The FTC and food bloggers; or, why quid is sometimes but not always pro quo

Nothing says “Yum-o!” to a food blogger like a 12-page treatise from that house of haute cuisine, the Federal Trade Commission. And as of today, according to the FTC, there is such a thing as a free lunch — as long as you make sure everyone knows that you ate for free, because if you don’t they can haul your fattened, freeloading, lying-by-omission ass into court.

That’s the jist of it; go here if you’d prefer a more technical explanation.

And on that note, I poured two bottles of J Pinot Noir on Thanksgiving. One was from Nicole’s Vineyard; the other one was Russian River Valley. Both were fantastic, if you’ll forgive the term, expresions of the grape; they had a nice combination of the fruit I associate with Northern California and the complex flintiness that I associate with Oregon (and usually prefer for Pinot Noir). And? Both were 100%, delivered-to-my-doorstep in styrofoam containers, tasting notes thoughtfully included, FREE.

See how easy that was?

A publicist sent the wine to me unbidden. In fact, it took a little deduction to figure out the source. Not that it mattered; as soon as the brown box landed on my desk, I knew why it was there. The sender wanted me to write about the wine. And I wanted to drink it.

When I started food writing in 1992, I competed for, and got, a job as the restaurant reviewer for an alternative weekly. The rules were simple: Be anonymous and pay for everything. And, like most other newspaper food writers, that’s what I did. Invitations to dine “as a guest” of a restaurant owner were ignored; my employer also made it clear that if I thought a place worth reveiwing, they’d pay for it. Also: kind of creepy and gross.

I wonder what restaurant launches looked like before the internet? Were they sedate, congratulatory affairs? Nowadays some feel like foodie frat parties, albeit with a much better quality of free-flowing booze. And instead of leaving with a STD, you get a gift bag.

I digress… actually, I don’t. This free-admission numbers game is how publicists penetrate the new food-world order. There are now far fewer journalists employed as restaurant critics (or employed as journalists, period). However, you can set up a blog and become a critic. No one’s paying for your dinners, much less paying you to write, but if you write with some intelligence and consistency the world’s food, wine and travel publicists will beat a path to your inbox. And then they will invite you to restaurant launches, to tequila tastings, to “fam trips” and to media dinners.  Sometimes you can watch the coverage flow through the blogs, like a wave.

It took a while — the FTC hasn’t updated its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising since 1980 — but they finally figured out that the bloggers couldn’t afford all the stuff they wrote about and publicists were not blessed with a surfeit of generosity. And so:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

I like this. Frankly, if I could afford to buy all the food and wine and travel, I’d like it more. But since I can’t, I’ll take the level playing field.

This is how I read it: If I write about a wine sent to me by a publicist, I tell you. If I talk about the food I ate at a media dinner, I tell you. If I stay at a hotel for free or at a media rate, I tell you. This is how I am able to afford some of the things and experiences I write about.

This is how I feel about it: I don’t write about a wine just because a publicist sent it to me. Or about the media dinner or the hotel just because I was there. This is how I avoid the kind of creepy and gross.

This is what I do: Sometimes I go to media dinners; sometimes I go out on my own dime. Either way, what I choose to write about — and what I choose to write — is wholly up to me. As any number of likely annoyed publicists will tell you, I don’t feel inherent obligation to write about anyone or anything.

The Spectrum Wine Auction is starting to freak me out

One of these things is not like the other.

This time yesterday:

Since then, I have become 300% more trustworthy:

 

And in other news, I’m still winning.

Not everyone loves free food as much as I do

The Avalon Hotel hosted a one-two punch of a launch party last night. I was there for the new chef, Mirko Paderno, who has been charged with turning the servicable Blue into a more-signature Olivero. However, almost everyone else was there for the publication of “Hue” by interior designer Kelly Wearstler.

In some ways, this is savvy: The hotel gets to position its chef among lots of swank and shiny people while introducing said people to his fabulous new food. The Avalon also gets a lot more PR; it’s hard to imagine that WireImage would assign Donato Sardella to spend an evening shooting Mirko and people like, well, me, who are conspicuously neither swank nor shiny.

That said, the combination made for an odd evening. Most of the guests looked as if they belonged in Wearstler’s beautiful rooms, where it’s hard to imagine people eating anything lest the setting be marred with a greasy fingerprint. I think it was hard for them to imagine, too; while the crowd was so thick I couldn’t navigate my way from the dining room to poolside, it was easy to find waiters eager for you to pluck appetizers off their trays.

