by Holly Hughes
Chef Russell Klein, who owns Meritage with his wife, Desta, recalls one incident in which a family brought along a baby who cried loudly throughout their leisurely meal. The adults made no effort to quiet the baby as it continued to disturb other guests’ enjoyment of the restaurant’s quaint, romantic ambiance. Looking out for the interests of other diners—some of whom had certainly paid for babysitters—Klein says Desta politely asked the woman if she’d like to take the baby out in the hallway to soothe it. The woman responded by making a scene about being “kicked out” and writing a rant that she posted on several restaurant-related sites.
I looked up the screed: “She was the meanest and rudest restaurant owner I had ever seen!” it reads. “A person who can not comprehend that a 10-month-old baby is not able to behave at 7 p.m. can no way make the rest of the customers happy.” Although Desta did post a response, the original comment remains. “If somebody puts something out that’s biased, unfair, or untrue,” Klein says, “it lives forever.”
Russo says he’s learned to ignore criticism—he gets his fair share from the comments section of his blog on StarTribune.com—though he and other restaurateurs are especially sensitive to unfair comments about their customers or staff. Erica Christ, owner of the Black Forest, recalls one online commenter who complained that a server was flirting with diners at another table and described the server’s appearance so specifically that she was easily identifiable. Elijah Goodwell, manager of the Birchwood Cafe, says he was particularly upset by disparaging remarks about two groups of valued customers: cyclists, who were described as “older flabby spandex-wearing bikers jockeying for first place like it was the friggin Tour de France,” and kids, of which the commenter wrote: “OMG! Do they really have to eat out? Can’t you leave them at home and throw them some kibble when you return?”
THE ANONYMITY GRANTED to bloggers and commenters who write under pseudonyms does have advantages to face-to-face conversation. If someone isn’t comfortable with confrontation, Duplex chef Andrew Smith points out, anonymous complaints may be more authentic and direct than those made in person. “‘Fine’ in Minnesotan means ‘it sucks,’” he notes.
But anonymity also means not having to take responsibility for one’s words. Opinions need not be justified with knowledge. “You can say whatever you want on a blog and you don’t have to research or fact-check or have to be qualified to offer an opinion,” Russo says. “Some of it borders on libel.” Anonymous critiques also tend to be harsher than bylined comments. Anna Christoforides, owner of Gardens of Salonica, says that she’s seen far too much of such internet bullying. Her husband/co-owner has been referred to as a “soup Nazi” and “freaky” on local restaurant comment forums. “The public seems to have lost all of its sense of decorum and diplomacy,” she says. Klein concurs: “The viciousness that people display online that they wouldn’t say in person is pretty disturbing, actually.”
Anonymous comment forums can also foster smear campaigns. “If somebody had a bone to pick with you for whatever reason, they could go online and say some nasty things about your business,” Klein says. He wonders if the animosity of former colleagues at W.A. Frost may have prompted some to write negative reviews of Meritage. Goodwell says it’s harder for him to trust online comments, not knowing the commenter’s agenda, and describes the situation’s inherent imbalance. “They have less to lose than we do,” he says. “Their reputation isn’t involved.”
Worst of all, online disputes may be moving off computer screens and manifesting themselves in physically destructive acts. Earlier this fall, Heidi’s chef-owner Stewart Woodman published some unflattering remarks about another local chef on his blog, Shefzilla.com, and shortly thereafter his restaurant was egged. The timing and narrow target of the vandalism suggested it may have been retaliatory.
Smith notes that the rise of the “entry-level foodism thing” has shifted the way food is perceived in our culture. “Interest in food has increased astronomically, so you have people who are really into it but don’t really know that much about it,” he says. He compares the tirades of the notoriously temperamental television celebrichef Gordon Ramsey to those of online commenters. “Those folks who are the chefs on TV actually have a background in cooking and knowledge to compel their rants,” he says. “Some of the people don’t have the background of knowledge but do try to copy the attitude.”
