appetites

In the first part of this little exercise, I wrote about what a restaurant website should be, and about how restaurants should react to scurrilous emails. Here, I’d like to expand on the latter issue, and address how I think restaurants should address social media more generally.
First, the more general issue: do you want to involve yourself at all? That’s a question that I can’t answer for you. There is a lot to be gained from social media like Facebook and Twitter, and there is some benefit to being active on internet messageboards. But there’s an investment of time involved, and not everyone has either the time or the desire to do it properly.
Let me start with the most difficult issue: Messageboards. There are a few out there, but while I don’t have access to their usage statistics, the number of posts and posters suggest a fairly limited number of readers.
The Chowhound board is probably the most visited, though it’s mainly a place for folks from out of town to get advice. Local food critic Tom Fitzmorris also has a messageboard, and others have been set up by folks who wanted additional options, such as New Orleans Eats, and a few different food-related boards at Mr. Lake’s New Orleans Forums. The folks at New Orleans.com** have a food forum, and the venerable (for the internet) website eGullet has a board dedicated to Louisiana.
Because none of the boards have a huge volume of traffic, there is not all that much utility to restaurants in maintaining an active presence. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, if it interests you; only that you should do it because it interests you, and not as a part of your marketing strategy. Occasionally a restaurateur will come into an online forum because the restaurant is being criticized. This is not always a good idea, but the worst thing you can do is to misrepresent yourself.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about. I don’t know for sure who any of the posters are, but it certainly appears that “fsk13″ and “gotham” are the same person, and likely associated with the restaurant being discussed. The reaction from the other posters is pretty typical, and counterproductive from the restaurant’s perspective. Rather than answering criticism, they’ve kept the thread alive, and earned more criticism to boot.
It’s probably better to ignore this kind of thing; or better yet, take it as constructive criticism. If there’s something on which you can improve, and the criticism alerts you to it, that’s pretty much free consulting. Even if the advice is clearly mean-spirited, it may be of value to you.
If you feel that you must respond, do not do so anonymously. Disclose your relationship to the restaurant, whatever it is. Be polite when you respond; go so far as to thank the person for bringing a problem to your attention. You might even consider offering to resolve the problem, if you think it won’t cause more headaches.
In the first part of my discussion on this topic, I talked about the difference between a false assertion of fact, and opinion. That was in the context of whether something written about a restaurant might be actionable. The basic concept is that, because opinions cannot be proven true or false, they usually cannot be defamatory or libelous.* There are exceptions, but the distinction is worthwhile to consider in this context as well.
If someone writes on an internet messageboard that your restaurant closes at 8:00, when in fact you close at 11:00, there’s something you can do. It’s a factually incorrect assertion, and it may be worth your time to correct it. If someone writes that your gumbo is bland and tasteless, you probably can’t. At least, not if your gumbo is not bland and tasteless. If the criticism is valid, again, maybe you should change the gumbo. But even if you believe that the opinion being expressed is wrong, there’s just not much you can do about it. It’s unlikely that arguing with someone who expresses a negative opinion about your restaurant is going to help.
The more likely result is that you’ll get into an argument on the internet, and honestly nobody wins in that scenario. Because if you’ve spent any time on the internet, you know that there are some people who are jackasses, and who derive pleasure from creating controversy. We call them “trolls,” and they exist in every public messageboard on the internet. That’s not to say that all criticism on those boards is invalid. Quite the contrary, there’s a lot of folks on those boards who know what they’re talking about, and there are a lot of restaurants that deserve vociferous criticism. My point is that whether you agree with the opinion expressed or not, countering it is generally a bad idea.
So that is my advice for dealing with internet messageboards. The advice with regard to Twitter, Facebook, and the like is similar. It’s very simple: if you have the time and the inclination, there’s no reason not to sign up for such social media sites. Assuming you’re not a complete moron, you’ll only increase your visibility. None of these sites, to my knowledge, cost anything. Frequently, they provide useful information for your customers.
What’s perhaps more important, letting people connect with you via these websites gives them a sense that they’re connected to you. People who are connected to you in some way are generally more likely to visit your restaurant. And that is the single most important reason to do any kind of “advertising.” If it puts asses in seats, and it’s free, why the holy hell wouldn’t you do it?
I won’t presume to tell you what to write on twitter, or how often. There’s an art to learning how to make effective use of a service that limits you to 140 characters at a time, but there’s no one way to do it. Cochon Butcher does a great job of announcing specials via Twitter, for example. Chef Scott Boswell, of Stella! posts a lot of pictures, and talks about what he’s doing. You may figure out another way to make Twitter work for you. My advice is that you should try. Oh, and please God don’t fucking spam. I don’t care who you are, or how much I like your restaurant. If you update 30 times an hour, I’m dropping you like a sack of plague-ridden hamsters.
Facebook is similar, but you have the option of providing even more information, and obviously you’re not limited to 140 characters. It is probably better for restaurants than Myspace, which I believe tends toward a younger demographic. Other than that, all of the above advice applies. Don’t be an asshole, or a moron, and don’t spam.
There’s one more topic I want to address briefly, and that is whether you should have a blog. Probably not. Facebook and Twitter are both relatively cheap in terms of a time-investment. Blogs are not. If you have the itch to write, then by all means do it, but most folks don’t. Most folks who start a blog end up abandoning it, and that does nobody any good. There are exceptions, the principal one I can think of is Chef Chris DeBarr, whose livejournal is a fantastic glimpse into his creative process, and a great way to find out what’s going on at his restaurant, The Green Goddess. I don’t think Chris really does it in order to market the restaurant, or at least not only for that, and that’s probably why it’s so good. Unless you have a similar need to write, I’d advise against blogging.
I think that covers just about all of the things I anticipated when I decided to tackle this topic, but if you have any questions, please do feel free to send me an email. I’m also, of course, on Twitter and Facebook, though if you want me to accept your friend request on the latter, it’s probably a good idea to mention something about this website or my other outlets for food writing with the request.
Hopefully this has been of some use to some of you. If not, as always, please feel free to apply for a refund.

