What about validating your membership in the "city's culinary elite"?

It was definitely a snazzier crowd than at Wines of Transylvania, with plenty of big name chefs there and journalists who write for actual things you've heard of.

Plus me.

And you have no idea how hard it is to be both applauding and validating while holding a Kuma's burger and trying to take its picture.

Kennyz wrote:And Nagrant lost his immunity to this stuff long ago.

Not sure what you mean. Nagrant has always seemed to take a very hard line about maintaining anonymity and not accepting freebies of any sort.

[quote="Darren72"][quote="gastrique"][quote="Darren72"]
It's fine to say the review in Chicago Mag was done poorly. But it doesn't make sense to say that the food shouldn't be critically reviewed in the first place. Why bother going then?[/quote]

Why bother going to Lolla? The food is a bonus, but mostly for the music/experience.

I guess I shouldn't say a review is out of the question...at the venue, or in context of this food vs. what the alternatives are. So really I just take issue with this one, you're right. Maybe what I mean is, the review mocks the Taste [a 'typical standard' for temporary outdoor food offerings], says this food is good and an improvement, and then dismantles each offering for not being more like standard temporary food offerings... it read to me more like a more large scale dismissal of trying to do something different. That's what stomped on my enthusiasm.[/quote]

I meant why bother going to GEB's press event, not why bother going to Lolla.[/quote]


Right, I tried to edit my previous. I have no idea what it's like to be a food journalist, but I would assume that there's often some clarity about the difference between events you are invited to for PR and things you do critical reviews of? I mean, isn't anonymity or the desire to be a fly on the wall or attempt to capture some element of the 'everyman' experience the key?

I don't know, maybe this whole pseudo-controversy was masterminded by PR people, but I assume from some of the other comments above it was not unclear what type of event this was [in that the room was full of 'big deals']. I am still just jilted because I thought this might be a cool precedent for other chefs that like music to get involved in event-driven stuff that's not JUST about food and wine, and I would imagine that getting dissed by influential food reviewing media in your hometown is a pretty effective deterrent for trying to combine high & low in a new way. Then again, it's the people with the $$ and I have shelled out mine, so maybe it will still lead to other endeavors/experiments.

Can't be good for chef GEB long term to have a rivalry with the major magazine in Chicago though, so this is not a happy moment for those that like him and his food--- ugly and unpleasant to see both sides get so riled up.

David Hammond wrote:

Kennyz wrote:And Nagrant lost his immunity to this stuff long ago.

Not sure what you mean. Nagrant has always seemed to take a very hard line about maintaining anonymity and not accepting freebies of any sort.

And I have respected him for it. Still do, but the world is changing. No longer is the restaurant-journalism trade just about free food for positive words. Now it's about publicity. The Twitterverse is filled with Nagrant retweeting PR messages from chefs, and popular chefs in turn retweeting comments from Nagrant. They help each other gain followers, popularity, and relevance in culinary cyberspace. Nagrant may still avoid taking free food, but he seems to happily accept free publicity. Not saying I blame him, but immune from the bias that comes with this stuff he is not.

gastrique wrote:I mean, isn't anonymity or the desire to be a fly on the wall or attempt to capture some element of the 'everyman' experience the key?

This seems particularly true for food reviews, where the goal is to provide other consumers with a guide to where/what is worth eating -- and that's the approach I like to take. If I'm reviewing the little hole-in-the-wall joint (and that's understandably and usually the kind of place those of us at the lower rungs of the food crit chain get assigned), then I'm pretty sure my anonymity is guaranteed (I doubt the folks at Tasty City saw the photo of me on Skyfullofbacon.com) and my goal is usually to talk about stuff that's good, interesting, worth eating. I have laughed many times as Sula skewers bigger name restaurants where the publicity about them has been so unbelievably pumped up (and thus prime for deflation), but if I'm writing about some small mom and pop joint, I may not like everything I'm eating there, but my focus is going to be on the good stuff -- not because they're comping me or they know who the hell I am, but because I think positive guidance in reviews is usually more helpful to consumers than negative guidance (and I think readers actually remember the plaudits more readily, but I have no solid research basis for that intuition).

