The Bay Area board seems active, although I don’t really look at it. But the NYC (where I live) board is relatively quiet. So I don’t think I could say that the major media market aspect of things comes into play here on HO. (As far as that goes I myself find the “hottest thing in Manhattan to be really immaterial” since I generally can’t afford to eat at those places.) The New Jersey board on the other hand is really active and enthusiastic about discussing local eateries.
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The trick is to have the regional boards be regional and not just about the biggest city within.
That happened at CH, then they split the big cities off and effectively killed the regional boards.
We went from colorful eccentric loveable pieces of reality to being nonentities in one swift manager’s signature…
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@ratgirlagogo and others: my own comment was not to suggest getting rid of regional boards, and I’m glad to hear the New Jersey one is lively. Back in CH days, I learned a lot from regional boards, notably in a trip to Philadelphia. It is striking, but maybe understandable in numerical/traffic terms, that the midwest finds itself in some tremendous catch-bag of basically a dozen flyover states. Probably that’s just about numbers, but, still, some new place opening 350+ miles away in Columbus, Ohio, isn’t really much on my radar here in the same “regional” district. Yelp remains finer-grained here, if more variable by far as to review qualities.
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I just decided to create my own topic- Southern Oregon.
I thought I’d be the only poster and posted local food news and stuff, but then others actually chimed in which I didn’t expect and was blown away by.
So maybe you could be the straw that stirs the Indiana drink, to borrow very liberally from Reggie Jackson. who after all lent his name to a Candy Bar!
That’s an honor reserved for few.
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Quite a lot of thought was put into the placement actually. In reality, the three groups of discussions- Cooking/ Cultural, Media, General/ Drinks belong together given they are general topics that appeal to everyone. The choice then was to place the regional dining discussions either before or after these 3 groups. The thought was that if its after, the attention on regional discussions would be substantially reduced, and might even kill the regional boards. Hence why the regional discussion was placed first.
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Plus where we live or travel to has a impact on our food experiences and perspective forum wide.
I appreciate the note of reply @hungryonion, and I do think your reasoning is sound regarding placement.
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Lol! Recently a youth works in salle of a restaurant, in her mid to late 20s, asked where we had heard of them. I answered abc forum and xyz’s blog. She replied What? Which Insta again please??
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Disappointing as it may be, these days I usually have to rely on Tripadvisor when travelling. At least, to give me a starting point. I might call up their top ten or twenty places and then do some further research to see if I can find online menus , etc. Back in the day, you’d usually find some information on a food-specific forum, even if it was a regional/local one
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For trip research my starting point is google, which can lead to all types of information… I value a lot from the more traditional newspaper or magazine sites criticismsthen comes the forums and blogs. Google, Tripadvisor, the Fork are served as the final touch, to look esp at the negative comments. One shouldn’t ignore YouTube. IG FB serves to look at what’s new and pretty looking, comments generally not interesting.
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I’ve though been disappointed with TA’s recommendations, example in Kuala Lumpur the high ranking restaurant was a place frequented by westerners serving westernised local food, with a lot of cocktails. Food was ok, but one can find better in holes in the walls places minus the decorations. If you try to look at the the best restaurants in Paris on TA uk, they are mostly foreign restaurants with foreign food, places I have never heard of.
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I think all types of forums are heading that way.
An example: when I was in my late teens, I was a member of several hockey forums to discuss the Rangers (I even ran a history forum for several years). They would be running smoothly and then shut, and another would take its place. This happened no less than five times in probably five years. Gradually, the last forum slowed to a crawl. While I believe it still exists, it is occupied by the same few die-hard posters. The forum was replaced by Facebook groups where a status and responses served as the “thread” and posts. Now, the group I belong to seems to be heading towards oblivion, as Facebook messenger makes it easy to just shoot texts back and forth during a game or to discuss what’s going on.
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I agree - it can only be a starting point. I have no idea how TA ranks its restaurants but, when you look at almost every one, most folk have scored them as “excellent”, which then becomes meaningless.
