Entries associated with the tag "LTH Forum":

Local food maven Ronnie Suburban, formerly of eGullet and now handling the weekly food media wrapup over at LTH Forum, provides an amazing, photo-rific step-by-step guide to curing and cold-smoking your own salmon. I'm embarassed to say that I found this via a link from Michael Ruhlman's blog. It's been up on LTH for a month but I guess I've been too busy making cheese and mushy pickles* to notice.

*Really, there's nothing grosser. Anybody know how to make them not so mushy? Alum? Horseradish leaves? 

LTH Forum celebrates its third anniversary by sitting down for a one-hour-and-52-minute podcast discussion with Hungry Magazine. (Repeat: one hour and 52 minutes.)

There's a thorough examination of the rise of ethics in food writing, which engages at length the whole knotty elitism question at the core of the booming organic food industry, in this month's Columbia Journalism Review.

Speaking of organics: everybody goes to Crust.

And, lastly: don't you want to try a pie floater? (Hat tip to Food Chain contributor Elizabeth Tamny, at her blog Cahiers du moment.)

Coalfire, the new coal-oven pizza place on Grand from longtime Matchbox bartender J. Spillane and partner Bill Carroll, has been open all of a week--and the thread on LTH Forum is up to 95 posts and counting. It's a fascinating lesson in the power of the Internet to serve (to paraphrase one of the site's moderators) as a force for both good and evil.

Call it the Smoque effect: when the place opened last Tuesday, anticipation for Chicago's first New Haven-style coal-oven pizza already ran high, and after glowing reports--complete with luscious pix--hit the Web, the mobs descended. By Thursday LTH diners were writing in to complain of 90-minute waits and harried service. Two days and the romance was over: frustrated posters slammed the owners for the "lack of preparation" and their failure to comp meals when the kitchen was clearly overwhelmed. It didn't help when, on Sunday night, Coalfire closed early, having run out of dough. 

Things have calmed down now, at least on LTH Forum. The whole hoo-ha does reopen a perennially fascinating debate about the role of critics, bloggers and other media in a notoriously fragile industry. LTH moderator Mike G sums it up thusly: "It's nice that we're known for enthusiastically embracing really good new places. But the more we grow, the more we have the power to swamp a place two days after it opens, wiping out the usual learning curve that comes with gradually increasing business in the first few weeks. If we then follow that by ripping into every new place that doesn't have its act together perfectly the first week, for the whole world to read, and holding permanent grudges based on something that went wrong on day 3, then people aren't going to be happy to get LTHForum attention-- they're going to dread it."

Meanwhile, over at Coalfire, Spillane says the joint's instant popularity caught him completely off-guard: he knew of LTH, but figured it was read by "like 50 guys or something. I didn't realize it was thousands."  He admits they were unprepared for the onslaught, but swears this week will be better. "You can only fit so many pies in the oven at a time," he points out, but they've hired more help to at least smooth the prep and customer service. Sunday being Mother's Day, he says, they underestimated the amount of dough they'd need, figuring it'd be a slow day. They won't make that mistake again.

Overall Spillane is sanguine. "Oh my God, it was crazy," he says of his first week in the pizza trenches. "But it's a great problem to have."

LTH Forum has announced its first photo contest, and lest you are intimitated by the plethora of high quality food porn regularly found on the site, there is a special category for new posters to get in the game. 

Meanwhile there have a been a good number of excellent spring break travel reports (with great photos) on LTH's Beyond Chicagoland board. Check out Spain, Mexico City, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Phoenix/Vegas, Panama City, and Milwaukee.

The San Francisco Chronicle weighed in Sunday on the recent explosion of food blogs and message boards and the (glorious/devastating) impact they can have on a new restaurant. Touches on some familiar ground (free meals, yea or nay?), but what was most interesting (to me) was the discussion of Yelp--in particular this tidbit, about the site's response to an aggrieved restaurateur:

"Kridech said he begged Yelp staffers to have a complimentary meal at Senses, hoping that would turn the tide for his restaurant. Instead, he says, Yelp offered to sell him an ad in which a positive posting -- including a line from the restaurant thanking the reviewer for the kind words and noting that the business is a sponsor of the site -- is placed above all other critiques. But Kridech thought it was extortion.

"Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp co-founder and CEO, said in an e-mail, 'We think it's a fun way for businesses to offer kudos to a customer that has said wonderful things on their behalf.' He added that businesses can also use the free messaging feature to defend their reputation."

I confess I'd never looked at Yelp until about two weeks ago, when a friend in the food biz directed me to a particularly contentious thread that had gotten her goat. Even by the slippery standards of online dialogue, it's pretty scrappy. Still, it's a brave new world out there and I'm inclined to agree with this LTH'er: 

"With a traditional critic, you basically get one shot. With the online community, you have tens or hundreds visiting and writing. If you serve one or two of them a bad meal, their criticisms will be lost amongst other positive reviews. As such, isn't the online community less dangerous, since the larger sample is more likely to give a true picture of the restaurant?"