In other words, almost no one (except me) seemed to be eating; ergo,  in turn, I recognized almost no one at the party except for Gwen Stefani. And that doesn’t really count, does it?

(Mirko shouldn’t feel bad about the food; no one seemed very interested in the book, either. Probably because it was a “special edition” that cost $93.)

Holy crap. I’m still winning.

Is it too early to start feeling guilty?

The one where I bid in a wine auction

Wine auction. I mean, really. Who has any business doing this? Obviously, if you’re the sort of person who’s reading this with the wifi on your G5, then god bless. But the the rest of us? Who swear that someday, we really will stop buying wine that costs less than $10 a bottle because that’s the line of demarcation between wine that’s really pretty good and wine that gets you drunk without inducing nausea? Yeah, that’s me, which means I have no business registering to participate in a wine auction.

I did, anyway. And placed a (very) modest bid.

A pipedream, rendered in jpeg.

In 2009, the Spectrum Wine Auction is one of those events that seems like it belongs to another dimension, one in which unemployment isn’t in the double digits and choosing to pick up the newspaper on your front lawn isn’t a revolutionary act. However, the man behind this auction, Aubrey McClendon, is a sort of an otherworldly type. He’s the head of Chesapeake Energy; last year, his comp package was $112 million. This spring he auctioned off caseloads of wine — $2.23 million worth — and he’s planning to sell off about $3 million more on Saturday, Nov. 21, at the St. Regis in Dana Point, with a simulcast in Hong Kong. (Lest you think McClendon may have overextended himself or otherwise fallen on hard times, a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal the reason for the sale was “100,000 bottles is a bit too much for him.” Yeah, me too.)

Which brings me back to: What business do I have bidding in this auction? Not only is it too rich for my blood, I don’t know anyone with this blood type.

And at the same time: Not only do I love wine, I love good wine. And while it’s not necessarily my goal to have the scratch to play games like this one, I want to know as much as possible about good wine, which means paying more. More than I’m used to. More than I should.

Besides, I fully expect to be outbid before I go to sleep tonight.

Thomas Keller in the house

The December issue of Esquire has a great article (sorry, not online), p. 102: “The night Thomas Keller came to my kitchen” documents how the magazine writer cooked in his apartment kitchen from Keller’s new book, “Ad Hoc at Home,’ with Keller in tow. Seems like an obvious bit of PR, but Keller says no one’s ever invited him to their home to cook from one of his books. That initially sounds like an odd bit of pathos given his rich pageant of a life… but on second thought, if you write books like this, you have no one to blame but yourself. As a nonpro home cook, even a very good one, you are either an unflappable optimist or a small-time masochist if you expect to cook a whole meal from “The French Laundry;” if you also think it might be fun to invite Keller over as a witness, I might suggest that you don’t need an apron, but a hairshirt.

How cookbooks say, "Do not touch."

Anyway. Ad Hoc is not the French Laundry. Ad Hoc, however, is the only restaurant where I read its menu every day (mailing list here). My dinner at Ad Hoc was everything I hoped for/expected; I haven’t eaten at FL (yet), but it’s food executed at the very highest level — and most of us don’t live there, or even want to. Ad Hoc, however, is something like how I would cook every day given the time/money/garden/opportunity, which is another kind of highest level, which means it’s a book I am going to buy.

So I went to Pourtal and decided to give machines a second chance

You've seen those EnoMatics, right? It's basically an Automat, but for wine, and you use a debit card instead of coins because this is the 21st century and like coins could buy you anything. I've always liked their gee-whiz value (press button! get wine! whee!) but found there was an inverse relation to its charm and the number of times you punched the button. Automat wine means no waiter; no waiter means you are getting exactly one ounce of wine (and who wants that?), context free; there's no one and nothing to tell you why the owners liked this wine or why it might be worth $4.65 per ounce.

Stephen Abramson's Pourtal has solved at least part of the problem: His schtick is to group the wines by style (three-grape blends; whites; Pinot Noirs), order them by three- or four-bottle flights and, best of all, have Peter Birmingham as a secret weapon. LA knows him best as the sommelier of the late, lamented Norman's, but he's possibly the most passionate, pan-alcohol geek I've ever met. (Wine, beer, gin — he loves and knows it all.) And on those nights he's not guiding tours at Pourtal, there's handy little printouts to tell you what you're drinking, with a little why thrown in.

