- Dennis Lee
- New frontiers in dining are being explored.
Celebrity chef Marc Vetri of Philadelphia is the latest chef to write a cranky old man anti-food-journalism-as-it-exists-in-2015 piece, for the Huffington Post, of course. He hits all the usual get-off-my-lawn notes, recalling a lost era when one learned reviewer for the local paper waited a month before reviewing, with invariable respect, the latest hometown-hero restaurant. And now you have these kids with their snark on Twitter and their lists! (What he’s really bemoaning seems to be that there isn’t one reviewer who can make a restaurant’s phone ring off the wall like there used to be, when in fact the multiplicity of outlets is evening his traffic out, which ought to be a good thing from a business perspective.) It’s a pretty clueless piece, and it certainly doesn’t look at anything from the point of view of diners, who might find it beneficial to have so many more perspectives—but at the same time, he’s not wrong about many things. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find a food writer who disagreed with this:
• Tony Magee, the owner of Lagunitas Brewing, which has a facility in Chicago, gets a lot of play for his anticorporate, Lebowskian stoner persona. So when he did something very corporate (briefly threatening to sue Sierra Nevada for trademark infringement for setting “IPA” in big block letters) it set off a lot of activity in the authenticity-obsessed craft beer world. And nobody is on that like Michael Kiser of the blog and podcast Good Beer Hunting, who thinks through the issues—and Magee’s act—with the same exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) thoroughness he brings to his podcast.
