What is Really New About the New Food Media?

I’m back in New York where today it is raining/sleeting as it will apparently do all week, quite the come-down from even the rainiest day I experienced in Napa. With the return to my inbox, I’m also back on my news perusal, and as such, this issue is different from what you’ve seen the last few weeks—from time to time I’ll be incorporating my read on news from other sources, for your pleasure and potential/ongoing edificatiooooon.

Some housekeeping before we get into it, paywalls will be phased into coming issues, to coincide with the introduction of monthly memberships and the non-discounted annual rate. There’s more good stuff on the way: a personal refresh on the antiquated chef profile with Kabawa’s Paul Carmichael, an exploration into chef brand collaborations and how they might not always align with one’s public persona, a series reflecting on the inner lives of persons of note, and more.

Consider upgrading your subscription! And a reminder to the folks in hospitality spaces, please do reply if you’d like to subscribe with the industry discounted rate for as long as you’re a member.

The lead* was split on how we’re imagining the future of our collective genius. Most of you said you’re refining your work for better alignment with the person you’re becoming, while almost as many said that you are observing and listening. In the space of our actions being the evidence for how we show up in the world we’re building, the next step after acquiring info is to put something at stake. Gotta have risk to have a future! I’m interested in how we are collectively placing ourselves on the line.

*Polls are for paid members with results in the following issue.

Social media influencers are recording restaurant meals with no camera in sight. A TEXTURE founding member and veteran NYC hospitality publicist shared this New York Times article with me about diners using Meta Ray-Ban glasses to record restaurant staff and fellow patrons (not always with the subject’s consent). A Manhattan restaurateur had no clue he was being recorded until customers began asking him for selfies.

The first issue of this newsletter focused on involuntary surveillance of strangers in our vicinity, whose behavior we find absurd, funny, or notable in some way. I’ve pointed out before that many hospitality workers are vulnerable not only because of the precarious nature of their financial stability in an industry where businesses go out of business overnight, but because so many back-of-house employees are immigrants in this era of automatic suspicion.

Rob Martinez posted about Bau Nguyen, the proprietor of bánh mì haven Singleton’s Deli in New Orleans. Nguyen, who was a refugee from the war in Vietnam, shared that he and his staff were recently carrying their passports on their person. Chances are, the people influencers and casual social media users are posting on their platforms for atmosphere, may actually be doing all they can to avoid the spotlight of any scope. I scanned the TikTok page of the influencer cited in the NYT piece, a young woman who goes by Elizabeth Eats NYC. Interestingly (offensively), the identity she obscures the most is her own.

Artist Chase Hall shared on his IG yesterday that he gifted his collection of 238 Black Panther newspapers to the Met. The first time I read a copy of one of those papers, I was an undergrad at UCLA in an Afro American Studies course where a former Panther visited our class. Chase made the donation (one he’s been working on since he was a teen) as advocacy for the “vital history” of the Panthers, and to further the efforts of Met curators Akili Tommasino and Allie Rudnick in celebrating Emory Douglas, the Panthers’ minister of culture. (I had the pleasure of interviewing Douglas while working on the Black Power Kitchen cookbook, in the chapter on rebellion.)

I’m fortunate that Chase and I have crossed paths, including one memorable car ride during which I had the esteemed pleasure of introducing him to the ‘90s R&B trio, Brownstone. Artists must have range y'all! It’s inspiring to see his practice converge in such a material way. In his IG caption he wrote, “The possibility of a more equitable world is all around us and we must never lose sight of the ones who laid the bricks we stand on and better yet take time to analyze how they are laid to cultivate a more sturdy footing moving forward.”

Click through to see a photograph of the papers in his personal archives.

Food media is diverging, and I would like to think that’s a good thing, but alas, I remain unconvinced. In recent weeks we’ve seen the launch of Coyote Media in the Bay Area inspired by the rogue spirit of the alt weekly, the digital magazine Gourmet (so named due to Condé Nast’s apparent lapse in trademark registration for the elder print version) highlighting long takes and recipes, and Caper Media, where the intersection of NYC-focused food, gossip, and restaurant news appears to converge under the tutelage of former Vanity Fair deputy editor, Dana Brown.

Eh. Some of this strikes me as independently reductive and less systemically transformational. Legacy media institutionalized elitism and nepotism in New York publishing, then codified it in mastheads and corporate hierarchies (still happening!). Coyote and Gourmet appear to eschew this model by doing away with traditional titles, adopting a labor-conscious framework by calling staff “worker-owners.”

Perhaps we can take this as a positive indication, in that the existing business model of legacy publications is to hire staff that is not actually capable of producing the content promised to the publication’s advertisers, therefore necessitating the contract of independent writers, photographers, and illustrators to facilitate the brand’s work. It appears the folks on staff of these new spaces will actually be doing the work of producing content for their publications, which, phenomenal!

My initial scan of named staff across these publications is that only one, Coyote, includes a Black person, pretty problematic (and dumb?) for any American-focused media outlet. I’d point you to this pandemic-era NYT op-ed by food writer and consultant, Nicole A. Taylor, my dear friend who wrote about her exit as executive food editor from the now-defunct Thrillist. (The site is still up, but mostly populated with non-bylined tourism board PR copy. See what happens when you’re bad at business?)

I’m digging Coyote’s POV as willing to bypass the false nobility (and false objectivity) of traditional media in coverage that spans local politics, culturally relevant meals outside of the restaurant space, and giving voice to those underserved by big business, as seen in the report about the Blue Note Jazz Festival (once prominently attributed to pianist Robert Glasper) leaving local chefs with thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices for the event.