Wow. Lollapalooza cuisine has come a long way since I saw Eddie Vedder drink a "bile beer" from "The Tube" of Jim Rose's Side Circus. http://www.twofeetthick.com/2007/07/lol ... ospective/ Would Chicago Mag go so far as to critique a bile beer? That would be hard core. That would be rock and roll journalism!

Yeah, I think I'm happy that wasn't one of the choices Monday night.

I haven't read the Chicago Magazine piece in question (and I spent Monday night reviewing a play), but having worked on both sides of the media event business -- as a onetime publicist and as a longtime journalist -- it never struck me that attending a press event meant a quid pro quo of coverage. That's not how it was explained to me in PR 101 back in journalism school, either.

Anyone who wants guaranteed ink buys advertising -- that lets them put out exactly the message they want to convey.

Most media events are meant to educate members of the press about the publicists' client. The hope is not that reporters attending the Wines of Transylvania media and concierge dinner will write up that event immediately, but that when they are later writing about wine they will remember that Wines of Transylvania exists and be able to comment knowledgeably on it. So it may be that a couple of months later, the listings at Wino's Database get some new additions and CockyTailz does a feature on "Six Bloody Good Wines for Your Halloween Table" of which one is Transylvanian Dracula's Breath, and the following spring, Cheezes to Pleeze mentions that Transylvanian Batfang is a good pairing with Uzbek raw-milk goat's brie.

While it's fair play for the reporters who attend to comment on the event itself, favorably or not, that usually comes off as riding the tricycle. "Let me tell you all about how I got to go to this cool event that you weren't invited to" seems dubious journalism.

Well, yeah, sorta, in the wine case, although it also kind of sounds like everybody in the business has a really good set of explanations ready for why the expensive party you just threw didn't result in anybody writing anything a month later. In the Lollapalooza case, though, clearly timelier coverage was hoped for (and had).

As for riding the tricycle, that's not a problem for blogs— it's a mission statement!

Seriously, it seems like the smart PR groups— at least the ones that seem smart to me— are looking beyond these old ways of doing stuff, which one notes a bit morosely were probably rooted in the fact that the people you hoped to educate long-term actually had long-term jobs writing about this stuff. I don't know exactly who and how you talk to the influencers in this brave new world, but clearly their first job needs to be thinking about it, and experimenting, and not doing the same old as if nothing else in the world of media has changed. One way, certainly, is to get out of the chef's way and let him maintain some contacts. Even if, occasionally, he also terminates them...

Mr. Hammond, thanks for defending my honor, especially in light of my poor conduct in our recent lunchbox conversation. I need to learn that there are multiple ways of doing this job and my way is not the only way, just a different way. I maintain as I always have that I enjoy your work and it's more thoughtful, informative, and entertaining than most in our fair city. I'm just a hard ass sometimes, too much for my own good.

Kennyz, I appreciate what you're saying. It's true, there's more direct access between the source and the reporter and the reader than ever, and as a result my Tweets reflect that. However the bottom line is I RT what I'm genuinely interested in or I believe will be generally interesting to people who follow me as a writer on food.
There is zero calculation on my part about trading Twitter followers for Tweets. I RT'ed the Southern's peach shrimp cocktail because it sounds interesting and looks like a real smart take on the classic - that's it.

If I was really interested in getting approval or building my brand on the back of feeding everything chefs feed me, I probably wouldn't have pointed out that GEB's mission statement said that he was about pursuing humility and humbleness in response to his attack. Likewise I probably wouldn't have made a crack about Rick Tramonto's Wendy's commercials this afternoon as the guy has like 10 times more followers than I do.

As for the preview last night, I was invited. I didn't go because I knew I couldn't get an objective look at the quality of food being served at Lolla. What was served last night was created for a small group in top level kitchens with the knowledge that people would be reporting on it. Or like I said a few minutes ago on Twitter, a chef serving terrible food at a media preview is like a politician having sex with his mistress at the offices of the National Enquirer. It probably won’t happen.

The food being served last night was not created in off-site catering facility, in part a week ahead of time, and then served to 10,000 people in 80 or 90 degree weather as it likely will be. So what’s to be learned? We already knew or could call the chefs who were serving to find out what’s being served if we wanted to report on it.

