. But these are few and far between. The lth posts and pictures are informative. The 'accounts' opinions and reports help us find a place and order things that may not have been or first choice or out of our comfort level. After reading posts year after year I get an idea as to who these folks are and their tastes. Unlike Zagat reviews (does anyone actually use this anymore?) you are familiar with the people and thus feel that the dialogue is reliable and unbiased. I don't get this with the mass media reviewers. No one likes to be criticized/scrutinized but it goes with the territory.

Well, this topic has been hashed and rehashed for a few weeks now, so I'll just weigh in with a few remarks here, from the other side of things.

As several have mentioned, this story is really no big deal. You all must know that these chefs are directing their ire at specific reviewers who go overboard, not the entirety of the blogging scene. As Aaron, kel, and dicksond have mentioned, there are clearly some bloggers who go too far, some who are annoying, some who do it only to criticize unfairly and not to remark positively on other experiences. Again, it's incredibly frustrating to have someone go home and complain about picayune issues that could have been easily dealt with at the restaurant had they been raised there, and have that record stay online for years as a semi-permanent record of how that restaurant is now perceived. I could go on, but much on this has already been said.

I would just say that, from the point of view of someone who both participates in food forums/blogs and works full time in the restaurant industry, the effect of blogs on restaurants such as Urban Belly and Graham Elliot is, sorry guys, minor. As others have noted, LTH, Yelp, and other blogs do best to highlight smaller ethnic and neighborhood restaurants who don't have a PR rep or a known chef. Bill Kim and Graham Elliot Bowles have major PR efforts and national reputations--most of the buzz surrounding their restaurants came from the mainstream press and traditional reviewers. Yes, the internet is changing some things, but restaurants like this still survive and get the majority of their business through traditional means, such as reviews, concierge referrals, newsletters, and regular word-of-mouth. Yes, on opening day, Urban Belly had a big LTH table and a big Yelp table, but I can tell you that as for the Yelp table, at least, that was spearheaded by one vocal member who is friends with Bill and Yvonne and loves Bill's food. She didn't hear about Urban Belly through a blog--she heard about it because she knows the chef, and she spread the word accordingly. That's how these things still work. Not one person I know personally found out about Urban Belly through a food blog/forum, and yet somehow almost all my friends have been there several times since its opening.

I work at a highly rated restaurant in the city with a relatively well-known chef. I am, to date, the only person at the restaurant currently who is aware that the LTH Forum even exists. Other work colleagues know about Yelp, Metromix, etc, but mostly because of our own internet surfing and research. We've actually had Yelpers come in and ask for free stuff because they have hundreds of reviews. We can't help but laugh out loud at something like that, and it undercuts the seriousness of all food blogging when something like that occurs. What my chef tracks is professional reviews, traditional press, and that sort of thing. He's happy if the restaurant is appreciated by bloggers, but I've got to be honest, the majority of our guests aren't bloggers and don't read food blogs/forums. They are just old school, and that's not going to change significantly in the near future.

I hope some of you who have stated things like "we made Urban Belly" or "if it wasn't for us, chefs would have to move to the suburbs to serve foie gras" (I mean, seriously?) can look back after the furor of the moment has passed and see how those statements look to someone who isn't active on this forum. It only makes you look at best, insular, and at worst, bitter. I, for one, found much else to dislike in the Tribune interview:

What is Chicago's culinary scene missing?

Graham: A good bakery. We don't serve bread because we aren't able to make it in-house and there are really no great bakeries to source it out....

Chefs have to balance several factors: Taste. The environmental/local/carbon footprint. Health. Price. How do you prioritize them?

Graham: I think taste, then price. The rest don't matter.

No great Chicago bakeries? Environmental/local/carbon footprint doesn't matter? Now those are things that irk me. Not comments from chefs about bloggers who go too far.

AndrewR wrote:We've actually had Yelpers come in and ask for free stuff because they have hundreds of reviews. We can't help but laugh out loud at something like that.

I hope some of you who have stated things like "we made Urban Belly" or "if it wasn't for us, chefs would have to move to the suburbs to serve foie gras" (I mean, seriously?) can look back after the furor of the moment has passed and see how those statements look to someone who isn't active on this forum. It only makes you look at best, insular, and at worst, bitter.