If I look at TA’s top 20 restaurants for Manchester, I have never heard of 15 of them. Of the five I have heard of , I’ve only eaten in two and maybe one of the five would make my personal top 20 in the city.
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There are interesting groups in FB. Problem, everything is present tense, you can’t search archives. I don’t remember where I read this, it said many years from now, when historians in the future look back at what we eat now, they will probably look at food forum.
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Some groups have a “search” option, but it does not yield exact results as a forum would.
So, you are right in that regard: once something slips into the past, even after a few weeks, it can be impossible to find again.
The highest ranks are experts in big data, they either hire or know someone working in the field to learn the ways to manipulate data. Come on, the top 20 restaurants in Paris are expensive Pakistinian food or Argentina BBQ? One of the French restaurant who has been at the top 3 for some 2-3 years, the chef used to work in IT or banking before cooking, even him, today he falls out of the top 20s when January 2020 he is awarded one star Michelin.
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Same here. TripAdvisor is not a bad starting point for me. Though I need to really pick through what I find to see if there’s anything of value.
But If I can run across a blogger or a forum somewhere where the author(s) have a passion for the given destination, that’s better but so much harder to find than even a few years ago.
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I don’t use Tripadvisor at all. When links to TA show up in Google searches I don’t bother to follow them. Historically unhelpful for me. YMMV. I start with Google (including Google Maps) and filter in other sources.
Food fora (and other niche topics) are not someplace I generally go for travel advice. I find them pretty disorganized, not unlike Facebook or Reddit. That includes Hungry Onion. Someone here challenged me to look at the local and regional fora here and I gave it a shot for a few months. Not helpful to me at all - there just isn’t enough data even for the places with a lot of participants. That isn’t to say I don’t get value, but the value comes from relationships. My wife and I are going to England and Scotland in April and I got some really good advice from members here (Thanks John! Thanks Chris!).
I come to food fora to talk about food, cooking, cuisines, and to share experiences. That’s good enough to spend the time to contribute.
Absolutely.
We did one of our American tours a year or so back, which included a lot of small towns. There was no info here, no info on Chowhound - which just left me with TA. As I mentioned, I looked at the top rated places and then tried to research further - not least finding a website that had a menu so I could at least try to judge the cuisine at a place. We ate OK. My only criticism of the process is that one small town’s “best” place was often the same sort as the next town’s “best” - often a European style bistro or an Italian. It meant we often didnt pick the “best”, just because we’d become bored with the genre.
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I think Food Forum sites, message boards, whatever they’re called are dinosaurs and are generally an unpleasant interface. I hadn’t been on food forums for years, including Chowhound which I post at regularly, and I didn’t miss it. There’s always Reddit, Instagram and Facebook, the three major outlets for me if I want to “socialize” about food.
The biggest turn off of forums is you’re not really in control of your content. Not everyone wants to make “friends” some people join forums to talk about food and share information. You put your content out there and a moderator can come along and delete it for no other reason than they felt like it. Or they can start banning people who don’t fit the mold of what their forum members should be. That was my biggest problem with egullet and the reason I absolutely refuse to post again to that site. Whereas places like Instagram and Reddit have been good about not molesting people’s content. And if you get kicked out of a group, you can start a new one, or you can block people who are harassing you. Instagram has also been good, conscious or not, to talk to people that I would not normally have a chance to. That’s what first attracted me to egullet, they had famous chefs who posted there like regular people, but that was long ago. Most have left, now they post to Instagram and Facebook and on there you can tag them, show them your post, DM them, etc…
I dunno, I don’t mean to sound so negative but it’ll be tough getting a food forum to become popular, if that’s your goal. You’re going to have to offer something unique and special to beat out sites that have much better interfaces and a much wider, diverse reach. Quality content is a good start. Or you can just have fun with it and post to the small audience you have. Let it be what it is.