Although, maybe there was something to be learned, which is that these chefs can’t perform even at a basic level at a media preview. As such this food is open to interpretation and I like that Cassie did that. I also like Mike G and Hammond in that sense, because though maybe I don’t choose to go to the event like Mike did, I know he’ll say if something wasn’t good if he believes it was.

But, still if the food doesn’t represent the situation and you could get whatever info you needed about what will happen at Lolla through an interview, what’s to be accomplished? It seems like nothing more than an opportunity to network with like-minded folks (which isn’t a bad reason to be there), or in some folks’ case, kiss the GEB ring or get a chance to ogle Mr. Jane’s Addiction himself, Perry Farrell, and those last two things aren’t very interesting to me.

But, still if the food doesn’t represent the situation and you could get whatever info you needed about what will happen at Lolla through an interview, what’s to be accomplished? It seems like nothing more than an opportunity to network with like-minded folks (which isn’t a bad reason to be there), or in some folks’ case, kiss the GEB ring or get a chance to ogle Mr. Jane’s Addiction himself, Perry Farrell, and those last two things aren’t very interesting to me.

I kind of liked the getting out of the house and talking to someone who wasn't 8 years old or a Whole Foods checkout person part, myself.

Now I have to go back to my conversation with the cardboard cutouts of Rick Bayless and Stephanie Izard in my basement.

Mike "Rupert P" G

When toiling in the restaurant trenches, nothing is more abhorrent, more boring, more flaccid, than programmed cynicism. Wait! No – you know what? There’s something deeper, more repugnant; a quality so malignant that people literally waste years of their precious lives in its delusive grasp: Self-Importance. If we were to fuse these shining traits in an unholy marriage not unlike Frankenstein or Will Smith’s Wild Wild West – we’d only begin to scratch the surface of the article in question.

Who cares if we’ve tweaked the food offerings at Lollapalooza (whose home lies in Chicago), with an amazing lineup of Chefs that represents…wait for it...Chicago? And seriously, why worry about the tens-of-thousands of dollars these independent restaurateurs are putting on the line by trying to make a music festival even better by serving inspired food? Pretty blasé when compared to the collective inhale of the entire city, holding its breath for a "writer" to critique/rate sampling portions of the food that will be offered.

Aside from meddling with the parasitic formula that affords her a job in the first place – Cassie Walker has donned the garb of a fourth-rate Joan Rivers covering the Daytime Emmy’s. What was supposed to be a fun gathering of Chefs, foodies, bloggers, writers and musicians celebrating the fact that our town now sports the best food offerings of any music fest in the country, sadly turned into a opportunity for a catty, reckless blog post fueled by a sick self-importance for insidious and prosaic journalism.

That does it! I'm submitting this thread to "Shut Up Foodies!"

art wrote:Wow. Lollapalooza cuisine has come a long way since I saw Eddie Vedder drink a "bile beer" from "The Tube" of Jim Rose's Side Circus. http://www.twofeetthick.com/2007/07/lol ... ospective/ Would Chicago Mag go so far as to critique a bile beer? That would be hard core. That would be rock and roll journalism!

The only thing I remember eating at Lalapalooza #1 was some mushrooms! Boy, Siouxsie and the Banshees never sounded so good!

MJN wrote:Kennyz, I appreciate what you're saying. It's true, there's more direct access between the source and the reporter and the reader than ever, and as a result my Tweets reflect that. However the bottom line is I RT what I'm genuinely interested in or I believe will be generally interesting to people who follow me as a writer on food.
There is zero calculation on my part about trading Twitter followers for Tweets. I RT'ed the Southern's peach shrimp cocktail because it sounds interesting and looks like a real smart take on the classic - that's it.

I hear you and have no doubt that you go out of your way to be ethical in your work. That said, I'm sure that most media people who accept the freebies use pretty much the same argument - "the freebies don't affect what I write".


And GEB - self-importance is validated when it's met with a disproportional a response from someone many people consider genuinely important.