*I shouldn’t really have to say this, but I don’t give legal advice on this website. If you are stupid enough to consider anything I say here as legal advice, or that because of something I’ve written, you and I have established an attorney-client relationship, then… Well, you’re probably not that stupid.
**Corrected thanks to a friend, who pointed out my error in attributing that forum to ABC 26 News.

A friend tipped me off to this story in the Times Picayune, about a restaurant that saw its business affected by a chain email. The restaurant is Manchu Food Store, on North Claiborne, and the email, which was false, claimed that the restaurant had been cited for health code violations:

The message was an e-mail with the subject line, “Manchu Food Alert!” It exclaimed: “Manchu . . . failed their health inspection twice in the last 30 days. They were cited for having rats in the grease, and storing food on the floor.”

The owner, Tommy Nguyen, addressed it quickly. He bought radio advertisements, and bought an ad in the Times Picayune. He put up a banner on his storefront that says, “Manchu Rumors are Not True.” His business, he reports, dropped by 75%.
This is an unusual situation, because in order for the rumor to spread by email, there needs to be some connection between at least a significant percentage of the restaurant’s customers. Otherwise, how can enough people learn of the “problem?” Most restaurants probably don’t have a clientele that is closely connected enough to be affected by a chain email.
But it made me think of something more common – posts on messageboards or blogs that denigrate a restaurant anonymously, and how restaurants should react. That, in turn, had me thinking of an even broader topic that’s been bouncing around in my pointy little head for a year or two: how should restaurants behave on the interwebs?
So I thought I’d take a stab, in the warm afterglow of LSU’s victory over Georgia, at an introduction to the topic. A lot of what I’m going to say is going to seem obvious. If you’ve already got a significant web-presence, then this may not be all that useful to you. You may skip ahead to the more advanced discussion with my permission.
Let’s start with the basics. Do you have a website? If you do, does it communicate what it should? Because if you have a website, and the most essential information you need to communicate isn’t immediately accessible, you’re not doing it right.
The essential information you need to display on a website is as follows: your address, your phone number, and the days and hours that you’re open. If these things are not on the first page I see when I load your web page, then you are doing it wrong.
There are exceptions; I know of a few local restaurant websites that have an artistic “splash” page that fits the ambience of the restaurant, and I can’t quibble too much about that, because generally those splash pages are something you can skip with a single click. But if your page loads with a bunch of pretty pictures, and makes me hunt around for more than five seconds to figure out how to contact you to make a reservation, WHY?
99% of the people who visit your website are looking for information on how to reach you. Why the holy fuck would you hide that? Why would you make it difficult to find? If your web designer advises you to do so, you need to find someone who understands that restaurant websites are not designed to generate page-views.
Let me explain: commercial websites that are trying to sell advertising often make you visit multiple pages to view all of the content they’re providing. That’s because each time you load a page, the advertisements they run are re-loaded too. It’s a model that’s pretty much out of date, but I guess some web designers haven’t figured that out yet, because a lot of web pages still follow that template for no apparent purpose.
Look, I know that your restaurant is special. It is your baby, it is the result of your hard work and it’s a work of art. You want your website to be as special as your restaurant. You want it to reflect the spirit of your restaurant; you want it to reflect the atmosphere, and to give people an idea of what they can expect when they dine with you.
