Recently in Social Media Category
Chef's Lagniappe is a new (to me, anyway) blog that self-describes as "an insider's view on New Orleans food from the kitchens of Dickie Brennan's Restaurants." It looks like a pretty well designed operation, and it makes a lot of sense for a restaurant group as large and diverse as Dickie Brennan's to market itself in this way.
In other local news, both Lorin Gaudin and Celeste, over at Bouillie have written eloquent and restrained responses to Tom Fitzmorris' recent piece on the limitations of Vietnamese cuisine. I didn't see his piece when it came out, and I haven't read the whole thing, but the excerpts don't make me anxious to waste my time doing so. I think Lorin and Celeste nailed it pretty well.
Alas, I have broken the established pattern of alerting you contemporaneously to the publication of the most recent Haute Plates column. This week I went to the Tuesday Crescent City Farmers Market. In addition to the market, I had a chat with the folks at A Fork in the Road, a little red school bus that sells sandwiches, salads, and the occasional hot plate lunch adjacent to the market, as seen here:
A Fork in the Road
If you haven't checked out Haute Plates, and are wondering why my updates to appetites have been less frequent lately, please go and see at least part of the answer. If you do, and have any thoughts about a particular column, a question, or a suggestion for another topic you'd like to see me cover, please leave a comment.
I will also accept shameless flattery and cashier's checks.
In addition to Haute Plates, I had a chance to speak with Poppy Tooker last night, when we both participated in an oyster and wine pairing event at the Bourbon House. It was a pretty neat setup, and it looked like everyone involved had a good time. Poppy mentioned that her new radio show, Louisiana Eats! will premiere on WWNO on Wednesday, June 9, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. It's a weekly show about food and cooking here in Louisiana that runs for a half hour on Wednesday evenings, and will be rebroadcast at noon on Saturdays, after The Splendid Table.
From the release I received early this morning:
The inaugural program will focus necessarily on the effects of oil in the Gulf of Mexico and the dire outlook for Louisiana oysters. Poppy will talk with oystermen and other experts on the Gulf’s beloved bivalves, including: Sal Sunseri, of 134 year-old P & J Oyster Company; Chef Frank Brigtsen of Brigtsen’s Restaurant and Charlies Seafood; and Mark Schexnaydre, Coastal Region Advisor for Louisiana State University’s Sea Grant Program.
In future programs, listeners will join Poppy as she meets people who produce, cook, and eat the foods we enjoy and treasure—exploring kitchens and stores, farms and waterways where favorite foods are produced and prepared. And because Louisianans love all kinds of food, Poppy won’t limit herself to shrimp Creole and hot sauce! Coming up on the schedule: Lolis Eric Elie, screenwriter for the HBO television series, Tremé, joins Poppy with tales of his African adventure with Top Chef Marcus Samuelsson.
Louisiana Eats! builds on the popularity of WWNO’s current culinary programs, the nationally-distributed The Splendid Table, and local short features Market Minutes and Where Y’Eat? “Our listeners have enthusiastically embraced our culinary programming,” said WWNO General Manager Paul Maassen. “Poppy Tooker is the ideal storyteller for this next step. Her life-long commitment to preserving our historic foodways adds depth and perspective that can be heard only on Louisiana Eats!”
In Louisiana Eats! Poppy Tooker displays the same passion for local foodways that she brought to her award-winning Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook, where she tells city’s story through the eyes of farmers, fishers, and vendors. The book received a special Tabasco Cookbook Award for historic and cultural content. New Orleans Magazine named it Cookbook of the Year. With her motto "Eat It To Save It" she has helped to revive endangered foods across the U.S. and abroad, in collaboration with Slow Food's Ark of Taste. Poppy's on-camera flair has made her a sought-after guest on the Food Network, the History Channel and on PBS. She provides restaurant commentary on Steppin’ Out, broadcast weekly on New Orleans public television station WYES-TV. Her many accolades include being named a Times-Picayune Hero of the Storm for her work following Hurricane Katrina. Across the country, Poppy may be best known for beating Food Network star Bobby Flay in a Seafood Gumbo Throwdown-- he didn't stand a chance.
