You got served…(now write about it)
Is the MEAA Code of Ethics too general for restaurant reviewers? Lisa Rosman talks to Ed Charles, food journalist and blogger extraordinaire about the tricks of the trade and the ethics of reviewing food.
Upstart – the magazine for emerging journalists. 8 December 2009
Neil Perry, the angry customer and the spicy email exchange
Award-winning chef Neil Perry is not accustomed to serving things up hot and having them sent back, cold.
After all, the Sydney maestro’s Rockpool Bar and Grill was named best new restaurant last month in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide awards.
So he was surprised to open his email account this month to find a fiery email exchange he had had with a disgruntled customer days earlier emailed back to him by a friend…
…Media and marketing blog Mumbrella last week documented a snappy exchange between Perry and food critic Ed Charles, after Charles labelled a newspaper profile of Perry as “egotistical”.
Sydney Morning Herald website 15th October 2009
Chubby Hubby lives his life high on the blog
UN KOH is known to 400,000 readers who visit his food blog each month as Chubby Hubby, a name lifted from his favourite ice-cream.
“My wife banned the Chubby Hubby flavour from the house because I ate too much of it,” he said yesterday. “And she started referring to me as that. I hope Ben and Jerry’s don’t sue.”
The Singapore-based Koh is one of the world’s best-known food bloggers, an elite few who are feted internationally by tourism bodies and event organisers, as influential blogs are recognised as useful marketing tools.
Tourism NSW, organisers of the month-long Crave festival – which includes the Sydney International Food Festival – is sponsoring the visits of Koh; the New York travel blogger Paul Smith, known as the Twitchhiker, and the Melbourne food blogger Ed Charles of Tomato M. They have also invited Sydney bloggers including Helen Yee of Grab Your Fork to festival events, and journalists from traditional media.
Page 3, Sydney Morning Herald October 8 2009
The death of food porn?
Shock news this week from America as Conde Nast closes down Gourmet magazine, the 68-year-old food magazine edited by Ruth Reichl. What next? Media pundits say we will never again be able to walk into a newsagent and have such an incredible variety of magazines to choose from. Good news for trees, bad news for those who take their fave foodie mag to bed with them. How will this affect us and where will we get our foodie info, recipes and cheffy restaurant news from in the future?
…There are nearly 600 food blogs in Australia, according to Ed Charles of the lively Melbourne-based blog www.tomatom.com, and there are plenty more on the way.
The changing shape of our food media gives bloggers an even greater opportunity to go forward. We will continue to need responsible, well-informed and entertaining posts on the issues of food security, sustainability, obesity, food education, health, climate change and genetic modification of food, as well as helpful, inspirational recipes, as well as the low-down on where to find the best nasi lemak in Chinatown. The world is hungry for good food and good food writing, and will take it wherever it can find it.
Sydney Morning Herald October 8 2009
Featured Foodie: Ed Charles
Ed’s not a foodie. He brings a rockstar-style anarchy to the food community. A business/food journalist and regular blogger. (Incidentally I haven’t’s lived in LA for the past 22 years nor recently returned to Melbourne to open a Pho restaurant in Footscray, with my wife.)
What inspires you to write a food blog?
I see a lot of pretension and elitism in food and drink. And there is a lot written about crap experiences and manufactured products – even if made by artisans – that need to be debunked.
I want to break down those barriers with my own skewed and prejudiced view of food where I can. Food and drink is the new rock n roll and out with other food bloggers eating and drinking it seems like the best party in town.
Your secret food shames…
I’m slightly shamed being called a foodie as I don’t believe I am one. A lot of my shame is the volume of what I am eating and the time of day. I’m talking about two bigs bars of Lindt Extra Creamy at once, chocolate cake and piles of macarons for breakfast – or late evening when I also gorge on them with my girlfriend if she is around.
My other shame is Anton Berg marzipan liquor chocolates which luckily are very difficult to find in Australia but I buy in bulk at Singapore airport.
15 tips for blogger relations
On 29 June a bunch of PR people and food bloggers got together to discuss blogger relations in response to some recent and very public PR stuff ups involving food bloggers and journos. At the meet up, a panel discussion was held with Helen from Grab Your Fork, Reem from I Am Obsessed with Food and Ed from Tomato.
Stella PR blog 10 July 2009
It’s my tweet: What’s your #foodcrack?
In Twitter, social networking platform of the moment, tweets come in fast and furious, making culinary conversation a round-the-clock sport. Food writers, bloggers and enthusiasts have fully embraced the application, as Jane de Graaff discovers — and they are tweeting up a storm.
Social networking sites enter the public imagination once every year or two, luring pundits with the promise of new styles of interaction and the community-building opportunities that accompany them. Filling the space once occupied by Myspace and then Facebook, ‘micro-blogging’ platform Twitter is the latest tool to come to prominence — and the food community has wasted no time in making their mark.