Nobody cares. Nobody but you, your close relatives, and the people you’re paying to make a fabulous website. Again, 99% of the people who visit your website are looking for information on how to visit your restaurant. Your website is advertising, and like any other advertising, the function of your website is to put asses in seats in your restaurant. To the extent you make it more difficult for visitors to your website to contact you and make a reservation, or to find out when you’re open, or where you are? You’re making it less likely for that particular ass to end up in a seat in your restaurant. And unless I’m very mistaken about your business model, that’s what you want, no?
That is not to say that your website should not reflect the spirit of your restaurant, or give people an impression of what they can expect when they dine with you. It is simply to say that you can do those things, and others, while still making sure that the essential information you need to relate is ON YOUR FRONT GODDAMN PAGE.
Everything else is a matter of taste. There are certainly things that you may want on your website in addition to the essentials. A representative menu is nice, as are well-taken photographs of your food. If there are positive media reviews of your restaurant, by all means post them, and provide links if the reviews are online. Personally, I despise embedded music, but hey, I despise a lot of things. Your mileage may vary. Speaking as someone who writes about restaurants, I also like to see a “history” section, and maybe something about the staff, especially your chef(s). Nude pictures are not necessary.
So how did I get here from the original story to which I linked? Well, your website is really the first thing you should consider when you consider your presence on the interwebs. It’s what most people will find first when they plug your name into a search engine.
What I’ll get into in more detail another day is how you should react, if at all, when you plug your restaurant’s name into a search engine (which you should do regularly, by the way) and you find someone slandering you on a messageboard or blog.
For now, I’ll address, briefly, what you should do if you learn that someone is sending emails around claiming that your restaurant is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. First, is your restaurant a wretched hive of scum and villainy? If your answer is “yes,” please do what you can to evict the villains and clean the scum, then pretend the villains and scum were never there in the first place. “What villains? What scum?” you’ll say to anyone who asks.
Your next question should be: “What do I care?” Because lots of dumbasses say all kinds of dumbass things via email all the time. While I was typing this, I received seven offers for Rolax watches, three notices that I have won a Nigerian lottery, and seventeen offers to improve the size of my member, none of which work, I’ve heard. If, however, you are unfortunate enough to be the target of an effective eamail smear campaign, I would suggest that you do not take the “high ground” taken by Mr. Nguyen. If you can find out who sent the original email, by all means do so. Sometimes people make it easy.
If you can find the original sender, you have a dilemma. Contact them, or no? This obviously is going to depend on the circumstances, and the circumstances are far too broad for me to address here. If it’s a disgruntled employee, that’s one thing; a disgruntled customer, another. You may need to seek legal advice (he said, hoping that the reader remembers he’s a lawyer.) The point I’m trying to make is that if it’s affecting your business, you shouldn’t ignore it, and even if, as did Mr. Nguyen, you choose to attack the problem with advertising, you should probably also address the source.
There is one other considertation: is there anything you can do about it? Because if the email says, as in the Machu Food Store instance, “Your Restaurant was cited for having a rat in the fry oil,” which is demonstrably false, you may have some recourse in the courts. If, however, the email expresses an opinion, such as “the food at the Manchu Food Store sucks,” you probably do not. That is because you cannot demonstrate that an opinion is false.
Whatever the circumstances, the universal advice I can give you is that you do not want to make threats on the interwebs. That is what lawyers (oh hay!) are for. This is a topic I will, hopefully, address in the future when I talk about how you should react to negative postings on messageboards, and blogs, and how you should interact with social media like facebook, myspace, and twitter. Also, I will address run-on sentences, and my proclivity to write them, despite my distaste when I read them, and the influence of editors and so on, and so on.
So, go forth and conquer, my monkeys. Fly, in other words.