Support for Louisiana Eats! comes from: Zatarain’s; Wine Institute of New Orleans; Dickie Brennan Restaurant Group; Leidenheimer Baking Company; and Leitz-Eagan Funeral Home and Nottoway Plantation and Resort. WWNO appreciates their generous support, which helps bring more Louisiana sounds and voices to public radio.
I know I'll be tuning in. If you can't catch the show on the radio, you can listen live to it at WWNO's website, and it is also available "On Demand" (link to follow shortly).
What do I have to do? I ask that you alert me to new, local foodblogs, and yet I must find them myself? Forked For Now is the product of, it appears, a young woman living in New Orleans. And yet none of you alerted me to it.
For shame.
I would say more, but the Saints are playing the Patriots, and that's clearly more important.
Men, Women, and Mannish Boys take note: the 3rd annual Po Boy Preservation Festival will take place this Sunday, November 22nd, on Oak Street between Carrollton and Eagle Streets.
The festival has been incredibly popular in its first two years, and this year is likely to be similar. The popularity led to some pretty serious crowds, but this year the area that the festival will encompass has been expanded, and a few of the attractions have been moved to the periphery of the show. More importantly from my perspective, there will be a screen set up for the Saints game.
I'll be one of a host of judges this year, and I'm looking forward (foreword) to it. With 40 or so selections, there should be food enough for everybody's taste.
Anyway, it's going to be a good time, and I'm pretty pleased to be taking part. Say "hello" if you see me out there.
Or don't, and feel the steely wrath of my gaze upon your nape. Muah.
Folks, I've been busy. I know I've said it before, but while I enjoy writing this website, it's pretty far down on my list of priorities. My family, my legal practice, and writing for which I get paid all come ahead, as does my continued quest for that Leprechaun's pot o' gold. God damned Leprechaun.
There are a number of things I'd like to write about, and hopefully in the next week or two, I'll have a chance to do so. My cousin David's cookbook, DamGoodSweet has been released, and it's only one of about a half dozen books I need to review in some fashion.
I have been remiss about posting press releases that you might actually find interesting. For example, Peggy Scott Laborde's new documentary, New Orleans Food Memories will air on November 18 on WYES, at 7 and 10 p.m. I'm getting a chance to see it tonight; if I manage to find the time, I'll post a quick review. I'm pretty sure, knowing Peggy's work and the folks she's interviewed, that it will be worth your time.
Also: the New Orleans Po-boy Preservation Festival is set to kick off on Sunday, November 22nd, from 11 to 6 at Oak Street near Carrollton. They've moved things around, and should have more space for what's become an extremely popular event. It looks like I'll be there as a judge this year, so come by and see me.
I've also been taking a bunch of pictures lately; some for paying work, but others just sit on my hard drive, or reside in my Flickr page Here is an example:
Jambon-beurre at St. James Cheese Company
That's a photograph I took as part of some research into an article on banh mi sandwiches, or "Vietnamese po-boys" as we tend to call them down here.
Finally, at least for the moment, I have been making plans to redesign and rework this site. I've had a very good proposal, and now the problem is finding time to meet with the designer to discuss practicalities. I hope that by the end of the year Appetites looks completely different, and that you will once again be able to add comments here. I very much appreciate emails, and please keep them coming, but I've always found it easier to simply add a comment, and I'm sure you do too.
We'll see how that works out, and in the interim I'll try to at least provide brief updates on a more regular basis. Now if you'll excuse me, I believe I hear the lilt of bagpipes in conference room 3.
In the first part of this little exercise, I wrote about what a restaurant website should be, and about how restaurants should react to scurrilous emails. Here, I'd like to expand on the latter issue, and address how I think restaurants should address social media more generally.
First, the more general issue: do you want to involve yourself at all? That's a question that I can't answer for you. There is a lot to be gained from social media like Facebook and Twitter, and there is some benefit to being active on internet messageboards. But there's an investment of time involved, and not everyone has either the time or the desire to do it properly.