Yet across these “independent” platforms, you’ll still find affectionate references to legacy media’s fave figures, like this brief summary of Tom Sietsema, Robert Sietsema, and Alan Sytsma and how they’re not all the same person. They do in fact cover more than 30 years of food publishing and it’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but I wonder why—if the goal is to diverge, then why engage in reductive inside-baseball jokes with some of the oldest names in the business? Brain trust is one thing, but are we trapped with old ways of doing business in media?

I went through a couple of interviews with the Vox Media recruiting team and Alan Sytsma for the New York Magazine restaurant critic role back in 2022, then was told to “hold on” during a “hiring slowdown” that stretched to about one year. I’d later discover in the news along with you that I wasn’t in consideration for the role because it had gone to an existing staff member who wrote for the style section. Ha!

I never got notice from Sytsma about the hiring of his (also white and male) colleague, nor did the HR team send me a generic rejection letter, which would be standard behavior. I had multiple interviews, a lengthy assessment that took quite a bit of effort to complete (I also had to chase down reimbursement for the faux restaurant review I wrote as part of my application), and even a one-on-one coffee with Sytsma at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn after receiving notice of the “slow down.” He assured me that no decisions had been made and I should wait for updates if I could. Ha!

Companies should absolutely hire the people they want, especially if the senior editor has been there for ages with no apparent competition in sight. However. I have two James Beard Awards, am well known for my ability to document culture through food, am an accomplished co-author of multiple industry-shifting narrative cookbooks with some of the most recognizable chefs living today, and took seriously the New York Magazine prompt to share new, edgy, and unexpected approaches to food journalism.

They hired a guy with not even a fraction of my résumé and couldn’t be bothered to write me to say “thanks, we decided to stay in-house.” Sytsma later followed me on IG, a juvenile approach too many of my colleagues use to attempt to not address conflict. My issue wasn’t not being hired, you’ve made it pretty clear I would hate to work there. My issue was the lack of care for a colleague that you expect to pitch you later. You have my phone and my email, but you choose to passively engage in the public square of social media? Asking people to cultivate a new world for you when what you want is what you’ve always had seems like waste of all our time. What are you doing here, Alan? I blocked him.

I’m often asked, but Osayi! Is it fair that people with years of experience are asked to step aside at times to make way for fresh perspectives and experiences—as in, is it ageist? (Always the elder white men being worried about this by the way.) My question in response, is why are you still interested in doing the same thing you did decades ago? Why haven’t you changed? Is the development arrested? By the time Pete Wells departed his critic role at the New York Times, he had essentially admitted in his farewell letter and across countless reviews that he didn’t even like restaurants anymore. You hold the power of the pen for people who’ve put their sweat, blood, and savings into a dining experience you chose to write about and you hate your job! Why are you there!

A stat I like to reflect on is that the new restaurant critic of the Washington Post and dear friend Elazar Sontag was a preschooler when Tom Sietsema first took up the mantle as the paper’s critic, the role he just departed that made a place for Elazar to come in. I am loud and proud on the record—and speaking for myself—that keeping the same job in journalism for 25 years is not only a reflection is stunningly selfish and self-aggrandizing to assume that you alone are keeping the pulse on shifting cultures in a shifting city across multiple presidencies. MULTIPLE PRESIDENCIES. That so many white restaurant critics held their positions long enough to raise a child into adulthood is an embarrassment across every major American newspaper alive or dead from LA Weekly, to the SF Chronicle, to the New York Times, and more. Is new media even trying to be different? Or do they simply want a version of the thing they never bested in the legacy era of their career?

I’m told Caper Media had a launch party last night in Manhattan, and from word of a few folks in attendance, I was correct in my perception that it felt a bit Puck News-ish—the lower Manhattan, glitzy, sexy part of old days of journalism everyone wants to experience but doesn’t want to account for.

Scanning their IG, I see many approaches that feel familiar, as founding journalists on their team come from the legacies. How much difference can we expect from those who were trained to define what news is through a narrow lens? While I can speak the language of legacy, one of the challenges (read: accidental upsides) of my professional background is that I have been forced to operate as an outsider even when the place setting at the table has my name on it.

There was a time when having an intrepid voice on the team was considered a necessary asset, even when it ruffled the feathers of the business side. While that fight was never easy, that wall disintegrated ages ago. Now, if it’s bad for business, it cannot be news; it will not run. Kinda seems like a recipe for corporate-fueled fascism, I dunno.

What does all this mean for national or local coverage of people in and around restaurants. While the legacies keep salaried editors on staff who ignore contracted writers and artists, they have turned to AI under the data-driven impression that you, dear reader, will not scroll to the end of the page anyway (yes they track these metrics), therefore eliminating the need for stories that require more than 2 to 3 minutes of reading.

I don’t know what to say. It’s your fault you’re not getting better news, apparently. Then again, people are walking into wine stores searching ChatGPT instead of talking to the person who curated the wine in the shop. Who is to blame? Everyone is canceled!

Here in New York, we are back on the rumor mill and whisper network. The institutional commitment, budget, and capability for reporting that just barely exposed problematic chefs in food to begin with is pretty much gone, and those guys know it. You’d have to be in conversation with your neighbors or constantly be searching the internet for “CHEF NAME + ASSAULT” to learn that you might be eating at a place where someone was allegedly beat up, deprived of pay, or subjected to yelling and other abusive treatment. I will say this much—people with power and money don’t let their grievances fly on Reddit.

There are few, if any, truly new kids on the block; the block has just been rebranded. I would like that to mean something that benefits the rest of us one day. Time will tell.