The glove compartment is inaccurately named, and everybody knows it.

At the suggestion of a couple of friends, I have decided to compile a list of New Orleans area restaurants and chefs who are using Twitter. Twitter is an excellent way to get information out, and there are a bunch of restaurant industry folks using it, but at this point I don’t think anyone’s taken the time to compile a list. Update: a friend pointed out that someone actually has compiled a list of restaurants on Twitter at Tom Fitzmorris’ message board: here. It’s missing a few that I found last night, but has at least one that I didn’t catch, and I’ll add that, along with any others people send me. Thanks to JS for the head’s up.
This is not going to be comprehensive, as I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of people/places, but I’ll try to update it when I can. If I have time in the future, I’ll organize this list alphabetically, but for the time being, the list will start with the folks I’ve most recently “followed” on Twitter. And so,
Cold Stone Creamery
Cafe Adelaide
Sucre’s gelato van
NTINIS
Ralph’s on the Park
Red Fish Grill
Bacco
Boucherie
Anthony Spizale is the chef at the (also tweeting) Rib Room at the Royal Orleans.
Shula’s Steak House has a Twitter account, but it doesn’t appear to be active.
Nonna Randazzo’s Bakery
Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse
Chef Jared Tees of Luke.
Jason McCuller is the chef at Cure.
Rambla
Bourbon House
Palace Cafe
Scott Boswell is the chef at Stella!
Nealy Frentz is the co-owner and chef at Lola, in Covington.
Emeril’s Eats has a twitter account, as does Chef Emeril Lagasse.
La Cote Brasserie
Le Foret
La Petite Grocery and its Chef Justin Devillier are also on Twitter.
Cochon Butcher
Sucre
Popeye’s
Again, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of restaurants/chefs, but that’s a list of the folks I’m currently aware of and following. If you fit the bill, have a twitter feed, and are not on the list, please email me and I’ll add you… eventually. I’m not making any promises, as my time is incredibly valuable. I am a very important and busy man. Sometimes I am so busy that I do not have time for myself. That’s how important I am. Seriously.
You can, of course, also find me on Twitter and send me a direct message there. Which, given the subject of your message, might just be the best way to approach things. I don’t care if you actually “follow” me, though it would be helpful if you want to get information to an incredibly important and busy man. By which I mean me.
Thanks to everyone who sent me a direct message via Twitter this evening. Please continue to do so, though don’t expect a response tonight, as I am weary. Weary and important, if I haven’t mentioned that already.

Edited 7/11