Let me start with the most difficult issue: Messageboards. There are a few out there, but while I don't have access to their usage statistics, the number of posts and posters suggest a fairly limited number of readers.
The Chowhound board is probably the most visited, though it's mainly a place for folks from out of town to get advice. Local food critic Tom Fitzmorris also has a messageboard, and others have been set up by folks who wanted additional options, such as New Orleans Eats, and a few different food-related boards at Mr. Lake's New Orleans Forums. The folks at New Orleans.com** have a food forum, and the venerable (for the internet) website eGullet has a board dedicated to Louisiana.
Because none of the boards have a huge volume of traffic, there is not all that much utility to restaurants in maintaining an active presence. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, if it interests you; only that you should do it because it interests you, and not as a part of your marketing strategy. Occasionally a restaurateur will come into an online forum because the restaurant is being criticized. This is not always a good idea, but the worst thing you can do is to misrepresent yourself.
Here is an example of what I'm talking about. I don't know for sure who any of the posters are, but it certainly appears that "fsk13" and "gotham" are the same person, and likely associated with the restaurant being discussed. The reaction from the other posters is pretty typical, and counterproductive from the restaurant's perspective. Rather than answering criticism, they've kept the thread alive, and earned more criticism to boot.
It's probably better to ignore this kind of thing; or better yet, take it as constructive criticism. If there's something on which you can improve, and the criticism alerts you to it, that's pretty much free consulting. Even if the advice is clearly mean-spirited, it may be of value to you.
If you feel that you must respond, do not do so anonymously. Disclose your relationship to the restaurant, whatever it is. Be polite when you respond; go so far as to thank the person for bringing a problem to your attention. You might even consider offering to resolve the problem, if you think it won't cause more headaches.
In the first part of my discussion on this topic, I talked about the difference between a false assertion of fact, and opinion. That was in the context of whether something written about a restaurant might be actionable. The basic concept is that, because opinions cannot be proven true or false, they usually cannot be defamatory or libelous.* There are exceptions, but the distinction is worthwhile to consider in this context as well.
If someone writes on an internet messageboard that your restaurant closes at 8:00, when in fact you close at 11:00, there's something you can do. It's a factually incorrect assertion, and it may be worth your time to correct it. If someone writes that your gumbo is bland and tasteless, you probably can't. At least, not if your gumbo is not bland and tasteless. If the criticism is valid, again, maybe you should change the gumbo. But even if you believe that the opinion being expressed is wrong, there's just not much you can do about it. It's unlikely that arguing with someone who expresses a negative opinion about your restaurant is going to help.
The more likely result is that you'll get into an argument on the internet, and honestly nobody wins in that scenario. Because if you've spent any time on the internet, you know that there are some people who are jackasses, and who derive pleasure from creating controversy. We call them "trolls," and they exist in every public messageboard on the internet. That's not to say that all criticism on those boards is invalid. Quite the contrary, there's a lot of folks on those boards who know what they're talking about, and there are a lot of restaurants that deserve vociferous criticism. My point is that whether you agree with the opinion expressed or not, countering it is generally a bad idea.
So that is my advice for dealing with internet messageboards. The advice with regard to Twitter, Facebook, and the like is similar. It's very simple: if you have the time and the inclination, there's no reason not to sign up for such social media sites. Assuming you're not a complete moron, you'll only increase your visibility. None of these sites, to my knowledge, cost anything. Frequently, they provide useful information for your customers.
What's perhaps more important, letting people connect with you via these websites gives them a sense that they're connected to you. People who are connected to you in some way are generally more likely to visit your restaurant. And that is the single most important reason to do any kind of "advertising." If it puts asses in seats, and it's free, why the holy hell wouldn't you do it?