A challenging post, and one I appreciate you taking the time to write. A brief rejoinder:

- following the lead of our founders, LTH members never ask for comps and typically shun ad hoc special treatment from restaurateurs. We may set up special events, life event celebrations, or tastings well in advance, but when we walk in the door of a place unannounced, it's to eat and converse respectfully.

- For our bread and butter - your "neighborhood ethnic" places, which I prefer just to term regional restaurants - I see our community members going out of the way in the opposite direction from some examples cited above, ordering and tipping in a most generous fashion, without calling attention to this, and going way out of their way to get to know the hosts personally (not to develop a perks-based relationship), and help the businesses off the board as much as on it, through personal word of mouth

- this said, the good taste that distinguishes many LTH members from the many, many other sites out there does NOT preclude us from considering ourselves part of a larger movement of fora, blogs, and media (and where exactly is the line between "traditional" and "non-traditional" drawn these days, anyway)? I don't see claims of "LTH made this place" - what I see is individuals seeing the ever-expanding network of web-based reviewing, contextualizing, and photographing contributing significantly to a place's success, and I agree with those sentiments.

LTHForum is named from "Little" Three Happiness in Chinatown, a favorite of the forum founders. I don't even think the most fervent and ardent among us is going to tell you that our membership is keeping that restaurant afloat.

Now, bringing a more well-educated and engaged dining base from around Chicagoland (and even internationally, as witnessed again recently), sure. But I'm sure big restaurants with PR people like yours don't care about that as long as you can fill the seats, right?

AndrewR wrote:I would just say that, from the point of view of someone who both participates in food forums/blogs and works full time in the restaurant industry, the effect of blogs on restaurants such as Urban Belly and Graham Elliot is, sorry guys, minor.

AndrewR wrote:As others have noted, LTH, Yelp, and other blogs do best to highlight smaller ethnic and neighborhood restaurants who don't have a PR rep or a known chef. Bill Kim and Graham Elliot Bowles have major PR efforts and national reputations--most of the buzz surrounding their restaurants came from the mainstream press and traditional reviewers.

AndrewR wrote:Yes, the internet is changing some things, but restaurants like this still survive and get the majority of their business through traditional means, such as reviews, concierge referrals, newsletters, and regular word-of-mouth.

I personally wouldn't group Bill Kim and Graham Elliot Bowles or Urban Belly and Graham Elliot in the same categories. With all due respect to Bill Kim, I had never heard of him prior to his opening UB. Graham Elliot Bowles, on the other hand, has been nationally acclaimed for his helming a 4-star restaurant attached to a Peninsula Hotel, one that is often rated as one of the best hotels in the world. On the other hand, UB is a neighborhood noodle joint, albeit an upscale one. Graham Elliot, with mixed success, attempts to be a focused, high-end dining restaurant. Apples and oranges. While I have no doubt that both restaurants have PR agents (I think they all do nowadays, right? ), a place like Urban Belly is much more reliant on word-of-mouth than Graham Elliot is. Graham Elliot will always attract tourists, out-of-towners, weekenders and conventioneers just given his reputation, the restaurant, the dining experience and the location. I just don't see a concierge recommending that tourists use their time and money to schlep out to UB, which is not located close to public transportation and in a strip mall.

Thus, blogs or LTH or Yelp are the new means of word-of-mouth. So to say that a place like UB doesn't need blogs or LTH or Yelp is sort of like saying it doesn't need word-of-mouth. Now, I'm not saying that UB can't get word-of-mouth business the old-fashioned way, but as you indirectly acknowledge, that is getting harder and harder because the internet is sort of a megaphone for word-of-mouth that can drown out everything else.

Given the rate at which restaurants fail, I don't think I'd be so quick to say that a restaurant can ignore a hugely growing aspect of non-MSM and myopically focus only on traditional means of getting business. I'm not saying that there aren't restaurants that currently do that, and I'm not trying to overstate the effect of food forum and blogs, but that whole sector is only growing and not going away, so as a business strategy, I'd be keeping my eye on it instead of pretending it doesn't exist if I were a restaurant owner.

AndrewR wrote:I work at a highly rated restaurant in the city with a relatively well-known chef. I am, to date, the only person at the restaurant currently who is aware that the LTH Forum even exists.