Also: Fancy-wine appropriate bar snacks with a heavy emphasis on Andrew's Cheese Shop, including a warm crostini topped with Grevenbroecker blue cheese and heirloom chocovivo chocolate. Sounds insane, but it was perfect with a Atalayas de Golban Temperanillo. Also: They have a selection of wines sold by the full glass and sell all the wines retail, which is great news because Peter's knowledge runs far and wide; you'd have a hell of a time finding many of these anywhere else. 104 Santa Monica Blvd., 90401; (310) 393-7693.

Ammo still has ammo

I can't help it: Every time I walk into a restaurant, my first thought isn't about the menu, the wait time at the hostess stand, the decor or the music. It's, "Will this place survive?"

Pure reflex. Has nothing to do with appearances or reputations or Deathwatching or anything beyond this is what it's like to live in 2009. Blame my late father (he won't mind; he'd be proud that I absorbed his lessons so well), but restaurants are a vulnerable construct at best (80% die off in the first five years, yadda yadda) and in the current marketplace, everything feels fragile.

However, like it says in the brass-embedded polished concrete at Ammo's doorstep, "est 1996." It's already beaten the odds. And still, they're as worried as everyone else. They have a new publicist, they're flogging homemade ice cream sundaes, they're doing farm-to-table evenings and artisanal tequila tastings and inviting people like me to have dinner.

Oh, Ammo. To quote another 1996 establishment, you're so money and you don't even know it.

Part of Ammo's charm is it's long been an industry standard for lunch (started out by doing a lot of set catering, it's close to casting offices and it's halfway between the valley and Beverly Hills) and now that "stock options" have become a fancy way of saying "sucker!", it now looks like an especially clever choice for dinner (and judging by the crowd on a Tuesday night, Hollywood's already gotten the memo).

Handsome but not ostentatious (and a great playlist!), fair prices for reasonable portions, Ammo also has the gimlet eye of GM Benedikt Bohm, who walks the room like a panther looking for invitations to pounce. (If there's anything this economy may be good for, it may act as the long-needed vaccine for the tragic Lazy Eye syndrome that afflicts so many LA servers. "I don't see you, I'm not looking, I can't see you…")

What we ate: A plate of a dozen vegetables, each pickled in its own seasoned brine. Risotto with asparagus and peas, creamy and light. Thin-crust pizza showered with baby leeks and bacon. Kampachi with avocado and blood orange. Crisped pork belly with tiny white beans. Hanger steak with root vegetables, lamb tenderloin on a mound of minted peas and lemony yogurt sauce. And the aforementioned ice cream sundaes.

Delicious. Especially the pickled vegetables, those minted peas, the kampachi with a bite of blood orange. Especially when it was a chaser for the rich and crispy pork.

And the ice cream sundaes? It was the only bit that felt a little desperate. The ice creams and sorbets are homemade and impressive, but flavors like parsnip and popcorn feel like they're trying too hard — although they taste better than they sound, especially when drizzled with blood-orange caramel. (The blood orange can do no wrong.) But really, I'd have been just happy with that tiny scoop of vanilla.

Galco’s, world’s best soda shop, produces world’s best music video

Please enjoy this Greg Laswell music video, "How The Day Sounds," which was shot in Galco's, the world's best soda shop. (And I'm not saying that just because it's in my neighborhood; if you find one finer, please tell me.)

While I happen to think it's a dandy little song, the video really captures the glory of Galco's with all those rows of glass containing candy-colored liquid. It's quite beautiful when you think about it (which the director obviously did) and the video also captures some of the forbidden bottled-soda charm of childhood — only now it's not because you can probably have the means to buy as much of them as you want.

Anyway, I hope you like what I think is the best lo-fi music video since OK Go discovered treadmills. And then, you go to Galco's.

Also: Yes, that's Elijah Wood.

On Eating For Free; or, Gratis Means Gratitude

Full disclosure: I've wanted to write something about freebies for a long time. Because as a food blogger, even one as infrequent as me, I get them. And while I am offered many more than I accept, I go to restaurant and bar openings and to media dinners.