I won't presume to tell you what to write on twitter, or how often. There's an art to learning how to make effective use of a service that limits you to 140 characters at a time, but there's no one way to do it. Cochon Butcher does a great job of announcing specials via Twitter, for example. Chef Scott Boswell, of Stella! posts a lot of pictures, and talks about what he's doing. You may figure out another way to make Twitter work for you. My advice is that you should try. Oh, and please God don't fucking spam. I don't care who you are, or how much I like your restaurant. If you update 30 times an hour, I'm dropping you like a sack of plague-ridden hamsters.
Facebook is similar, but you have the option of providing even more information, and obviously you're not limited to 140 characters. It is probably better for restaurants than Myspace, which I believe tends toward a younger demographic. Other than that, all of the above advice applies. Don't be an asshole, or a moron, and don't spam.
There's one more topic I want to address briefly, and that is whether you should have a blog. Probably not. Facebook and Twitter are both relatively cheap in terms of a time-investment. Blogs are not. If you have the itch to write, then by all means do it, but most folks don't. Most folks who start a blog end up abandoning it, and that does nobody any good. There are exceptions, the principal one I can think of is Chef Chris DeBarr, whose livejournal is a fantastic glimpse into his creative process, and a great way to find out what's going on at his restaurant, The Green Goddess. I don't think Chris really does it in order to market the restaurant, or at least not only for that, and that's probably why it's so good. Unless you have a similar need to write, I'd advise against blogging.
I think that covers just about all of the things I anticipated when I decided to tackle this topic, but if you have any questions, please do feel free to send me an email. I'm also, of course, on Twitter and Facebook, though if you want me to accept your friend request on the latter, it's probably a good idea to mention something about this website or my other outlets for food writing with the request.
Hopefully this has been of some use to some of you. If not, as always, please feel free to apply for a refund.
*I shouldn't really have to say this, but I don't give legal advice on this website. If you are stupid enough to consider anything I say here as legal advice, or that because of something I've written, you and I have established an attorney-client relationship, then... Well, you're probably not that stupid.
**Corrected thanks to a friend, who pointed out my error in attributing that forum to ABC 26 News.
At the suggestion of a couple of friends, I have decided to compile a list of New Orleans area restaurants and chefs who are using Twitter. Twitter is an excellent way to get information out, and there are a bunch of restaurant industry folks using it, but at this point I don't think anyone's taken the time to compile a list. Update: a friend pointed out that someone actually has compiled a list of restaurants on Twitter at Tom Fitzmorris' message board: here. It's missing a few that I found last night, but has at least one that I didn't catch, and I'll add that, along with any others people send me. Thanks to JS for the head's up.
This is not going to be comprehensive, as I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of people/places, but I'll try to update it when I can. If I have time in the future, I'll organize this list alphabetically, but for the time being, the list will start with the folks I've most recently "followed" on Twitter. And so,
Anthony Spizale is the chef at the (also tweeting) Rib Room at the Royal Orleans.
Shula's Steak House has a Twitter account, but it doesn't appear to be active.
Chef Jared Tees of Luke.
Jason McCuller is the chef at Cure.
Scott Boswell is the chef at Stella!
Nealy Frentz is the co-owner and chef at Lola, in Covington.
Emeril's Eats has a twitter account, as does Chef Emeril Lagasse.
La Petite Grocery and its Chef Justin Devillier are also on Twitter.
Again, I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of restaurants/chefs, but that's a list of the folks I'm currently aware of and following. If you fit the bill, have a twitter feed, and are not on the list, please email me and I'll add you... eventually. I'm not making any promises, as my time is incredibly valuable. I am a very important and busy man. Sometimes I am so busy that I do not have time for myself. That's how important I am. Seriously.
You can, of course, also find me on Twitter and send me a direct message there. Which, given the subject of your message, might just be the best way to approach things. I don't care if you actually "follow" me, though it would be helpful if you want to get information to an incredibly important and busy man. By which I mean me.
Thanks to everyone who sent me a direct message via Twitter this evening. Please continue to do so, though don't expect a response tonight, as I am weary. Weary and important, if I haven't mentioned that already.
Edited 7/11