SO HOW DO RESTAURATEURS respond to comments they feel are out of line? “If they attack me personally in a vicious way, I don’t respond,” Russo says. “For the most part people read that stuff and they don’t give it a second thought.” On some sites, responding to a comment will move it to the forefront of a discussion; if left alone, comments tend to migrate to less noticeable placement over time. “If you respond, you inject life into it, and the person is probably enjoying your response,” Russo adds.
Parasole, the restaurant group that owns Manny’s, Chino Latino, and Salut, among others, has jumped into social media with more enthusiasm than any other local restaurateur. (Even founder Phil Roberts, who is in his 70s, has taken to Twittering.) Each of the company’s restaurants has one youthful staffer devoted to updating its Facebook page and monitoring online commentary. Kip Clayton, who handles the company’s business development, says that he has occasionally responded to online complaints on behalf of the company. For example, when commenters griped about the long lines and ticket times at Burger Jones, he explained that the restaurant was receiving three times the traffic they anticipated and were struggling to keep up. (Even for experienced restaurant owners like Parasole, some aspects of the business can be hard to predict.)
Still, it’s nearly impossible for restaurateurs to respond online and not have their remarks seem defensive. Lisa Edevold, co-owner of Tiger Sushi, discovered the challenges of counteracting negative online comments when a few loyal customers mentioned that they had seen some not-so-positive reviews of Tiger on Yelp and offered to submit their own reviews to balance them out.
Shortly after the loyal customers posted their reviews, several were removed. Looking into the situation, Edevold found a discussion on the site among hard-core Yelpers who accused Tiger of posting “fraudulent” reviews, because several had been written by first-time Yelpers. (Determining authentic reviews isn’t Yelp’s only business challenge. The company recently came under fire for allegations that its sales reps were offering to make negative reviews less prominent for businesses who advertised with Yelp, as well as accusations that employees were posting negative reviews about businesses that didn’t advertise.)
“Now when people tell me they love my restaurant and ask what they can do to get the word out, I tell them to stay away from Yelp, because they don’t seem to welcome newcomers to their site,” Evevold says. “We just stopped all Yelp activity after I read that, thinking that any more interaction with them would just be dangerous.”
LIKE IT OR NOT, social media and anonymous online chatter aren’t going away. “We have to figure it out or we’ll be left behind,” Clayton says. “I’m not sure how we’re going to communicate with twentysomethings otherwise. Young people depend more on each other than on a Target commercial to tell them where to shop.”
Still, every restaurateur I spoke with wished that online commenters would first try to address their concerns in the moment. “That gives us the opportunity to make it better,” says Goodwell. “We’re human. We’re going to make mistakes. But we really care that people have a good experience.”
Mike Phillips, chef at the Craftsman, laments the tendency for dissatisfied customers to express their concerns online instead of in person. “No one wants to talk to anyone anymore,” he says. “They want to hide behind a computer and say things.” Phillips also encourages commenters to be aware of the power of their words—they can have an impact on a restaurant’s bottom line. “A lot of people’s jobs are at stake,” he says.
Russo, too, says he can’t understand why unsatisfied customers don’t speak up. (“Maybe be
cause I’m Italian and I’m from New Jersey,” he says, “I’ll tell anybody anything.”) “I would have made an attempt to do a better job for you. I’m not going to charge you for something you didn’t enjoy. Do they think the chef is going to come out and sock them in the eye?” Russo says he’ll oblige a customer’s wish, even if it goes against his recommendation. “Order steak well done?” he says. “That’s wrong. But I’m doing it anyhow because that’s the way you asked for it.” Somewhat facetiously he adds, “You want me throw it on the ground and step on it?” (I dare somebody to hold him to that one.)
Like most new technologies, anonymous online comments can be both a blessing and a curse. Restaurant-goers may find them helpful in making dining decisions—as long as they know they’re coming from a trustworthy source. And restaurateurs appreciate the increased feedback—with a few reservations. “It provides more publicity and more information for people,” Klein acknowledges, “but it can be really frustrating to have people who don’t know a whole lot about what we do evaluate us.” He urges commenters to keep things in perspective. “There are also times that people can be downright mean and vicious, and you want to remind them, ‘It’s just dinner. Tomorrow it’ll be shit—literally.’ ”
Dining Around
FRIED IN EAST L.A.