And I think the meaning of free is changing as restaurant writing increasingly becomes the domain of utterly unpaid, expense-account-free bloggers (a number among which I count myself. Variety hasn't been associated w/ The Knife for many months; the ads are a function of me not having remapped the URL).

Namely: Without the free, it's a lot more difficult to get the coverage these restaurants desperately need. Not because free means bribery; it means there's no other way for writers to afford it. Any writer.

In a world where newspapers are laying off staff, cutting salaries or folding altogether on a daily basis, I'll make a not-very-bold prediction: The world in which people are paid to eat and write about it is about to disappear. It's untenable. Forget about the blogging competition; supporting a restaurant critic, with all the multiple visits and dining companions, makes absolutely no financial sense. Newspapers have no ad model for it; if Zachys were to pull out of the New York Times' dining section, there would be… almost nothing. And that sucks, but the New York Times has even suckier problems, like being a junk bond. And taking financing from a dubious billionaire. And wondering if it could face bankruptcy anyway.

More about writing from the freebie POV later, but as a preamble I bring this from my partner in crime, D.R. Stewart, aka my husband and frequent beneficiary of The Knife's largesse.

Filed from the frontlines of culture-war-torn Silver Lake, CA – They called it the Gravy Train when I was a kid. And if you’re lucky enough to hitch a ride, you will acknowledge it’s an aptly named locomotive. Due to a relationship I have, my passenger status has been validated for many years. So when the Gravy Train pulled up at the opening of Barbarella Tuesday night for free drinks and food, I was among the first to have my ticket punched.

Barbarella is a clean establishment on the hip-Hyperion highway that leads you into the Atwater Village for more hip adventures. Its food was serviceable; no wrong notes were hit, no popcorn shrimp went awry. The place is well-lit, open, with nooks & crannies to hide out and big spaces to dine in. I wish it well. The DJ was a dumbass, but that’s not his fault – that's really LA's DJ culture at fault. (Look at my cool set list that no one knows!  Only bar mitzvah DJs would play songs normal people actually resonate with! Although I ride the Gravy Train, to paraphrase Joseph Walsh: “I shouldn’t complain, but sometimes I still do.” )

But my real complaint is not with a sad lil’ too-kool-for-school DJ – it's with the patrons at Barbarella that night. Who were all eating and drinking for free.

It’s simple, really: Tip the waiter. Tip the bartender. Tip them fucking well. 

Why? Because you didn’t have to pay for a goddamned thing. Really. You sat there enjoying, even if it wasn’t perfect, a perfectly good meal and drinks for free. So throwing down a 20 spot to the waiter means you just had a night out in LA for 20 bucks. Poor you.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been comped in this town, be it premies, parties or product launches, but I can tell you the ratio of wallets I see removed for gratuity is somewhere around 10%. I don’t get it – on your own, you'd have to pay a $100 tab and then tip, but when something is free you can’t give the bartender a fiver? At least?

Here's a pitch on a purely selfish level: Giving service workers money when you just ate for free is good for the soul. Honest. People wonder why others still give change to panhandlers even though they are “just going to use it for booze.” They do so because it’s a direct exchange between someone who is really grateful. Which your servers will be if you just tip them. Because at some point in the night, whirling around like hor dervishes, they’ve started to notice that all these well-dressed industry insiders aren’t tipping them – at all. 

Let’s take a visit to the Hall of Shite Rationalizations:

1. Oh, their tip is built in.

   Really? And you know this how? You don’t know this. And it’s not. Quick calls to several bartender/waitstaff providers assures me of what I’ve always been told by the folks in the trenches: Tips are based on the kindness of strangers.

2. This is my one chance to save a little money.
   
   Same logic could be provided to not tipping on food and drink you actually have to pay for.  You already saved your money; you didn’t have to PAY for your night out.

3. They signed up do to the event. They know the deal.
   
   Um, they do, but they also know when they bartend at most places, people tip. Even private parties. And how about the situation where you are getting your meal comped in a place that is otherwise a working establishment that night? So all the other waiters get a little something-something, but the one lucky enough to get cheapskate eating the free meal does not.

Finally, words of wisdom from Sir Anthony Bourdain – not only should you tip WELL when comped, you should do so in CASH. It keeps it outta Uncle Sammy’s hands for the most parts and those living the service-industry life desire the green infusion.

I hope the Gravy Train pulls into your town. And when it does, better ante up – or I’ll send the porter after you.