The latest entry into the annals of great food debates—Trotter v. Tramonto, Levy v. Zarzour—concerns not the ethics of foie gras nor the state of pastry but rather the single most banal phenomenon of our time: Twitter. The discussion, which began with Steve Dolinsky’s tweets from Big Star’s opening night and evolved (or devolved, depending on your taste) into a back and forth between Restaurant Intelligence Agency owner Ellen Malloy, Chicago Tribune writer Kevin Pang and food writers Michael Nagrant and Ari Bendersky, took over Twitter yesterday and has moved over to Facebook today, which makes it significantly easier to follow, and significantly more…verbose.
At stake is the question: Is it okay for a food personality to tweet about a restaurant on its first night? (Responses included: Yes, if it’s positive. Yes, if the writer recognizes that people care. Yes, if the person wants to be relevant.)
We* followed along, but kept mum. Sure, as food writers, we’ve got opinions. (I’m completely neutral about positive tweets, which are—since the Tapas Valencia misstep—all that Dolinsky has ever trafficked in. But I think anyone tweeting negative remarks needs to know that the repercussions can be pretty fucking serious. Michael Nagrant, a bold participant in this conversation, has failed to mention that after he tweeted about the Publican’s bad service at brunch, servers at the restaurant lost their jobs.) But as an eater, and as a reader, I honestly don’t care. And neither does the vast majority of the thousands of Twitter followers accrued by this crew of food writers. These followers RT like crazy when they find out what kind of hot dogs Lula will serve as Hot Doug’s on Halloween or what the process was behind building the oven at Nella Pizzeria or whether the $5 burger at Primehouse is worth heading over for. But when a bunch of food writers tap away on twitter about how to use twitter? And do it in a way that betrays the fact that they’re really in the conversation not so much for the philosophical discussion but rather because they think it will “strengthen their brand”? Well, it’s then that we can hear the sound of one hand tweeting.
*This post was co-written with David Tamarkin.
UPDATE: A Publican spokesperson says that no one was fired as a result of Nagrant’s tweet. Other sources disagree. But we erred in not giving the restaurant an opportunity to present its side of the story before this post first went live, and we apologize for that.
Hilarious! Love it!
I would have mentioned the fact that people had been fired had I known that anyone was fired. I didn’t. That being said, the implication here I think is that I tweeted what I did as some half-baked idea or that I don’t understand the “f-cking serious” ramifications of what I’m doing and I would reconsider if I knew someone was going to get fired.
I meant every word. Consistently for me the service at Publican has not matched the quality of the food. That particular day, we were ignored for a decent time before our order taken, skipped over multiple times on coffee refills, things we asked for like milk for my son were forgotten, food was delivered to half our table and not all at the same time, silverware was knocked off the table. Food was dropped off by runners without description.
That being said, none of these things were fire-worthy offenses. Those were trainable service mistakes. If someone got fired, I hope it was because they’d demonstrated a history of problems. If not, then the firing seems like an over-reaction by zealous management who didn’t do a good enough job of training their folks. If that’s the case, I don’t have any regret for my tweets, but I do have regret that the displaced employees had to work for such unreasonable people. (This however is speculation, because I have no idea what happened, maybe you can fill me in?)
That being said, I can honestly say my participation in this discussion has nothing to do with some need to strengthen a brand. In using those words, I was paraphrasing what someone else had suggested Dolinsky was doing by taking advantage of opening day tweeting from Big Star.
I can see how my discussion with Kevin Pang yesterday might be construed as a personal philosophy of self-promotion, but what I was talking about regarding Vettel and the Trib “brand” is that I think because Vettel is so well-known, his tweeting could lift the Trib up by attracting more readers and thus helping all the journalists employed there. I.E. that by focusing on doing more than writing one review a week or two articles a week, by working on additional activities you could be helping others.
My participation in the discussion actually comes from having made mistakes in the past and wanting be a participant in finding better ways to conduct myself as a journalist. I would actually have preferred if this discussion had taken place on private email as most of these conversations do with me. I don’t even have a Facebook account because I believe the website is generally a totally self-aggrandizing tool. If I were really concerned about my brand or whatever, I’d probably have myself a big old Facebook page and I certainly wouldn’t have shut down my other personal website, Hungry.
Regarding the conversation about Twitter, there are much better ways of promoting oneself than spending hours writing thousands of words for free on what you point out, and I agree with you, is generally a marginally interesting topic to the public. Maybe some of the participants were promoting themselves, but I do think most of the folks were in it for the discussion of craft, and the fact that it was public was incidental.
Frankly, I wish you all had participated in the discussion, as both of you guys (Julia and Dave) know, I have nothing but the highest respect for you and have said so on many occasions. And yes, I know I jumped to conclusions regarding the Sarah Levy discussion on a Twitter a few weeks ago. But I apologized for that mistake, and apologize again. Time Out has some of the highest ethical standards in the business, and as strong arbiters of anonymity and paying your way, your thoughts would have been welcome. I think we all write, not because it’s interesting to readers or sells a magazine, because we love and care deeply about what we do.