By Jonathan Gold From LA Weekly
Longtime LA Weekly critic, and winner of a 2007 Pulitzer Prize (the first dining critic to be so honored), Jonathan Gold is like the Philip Marlowe of the LA dining scene, with a restless curiosity about all its eateries, from the trendiest café to the humblest food stand.
It is late, and my family is asleep in the car, and I am leaning against a chain-link fence on a sleepy Eastside street. At the shuttered bakery on the corner, some of the night crew has just shuffled into work, but I am here for the makeshift line of folding tables along the sidewalk, the line of folding chairs, the bowls of salsa teetering on the oilcloth. A woman bent over blue flames prepares to make my dinner.
She fries tortillas in hot oil for a second or two, just long enough to soften them, dips them in a dish of ruddy sauce, and splashes a few drops of oil onto a second griddle. Tortillas fly onto the hot metal. A moment later, the air is thick with the dark, musky scent of toasting chiles. She inverts the tortillas, flips them around a bit of cheese, and maneuvers them onto a plate in what seems like a single motion. They are the best enchiladas I have ever tasted.
Until recently, the center of the Eastside street-food universe was located in a small parking lot on Breed Street in Boyle Heights, a nocturnal band of vendors drawing customers from as far away as Riverside and San Diego, serving sticky, sizzling, crunchy, meaty snacks from all over Mexico; salsas hot enough to burn small, butterfly-shaped patches into the leather of your shoes; and quart-size foam cups of homemade orange drink. Over here were huaraches; over there Mexico City-style quesadillas; crunchy flautas; sugary churros; gooey tacos al vapor. The vendors never stayed open quite late enough, but Breed Street had become something of an institution, a place to take out of town visitors, a great quick dinner before a show. Sometimes there were even clowns.
The Breed Street experience was not exactly dependable—you never knew if a visit was going to result in a delicious bowl of barbacoa or a desolate patch of asphalt—and after local officials rousted the gathering for good a couple of months ago, it looked as if the party was over. To some of us, luxury dining means being able to find your favorite tamale vendor two nights in a row. But this is 2009—the tools of social networking are no farther away than the cell phone in your back pocket. A few weeks ago, some of the scattered vendors from the old parking lot began broadcasting their locations on Twitter, one of them as @antojitoscarmen, another group of them as @BreedStScene, and as with the introduction of Kogi merely one year ago, the intersection of technology and street food enabled something new. With Twitter, it doesn’t matter if that tamale vendor has set up at the corner of Olympic and Soto, at a Maravilla service station or in front of a nightclub down on Whittier.
So a weekend taco crawl might begin with a visit to the @BreedStScene guys, chiefly Nina’s, whose gorditas and huaraches were the stars of the Breed Street gatherings, and whose scarlet pambazos, chorizo-and-potato sandwiches dunked in chile and fried until the sauce hardens into a crackly gloss, are among the best in town. (Nina’s dry salsa of toasted seeds and chile is the perfect condiment.) Somebody will slip you a tiny pill cup filled with the hominy stew pozole, and you’ll probably have a bowl of that too, as well as one of the Mexico City-style quesadillas, which are like demonically good Hostess Fruit Pies filled with squash blossoms and melted cheese. Kids run around glugging orange soda, teasing their little sisters with Mickey Mouse dolls.
Lupe’s Crepes, the next stand over, specializes in sweets: bubbly pancakes or fried bananas dressed with caramel sauce and condensed milk. Rodolfo’s Barbacoa sells soupy lamb stew. The rogue cart around the corner does street dogs and tacos al vapor, scooping soft, unctuous masses of cow’s head from steam-table bins hidden under a clean, white towel. A block away are those enchiladas, part of a smaller, quieter scene, another entrepôt of huaraches and quesadillas. If you ask for tamales, somebody fetches them from a silent man in a car.
