Have you read Whetstone? I wonder how it compares to Gastronomica.
Has Berkeleyside covered San Leandro before? Their April openings and closings post mentions a few places down there:
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Yes. While Berkeleyside in general limits itself to Berkeley, Nosh and other food stories tend to go further afield, even to Walnut Creek.
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Food writer Luke Tsai had a culture piece in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about the men’s group known as Urban Healers. Since I hit the Chronicle paywall I’m only seeing the first 2 paragraphs. Maybe the departure of Jonathan Kauffman for Portland means there is a need for someone to fill the food and lifestyle work that was part of Jon’s bailiwick. just guessing.
walkout at Eater.com -
excerpt:
Vox Media employees walked out en masse Thursday as part of a dispute over wages and benefits between the company and its unionized employees. The Vox Media Union, which represents employees at Vox Media sites including Vox, technology site The Verge, and the Eater websites, among others, has been negotiating a contract with management since forming a union months ago.
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excerpt:
…
Vox Media joins the growing list of newsrooms whose employees, in the midst of layoffs, public attacks, and other threats to professional journalism, have banded together in unions. Paul Farhi wrote in the Washington Post in 2018, when Slate ’s unionized employees went on strike, “One by one, journalists employed by the once-scrappy start-ups and venture-capital darlings of the Internet have banded together to negotiate collectively.” Vox joins Slate , the Intercept , the Onion , Salon, Vice, the New Yorker , HuffPost , and many others.
https://www.thefoodmedialab.com/agenda
Day 1 of 3 - Books and Feature Writing
Confidence, Perseverance, and Your Point of View
Keynote: Chris Ying
Why Owning Your POV Matters, John Birdsall
Navigating the Proposal and Contrac t, Emily Timberlake & Danielle Svetcov
How to Craft a Feature Story Pitch + “Pitch It” Activity , Emma Christensen & Rachel Levin with John Birdsall & Andrea Nguyen
Happy Hour!
Luke Tsai in California Magazine (Cal Alumni Association) Summer 2019 issue -
excerpt:
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Now, in just a one-block radius from Bancroft and Telegraph there are no fewer than nine dedicated boba shops.
…
The craze, if that’s what it is, shows no sign of letting up. Instead, the drink just gets more … ornate. There are shops that specialize in boba topped with salted cream cheese…
excerpts:
…
For those unfamiliar with Studiotobe, it’s a coworking space focused on podcasting, storytelling, and journalism opened in April 2018 in the former Pacific Coast Brewing space (906 Washington St.). Joaquin Alvarado, Ken Ikeda, and Kristen Belden founded the coworking space, which currently has about 50 members. Podcasts like Snap Judgment and Peternell’s cooking-centric podcast Cooking By Ear are produced there. It’s a fitting space for journalism given that the Oakland Tribune once called this block home.
In a nod to the space’s journalistic past and present, The Lede is named after the journalism term “lede,” meaning the introduction or main point of a story. Taylor and Peternell hope The Lede will help introduce the public to Studiotobe through its food and drinks. But the name also acknowledges the ties between food and storytelling and a hope for how the two businesses will work together. During lunch and dinner service, Studiotobe members and the public alike will be able to grab a bite to eat side-by-side, offering members of the public the opportunity to talk with journalists, storytellers, and podcasters.
“I’ve always been attracted to the way that food and drink can engender storytelling and storymaking,” Peternell said. "What we want to do is serve people delicious food and drinks that allow them to connect around the table and tell their stories — and maybe make new stories."
James Beard award-winning Oakland podcast focuses on restaurant kitchens and inequality
Former Manresa cook tackles the issues on Copper & Heat
excerpt:
In a post #MeToo era, Osuna and the other Bay Area cooks on the podcast, both male and female, also tackle issues like work-life balance and wage disparity, in addition to difficult questions like these: How does the pressure to be tough affect cooks? Why do women represent only 19 percent of chefs and 7 percent of executive chefs? Why are kitchens still organized as a brigade, or military hierarchy, instead of fostering teamwork and mutual respect?
In her newsletter this week, Soleil Ho points out that she will soon be the last remaining restaurant critic in San Francisco, with Josh Sens out at San Francisco Magazine and Peter Lawrence Kane leaving at the end of the month from SF Weekly.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/Is-the-end-nigh-for-food-criticism-14078064.php
It seems that budgetary concerns are a factor in this and, like Soleil, I am worried that restaurant criticism and local food journalism that has the time to go much beyond checking out press releases/influencer invites has many places that can fund it.
The LA Times seems to have scaled up in a big way recently and I’m interested to see where that will go.
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Katherine Hamilton is still writing as Soleil noted. And I hope food review doesn’t go away for EBX also.
I am curious how Michelin can cover the expenses of high end restaurant meals when other food sections aren’t doing so well. Surely they can’t sell that many copies of the guides? Or perhaps the inspectors don’t eat at the restaurants regularly, if at all?
Michelin is subsidized by local tourism boards.
Shame to see Peter Lawrence Kane go. His (or the higher ups’) restaurant choices didn’t always align with what I care to learn about, and research was obviously limited by budgetary constraints, but he’s a good writer and it’s been enjoyable to watch his prose evolve from snarky to a more Jonathan Gold-like style.
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I think that conventional restaurant reviewers haven’t made the adjustment to be able to tell a story and be able to tell it visually and locally which is a necessity in the digital era. For 50 years columnist Herb Caen told personal and intimate tales of San Franciscans that drove the readership of the San Francisco Chronicle and the question is now how to do that in the era of Youtube.
The print papers haven’t been able to adjust to digital well. When Luke Tsai did a Q & A with us, he said that it was too expensive to do video for the East Bay Express, something that I don’t believe. Despite the Bay Area being the focal point of tech, there are only a few locals who have tried covering local food and other news stories online.
As noted by tm.tm above, the LA Times has invested, under new ownership, in stories about Indian food truck stops for Sikh long haul drivers and an article about San Quentin cooking classes for inmates by John Birdsall.
Soleil appears to lament the passing of restaurant review columns in print but that does not equate to the death of food and culture journalism which is a much broader and more fertile venue.
I watch a lot of Youtube and I marvel at the creators who with only a few thousand dollars of equipment can garner 10’s of thousands or 100’s of thousand of subscribers to their content.
I don’t care about reviews of high end restaurants in San Francisco that will only last a few years and which cater to a coterie of overcompensated millennials that I will never meet and don’t care about.
I believe that there is a big gaping hole for personal, mobile, local, news, food and cultural coverage online that could be could be filled by people with technique, energy and skill. Anthony Bourdain did it for 16 years and probably had another 10 years in him.
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Soleil Ho namechecks Hungry Onion as one place to go for Bay Area reviews/recommendations.
The other non-Chronicle resource she mentions is the East Bay Express.
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Very cool!
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Yes, I realize the linked article is about LA food journalism and not SFBA food journalism but I think there may be issues and lessons discussed in it that may be instructive for us.
I am thrilled to announce that one of those journalists, Javier Cabral , is our new editor. Javier’s distinctive voice could only have come from East L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley, but his knowledge and interests span the entire city and globe. Raised on backyard punk, graffiti, and neighborhood wisdom, he has transformed himself into a journalist who cares about his stories more than any other writer I know. Javier cut his teeth as a teenage blogger, became Jonathan Gold’s restaurant scout , was the West Coast Editor and Staff Writer at MUNCHIES, has written some of our most popular stories, and recently served as the main taco scout for the “Taco Chronicles” on Netflix , so you could say he’s literally the perfect person to take over the reins.
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