I should know - I've just suffered the same fate as
Lev Davidovitch Bronstein. One minute I was arguing my corner in Chowhound's internal
Site Talk section against the impromptu removal of one of my contributions towards better understanding of food in Barcelona... the next minute
I never existed. The "moderators", or People's Comissariat for Internal Affairs as Trotsky would have known them, had erased me from history. And what was my crime? Profanity? Insulting the readership? Self-promotion? No, I simply told these worthy protectors of the noticeboard's innocent and vulnerable readership that, in my opinion, they didn't understand the hospitality industry. Crime enough to merit a virtual ice-pick up the backside, resulting in my cyber-elimination. Still, there's one comfort. I'm
not the only one.
"Chowhound has a narrow mission: to allow unbiased consumers to share honest chow opinions with their fellow consumers", says the posting etiquette. You might think that meant that any consumer expressing honest unbiased opinions would be welcome. But oh, no! There's a special section that deals with those who
"are affiliated with a restaurant, caterer or any other food oriented business" and these bourgeois counter-revolutionaries
must be prevented from expressing their opinions
at all costs. The rules are clear:
"If you're anything other but an ordinary customer at a restaurant, please refrain from posting... about it... your opinion won't reflect an unbiased view of the experience an average consumer would receive." And it was exactly this dictatorship of proletarian diners that I was challenging when I was airbrushed off the electronic podium.
I wasn't born yesterday. I know all about spammers, self-promoters, scrapers and all the other species of low-life who inhabit the blogosphere. I would know about them, of course - I publish a blog. Like many other bloggers I spend precious time removing the embedded links that commenters try to sneak into my website in order to boost their Technorati authority. They are often highly sophisticated and very difficult to spot:
"Hallo Aydin, I just reading your blog and I loving it very muchly and I will be reading its lot's more in future. http://www.fakeviagrapills.com."
I've never accepted anything in exchange for offering an opinion, but I do know a little bit about food and I'd like to offer advice to those who are visiting my city and need some pointers. As I tried to point out to the censors of Chowhound, stagières don't get commission for writing about their employers - their bonus is that so long as they are rational and circumspect they get to keep their jobs. Not in the world of Chowhound, however:
"As chefs, waiters, sommeliers, etc, you're probably friendly with your counterparts at other restaurants, and you likely get treated very well in a lot of places, so this may significantly limit what you can post about. But for the benefit of the many thousands of non-industry people reading along, we ask that you avoid posting reviews or recommendations for places where you've received 'industry insider' treatment."Actually, people like me do receive 'industry insider' treatment in many top class restaurants. But it's not a conspiracy, as implied by the Chow hounds. Chefs usually recognise each other and, as customers, are often given extra dishes that are under development and are sometimes invited to tour the kitchen. Nobody
but nobody has ever suggested to me that they expected any sort of publishing favour in return. It's a simply ridiculous suggestion. What's even more ridiculous is to believe that one's noticeboard readers are so infantile that they are unable to tell genuine opinion from self-interested hype and they need Net Nanny to wipe away the nasty stains on the highchair and make everything sparkly clean again.
My equally heinous crime was to refer enquirers to posts I'd already published. Oh dear, naughty, naughty!
"You may also announce your web site or blog via a "sig" beneath your posting... but hyping of web sites is prohibited - sig links are a privilege, not a right... we reserve the right to revoke the privilege at our discretion. Posts which link directly to blog entries without adding any useful information to the site will be removed - copy or encapsulate your blog posts on Chowhound so readers can read and respond within our community." Oh, sure. Someone asks for an opinion on a certain restaurant which I've posted about with full menu descriptions and photos, and I'm going to copy the whole post and reformat it to suit the noticeboard when I can just stick up a link instead. Yeah. I've got nothing better to do with my time.
The moderators of Chowhound don't seem to know very much about the hospitality industry or about blogging, though it looks like they know quite a lot about childminding. Pointing out their deficiencies on Site Talk was not well received. Still, never mind. Tourists about to visit foreign cities can always rely on the honest, unbiased opinions of other tourists visiting the same cities. God forbid they should be allowed to seek advice from those who actually live and work in their destination cities and knows what they're talking about. Unless, of course, they decide to abandon the shameless
red-top and join
eGullet.
2007 and moved to Spain, where I trained in Barcelona at Carles Abellan's Comerç 24 (which won its first Michelin star) and Martín Beresategui's Lasarte (which won its second Michelin star) and was chef de partie and later Pastry Chef to Paco Morales at the amazing hotel restaurant Ferrero in the Valèncian mountains. This Spring I returned to London as part of the team of celebrated Portuguese chef Nuno Mendes, opening East End restaurant Viajante. I'm still working with food, but taking a break from fine dining. Passionately pursuing my life-long ambition to become a top-class chef and, one day, a world-famous restaurateur.