When you approach Antojitos Carmen, several blocks north and east, the first thing you may notice, once you get past the woman selling purses, are the big griddles dotted with chalupas, tiny tortillas smeared with puréed beans, drizzled with cream, and moistened with red or green salsa—the green chile is the spiciest thing you will eat tonight, unless you dipped into the sauce labeled “muy picoso” at Nina’s, in which case you’re already back home, recovering. And you can eat a dozen chalupas in a flash. Once you abandon yourself to the magnetic chalupa forces you will be lured across the river again and again—the CIA could learn something about mind control from antojitos masters.
And Antojitos Carmen itself? Homemade walnut atole, fluffy pambazos and the best Mexico City huaraches on the street: crisp-edged surfboards of toasted masa sluiced with an ink-black stew of huitlacoche, painted with red chile, crema and green chile to resemble the Mexican flag. The scion of the family that runs the stand, Abe Ortega, perpetually wearing an outsize Dodgers jacket, hands you a raisin-studded gelatin dessert and grins.
NEW ZION BARBECUE
By Patricia Sharpe From Saveur
Moonlighting from her three-decades-plus gig as food columnist of Texas Monthly magazine, Patricia Sharpe opens a window onto authentic Texas barbecue for Saveur’s nationwide readership.
The time is 5:30 on a cool Friday morning, and, as the old saying goes, it’s as dark as the inside of a black cat. A little breeze riffles the tall pines lining a country road in Huntsville, a town of 35,000 in southeastern Texas, and an insomniac mockingbird sings somewhere deep in the shadows. Although every cell in my body is screaming for caffeine, I’ve somehow managed to show up on time at the small parish hall behind New Zion Missionary Baptist Church. Soon a pair of headlights appears in the distance: Robert Polk has come, as he does three days a week, to fire up the barbecue pit.
Looking with resignation at the soot-covered, nine-foot-long metal drum cooker in front of him, the taciturn 44-year-old outlines the task ahead. “First, I have to shovel the old ashes out and put them in the trash,” he tells me. “Then I put some oak logs in the firebox,” he says, referring to the metal receptacle that serves as the pit’s fireplace. He gets a roaring blaze going and lets it cool down before he scrapes the grill racks clean. Then he disappears into the kitchen and returns with four enormous beef briskets that have been sitting in the refrigerator overnight while a seasoning rub from a closely guarded recipe seeps into every fiber and pore. After heaving the meat onto the racks, Polk settles into a rusty metal folding chair a few feet away. The sun has come up, and the day is getting warmer; the pit radiates a slumber-inducing heat. “I’ll keep an eye on it, but I might nod off a little,” he says. He’s entitled. By 11, when the customers start showing up, t
hings will be too busy for so much as a coffee break.
New Zion—more generally referred to as “that church that sells barbecue”—is one of the most renowned yet improbable members of the Texas barbecue hall of fame. I’ve been making regular pilgrimages here from my home in Austin, a good three hours away, for nearly 15 years, and each time I do I wonder why I’ve waited so long to come back. Everything about the trip is gratifying: driving out through the remote region known as the Piney Woods, spotting the smoke rising above the trees, comparing notes with other customers (“How’d y’all hear about this place?”), and finally sitting down in a rickety little church building to devour some of the most tender, flavorful barbecue in the state.
The transaction is about as straightforward as it can be: the church cooks mouthwatering meats, sides, and pies, and the public queues up for the privilege of consuming them. That’s all there is to it. Basically, the church runs a barbecue joint like thousands of others in Texas, but something about the whole experience far surpasses the sum of its exceedingly modest parts. Walking across the remnants of purple carpet that have been placed on the ground around the pit to keep the dust down, I feel as if I’d been hired as an extra for a Texas-based episode of The Andy Griffith Show or perhaps been asked to pose for a Norman Rockwell painting. A feeling of déjà vu—of having stepped back into that elusive, simpler time, a time when community and fellowship fueled the state’s great barbecue tradition—envelops me, but with one key difference: this is for real.
