Thanks to Blogs, a Bigger Menu for Food Criticism

The proliferation of blogs and tweets by culinary pros and amateurs alike is changing the landscape and purpose of food criticism

By Aaron Ricadela

The idea for "Thanks to Blogs, a Bigger Menu for Foodies" came from BusinessWeek reader Kay Logsdon, vice president and senior editor of Foodchannel.com. She lives in Springfield, Mo.

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Anthony Bourdain Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Discovery

Here's a sampling from the food criticism smorgasbord of summer 2009: Some 1.3 million people have signed on to follow Martha Stewart's tweets about condensed recipes for bruschetta and rack of lamb as well as about tomato blight in her garden and a fiery car crash near her property. Meanwhile, Travel Channel star Anthony Bourdain rants on his popular blog about "blissed out St. Alice" Waters, one of the nation's most vocal proponents of locally grown, organic food. As for food critics, some big names, including The New York Times' (NYT) Amanda Hesser and Gael Greene, formerly of New York magazine, are turning to blogs and Twitter to promote themselves, trading some of the elitism of the country's culinary and media capital to join the faster-paced, less rarefied cadences of food conversations on the Web. Hesser's new Web site, Food52, is tapping readers' recipes to assemble a cookbook.

A chorus of amateur food bloggers, meanwhile, is singing the virtues of everything from frontier-style fried steak and cornbread to Sex and the City-inspired New York cupcakes. Their ranks could swell even more in the wake of the new Meryl Streep movie, Julie & Julia, based partly on the story of New York food blogger Julie Powell, who cooked every recipe in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The film's Web site features rotating links to various food blogs. In an Aug. 5 blog post, The New York Times' new restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, said the abundance of Internet critics is creating a discussion reviewers would do well to join.

At a cultural moment when food consciousness is in ascendance, helped by a national conversation about healthier eating and a recessionary revival of do-it-yourself cooking and gardening, the proliferation of food blogs, foodie twitterers, and celebrity chef sightings online ironically is making it harder for diners and grocery shoppers to get what they traditionally sought from food writing: guidance in determining what's good to eat.

Opinions of Their Peers

Chefs and bloggers are trading on upscale urbanites' current fascination with food in part to sell merchandise, promote TV shows, and forge personal brands through their online musings. "It's completely changed the face of food criticism," says Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods and the upcoming Bizarre World on the Travel Channel. Zimmern, a former chef who also writes for Mpls. St. Paul magazine and Delta's (DAL) Sky in-flight publication, reads more than a dozen blogs each week about dining in the Twin Cities alone to keep up on what's current. "My audience has changed over the years, because now they have access to the opinions of their peers," says Zimmern, who lives in Minneapolis. "There's so much more to hear on the Web."

But the hordes of Web critics dishing up praise and scorn can deny diners the benefit of professional critics' breadth of expertise, Zimmern says. Missing from many food blogs are knowledge of a chef's range and the ability to cast a gimlet eye on some establishments' dubious claims of authentic cuisine. "A lot of the people who are doing food writing who don't know what they're talking about will disappear," he says. "There's no way for the dining public to tell who's full of [it]."

Chefs too are turning to blogs to flog their eateries, a pursuit that doesn't always leave time for actual cooking, says Chris Cosentino, a chef at San Francisco's Incanto and host of the Food Network's Chefs vs. City. "It's getting harder and harder for chefs to write and cook," says Cosentino, who often stays up until 2 a.m. writing about cooking on his Web site, Offal Good, after leaving the restaurant at midnight. "A lot of times I try reading it the next morning, and it's such f---ing garbage I can't make sense out of it," he says.

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