Two days ago, the New York Observer printed a blog post by a food blogger-turned-writer titled “Blog-Tied: How a Hunger for Clicks Drives New York’s Brutally Fickle Food Scene.”
The central theme of the article, as the title makes clear, is that food blogs are driving what is hot or not in New York City. New York City! How can tiny food blogs be running the restaurant world in this great food heaven? And is it happening here in Boulder?
Author Josh Ozersky lists eight of the “hottest restaurants of 2009” and says they are all out of business “as a result of a brutal food-media climate dominated by online outlets.” He continues that “by creating unsustainable hype around new restaurants, online food sites condemn those six months or older to murderous silence and obscurity.”
Josh is a product of the food blog world and, by food blogs, he means any food-related websites including the biggies Eater, Grub Street, and Serious Eats. He relates how these sites are kicking out ten or more articles per day, many of them binging on gossip about the hippest chefs and the latest trends.
Luckily, we here in Boulder are not like that. At Eat Drink Boulder, we only publish a few times per week and so are not driven by the need for content. We cover older, established restaurants as much as we do new ones. We are not concerned with gossip and prefer to get a story factually correct.
Did you know, though, that Boulder now has 32 food blogs? (Future article.) Most of them don’t write about restaurants but, instead, about their own food experiences, often at home in their own kitchens. The closest thing Boulder has to a food reviewer who can make or break a restaurant on her own is Liz Moskow, the Daily Camera’s always-entertaining (but sometimes harsh) food critic.
I actually took some pride in Josh’s article in the Observer. I see Eat Drink Boulder as emblematic of the good things he writes about food blogs, that our writing is “witty and entertaining”, that we provide “an IV drip of entertainment day”, and that we actually help Boulder foodies take advantage of a restaurant scene that has “never been better”.
Go read the article. But this is the internet – just read the first few paragraphs. You won’t have time to read the whole thing because you need to get back to reading food blogs!