With all due respect to this chef, the fact that this particular chef doesn't know LTH exists doesn't really mean or prove anything. I personally know of chefs who are blissfully and intentionally ignorant about LTH or Yelp and that is due to mostly sociological or generational factors. They are of a certain age where they are trained to focus on the mainstream reviewers and because they don't really understand the internet, they dismiss it. That simply stems from a lack of understanding about the reach and/or use of the internet, rather than a learned philosophy about the effect of these discussion boards on their restaurants.

AndrewR wrote:What my chef tracks is professional reviews, traditional press, and that sort of thing. He's happy if the restaurant is appreciated by bloggers, but I've got to be honest, the majority of our guests aren't bloggers and don't read food blogs/forums. They are just old school, and that's not going to change significantly in the near future.

Again, that your chef focuses on professional reviews and/or traditional press is simply the result of conditioning, mindset, age and/or the focus of his personal business. But I have to strongly disagree that "this is not going to change significantly in the near future." It has changed. And significantly. And quickly. That's why in part the Tribune has a food blog. That's why the new rollout of the Trib is significantly pared down. It's because the MSM is becoming less significant. You know who'd probably be the first to agree with this privately? Phil Vettel, the very person whose reviews your chef is so acutely tuned into.

The very reason why you hear the occasional rant by chefs against bloggers/discussion boards is precisely because it has changed, and they know it. As for your chef's customers, they'll quickly change too. I don't know anyone under 60 who isn't heavily tuned into the internet, and as people become more comfortable with and reliant upon it, what they use the internet for will only expand over time. Thus, the people now who perhaps only use the internet to shop will eventually expand that use to sourcing news, reviews, and, yes, finding restaurants. Maybe, now, this chef is justifiably sitting pretty as his customers are blissfully ignorant of food forums and blogs, but that isn't going to last.

AndrewR wrote:I work at a highly rated restaurant in the city with a relatively well-known chef. I am, to date, the only person at the restaurant currently who is aware that the LTH Forum even exists.

How could you possibly know that? Either (A) you've talked to them about LTH, in which case they do now know about it; or (B) you have no idea whether or not they know about LTH.

AndrewR wrote:I would just say that, from the point of view of someone who both participates in food forums/blogs and works full time in the restaurant industry, the effect of blogs on restaurants such as Urban Belly and Graham Elliot is, sorry guys, minor.

AndrewR wrote:Again, it's incredibly frustrating to have someone go home and complain about picayune issues that could have been easily dealt with at the restaurant had they been raised there, and have that record stay online for years as a semi-permanent record of how that restaurant is now perceived.

What a shame to let something get to you that much - to the point where you let it become "incredibly frustrating" - if the effect is so minor, anyway. Obviously - as your contradictory quotes reveal - the effect on these guys is not all that minor.

I was speaking with an owner (restaurant to remain nameless) recently. He said that he read Yelp, LTH, Metromix, etc. as well as reviews from Sun Times, Tribune, Time Out, Reader, et al. He even has made some changes at his place in reaction to feedback he read. What he thought was interesting was that people who wrote positive things tended to do it on one place it seemed (Yelp, or LTH, or Metromix but not all of them) - those read as if they were unique postings. People who had something bad to say seemed to go and post the exact same thing in EVERY one of these venues, clearly cut and pasted.

leek wrote:People who had something bad to say seemed to go and post the exact same thing in EVERY one of these venues, clearly cut and pasted.

Yeah, I call it the internet version of 'scorched earth.' It is not enough to be unhappy, you want to crash and burn any opportunity for future business. It is often a singular post and frequently no feedback to any queries.

Regards,

An interesting, if incomplete, story on Yelp in the NYTimes: Eat and Tell

leek wrote:People who had something bad to say seemed to go and post the exact same thing in EVERY one of these venues, clearly cut and pasted.

I spend most of my time at travel websites and I find this to be the case. TripAdvisor is a case in point. What is scary is after you have read 100 postings, how many of the negative comments are really very petty issues where the posters had unrealistic expectations.

And no surprise to me but in many cases, the people who paid the LOWEST rates per night (usually through a site like Priceline or Hotwire) generally nit-pick the places to death even though they are getting a great discount.

Around here, most "one-time" posters are generally challenged

crrush wrote:An interesting, if incomplete, story on Yelp in the NYTimes: Eat and Tell

I was coming here to post about that!

That "sponsorship" thing with Yelp is skeevy and may make Yelp the absolute worst example of online customer reviewing. That and the way people jockey for status, which reminds me of some (in my opinion, destructive) stuff that goes on at Amazon. I guess the Times does not claim anywhere that Yelp is representative of much, and they have given space in the past to eGullet's Steven Shaw and probably some others I missed.