MJN wrote:However the bottom line is I RT what I'm genuinely interested in or I believe will be generally interesting to people who follow me as a writer on food.
There is zero calculation on my part about trading Twitter followers for Tweets. I RT'ed the Southern's peach shrimp cocktail because it sounds interesting and looks like a real smart take on the classic - that's it.

Just so I can keep up--what does RT stand for?

RT- retransmit ...

Thanks.

John des Rosiers of Inovasi weighs in on the GEB/CM kerfuffle.

Cathy2 wrote:RT- retransmit ...

Silly me, I thought it meant "retweet."

ChefGEB wrote:There’s something deeper, more repugnant; a quality so malignant that people literally waste years of their precious lives in its delusive grasp: Self-Importance.

David Hammond wrote:

Cathy2 wrote:RT- retransmit ...

Silly me, I thought it meant "retweet."

Sorry, I defer to your more cutting edge knowledge. While retweet is effectively retransmitting, your vocabulary is more accurate for the situation.

Regards,

Tomorrow on LTHForum: OMFG

Mike G wrote:Tomorrow on LTHForum: OMFG

I know that one.

Cathy2 wrote:

Mike G wrote:Tomorrow on LTHForum: OMFG

I know that one.

Me too. Oh My Facebook God, right?

I guess GEB has his right to his opinion on local foodstuffs and taking the food up a level to show case creativity in food as the bands let loose the music sounds like a fun idea (and a WHOLE lot better than the general over priced festival food). If we look back at the festival its forum has always been pretty eclectic so why not tie in the food.
In my opinion, I can agree with his point of overselling this idea of the farm to the point that some menus read as if they are a family tree and the prices skyrocket out of control for the fact that it is local food(and creative marketing for the restaurant to charge those prices). This is where both the farmer and the market are taking advantage of the reworking of the systems. I know quite a few farmers whom are fantastic at what they do, are caring wonderful people but when it comes to pricing their products its a turkey shoot as to how much the market is willing to pay (perfect example is blueberries right now at $2 ish dollars for Michigan berries in the store and almost $4-5+ dollars a pint at the farmers markets). Do I expect to pay more at the farmers markets, yes as there are alot of fees and transportation to move directly from the farm but almost three times the market price is kind of hard to swallow on a family budget in this economy. I truly believe we are still in the honeymoon stage of local food and things will adjust as this shift comes into line and we get used to paying another 10% (just a number for example) or so more for our food to help cover land, water, fair labor wages, and direct transportation costs.

I went to the palloza festivals from 91-94 when ticket prices were much less and a grilled cheese made out of someone’s trunk with a cold beverage in a bottle was gourmet! Much less a thing on a stick could have become a dangerous weapon or a new piercing!

Once again, all in my opinion!
johnh

What I found annoying about the Chicago Mag. thing was the overall snide attitude. I like food. I like talking about food. But I'm really tired of people who think they are witty with the little half-line insults.

It is not witty. It is boring. The impression that I am left with after reading the note was "Please, don't ever have her sit next to me at a restaurant. I'm sure she `fills the room with her wit and intelligence.'" Maybe she should post where she is going, so we can all avoid those places when she is there.

I was a fan of GEB before, and even more so no. So many people here would have him just sit there and take it. He said no. It is time somebody finally stood up to some of the idiot "critics."

DML wrote:What I found annoying about the Chicago Mag. thing was the overall snide attitude. I like food. I like talking about food. But I'm really tired of people who think they are witty with the little half-line insults.

Are you talking about "Fuck Chicago Magazine"?

Darren72 wrote:

DML wrote:What I found annoying about the Chicago Mag. thing was the overall snide attitude. I like food. I like talking about food. But I'm really tired of people who think they are witty with the little half-line insults.

Are you talking about "Fuck Chicago Magazine"?

No, that was not meant to be witty. It was not meant to be snide. It was not meant to show how important GEB is. That was meant to be an insult. It was very effective as such.

It gets more and more entertaining, with that des Rosier dude from Inovasi now weighing in to lambast GEB. Fearful, I presume, of losing his Most-Self-Important-Chef title to GEB, a serious challenger.

des Rosier to GEB: "You actually sweating on the line or just watching?"
GEB to des Rosier: "both; not all chefs have the luxury of doing 10 covers/night in the burbs."