Amazon doesn't get that "Top 500 Reviewer" means "Ignore this, the person who wrote it couldn't possibly have read everything he/she claims to be reviewing."

Yelp and alleged extortion: http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/24/yelp-c ... n-lawsuit/

interesting, Yelps antics like this have been reported for a while now, glad to see someone call them on it. I hope they take Yelp for millions.

jimswside wrote:interesting, Yelps antics like this have been reported for a while now, glad to see someone call them on it. I hope they take Yelp for millions.

Reported yes, but as far as I can tell, completely unsubstantiated. As we can see even in this thread, sometimes business owners will say the darndest things when they don't like what people have written about their businesses.

Though I don't get much value out of Yelp, I don't see any reason to believe that the company has done something unethical.

Kennyz wrote:Reported yes, but as far as I can tell, completely unsubstantiated. As we can see even in this thread, sometimes business owners will say the darndest things when they don't like what people have written about their businesses.

Though I don't get much value out of Yelp, I don't see any reason to believe that the company has done something unethical.

i hear ya kenny, but typically where there is smoke there is fire.
It will be interesting to see how this case turns out.

What I find interesting about this latest article is this quote:

The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

There is nothing indicating that the review was written by a Yelp employee, or that is was in some other way colored by unethical behavior. Why did the company think they could call Yelp to have the negative review removed? If Yelp had said yes, THAT would have been unethical. As far as paying to "hide" the bad review, Yelp has been very clear about this. If you buy advertising, you become a "Sponsor," and you can choose a positive review and have it appear at the top. If a business calls to get a negative review moved, I don't see anything wrong with Yelp using it as an opportunity to sell them the Sponsorship product.

interesting, Yelps antics like this have been reported for a while now, glad to see someone call them on it. I hope they take Yelp for millions.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I know of a class action suit being started here in Chicago. Yelps standards are definitely "inconsistent" I guess you could say as far as a business owner being able to protest a review. No one is saying Yelp writes the bad reviews, business owners that advertise have an easier time having reviews removed that are either inaccurate or just straight slanderous. This is the big issue involved.

pizano345 wrote:

interesting, Yelps antics like this have been reported for a while now, glad to see someone call them on it. I hope they take Yelp for millions.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I know of a class action suit being started here in Chicago. Yelps standards are definitely "inconsistent" I guess you could say as far as a business owner being able to protest a review. No one is saying Yelp writes the bad reviews, business owners that advertise have an easier time having reviews removed that are either inaccurate or just straight slanderous. This is the big issue involved.

True or not, I fail to see what qualifies this as a "big issue". If you are a paying Yelp customer, you have better access to their customer service staff. What's wrong with that? I also hear that first class passengers get to board airplanes first, and club members get better tee times at the golf course.

pizano345 wrote:
Quote:
interesting, Yelps antics like this have been reported for a while now, glad to see someone call them on it. I hope they take Yelp for millions.


This is just the tip of the iceberg. I know of a class action suit being started here in Chicago. Yelps standards are definitely "inconsistent" I guess you could say as far as a business owner being able to protest a review. No one is saying Yelp writes the bad reviews, business owners that advertise have an easier time having reviews removed that are either inaccurate or just straight slanderous. This is the big issue involved.

True or not, I fail to see what qualifies this as a "big issue". If you are a paying Yelp customer, you have better access to their customer service staff. What's wrong with that? I also hear that first class passengers get to board airplanes first, and club members get better tee times at the golf course.

The "big issue" is what you described above. Yelp PORTRAYS itself as a search, discussion, and community much like this one. It is not. It is an advertising vehicle that's main goal is to create revenue for the owners and workers. Yelp easily could of been both but instead let loose sales rep in the field that also had the ability to easily change reviews and how the reviews are laid out. In example, why doesn't Yelp list reviews chronologically unless you click "by date"? This allows them to bury good/bad reviews as they feel fit.

There isn't a small business in this world that doesn't see the benefits in the internet. The issue is with the fact that Yelp does not accurately represent itself as mainly what it is, an advertising vehicle.

pizano345 wrote:The issue is with the fact that Yelp does not accurately represent itself as mainly what it is, an advertising vehicle.

Yes, they are pretty secretive about it.