No Such Thing As a Free Meal

If you were a struggling Chicago chef or restaurant owner, my advice to you might be, “Have you considered sleeping with a food journalist or a PR person, yet?”

Maybe you’d consider this cynical or crass advice grounded in the food worker’s moment of weakness.

You’re not wrong.  But, also, if the method has been proven effective and achieves its means and no one gets hurt except maybe the consumers who end up paying good money for food that may or may not be good depending on whether your culinary skills are equivalent to whatever skills got the scribe or flack in bed, why, not, right?

Farfetched, right?

Wrong.

This is happening everywhere. There may not always be an exchange of bodily fluids, but there is almost always some kind of quid pro quo in a significant percentage of posts you see on social media today. 

In your heart you know this. In your head too. Maybe you missed it yesterday, but the SEC just slapped Van Eck Associates with a 1.75 million dollar fine for providing secret payments to the racist, sexist pizza simp known as David Portnoy so that he would pump their financial securities.

But, you were not there. You did not see photos. Maybe, poor Davey Pageviews is being misrepresented by the liberal media?

But, what if there’s actual receipts, photos of the sausage being made in broad daylight?

Mike, surely that’s not possible. These people are embarrassed by their pay for play, their manipulative shenanigans, right?  They must do this like blood sucking vampires beneath the shadows and far from the flickering gas light.

Wrong. They know you don’t care. They’re proud of their networking, their free meal taking, their psychophantic pleasures. Consider this picture?

Just another influencer cheese pull in a Cunard cruise-liner-sized French restaurant transported from a New York restaurant group for our backwoods hogbutcher-to-the-world stomachs, right? Wrong.

But before we get to that, hasn’t this game already been played and lost multiple times already? Brasserie Ruhlmann in 2008 for those of you who go back that far.  And of course, Le Select, for those of you who don’t? 

Anyway, back to the photo. The lady in the pink jacket doing the pull is one of Chicago’s bigger food, drink and general PR mavens, Victoria Kent.

The guy in the matching pink sweater lighting her indulgence is Jeffy Mai, her live-in partner.  Nice, supportive boyfriend, right? Well, yeah, but also, he’s the editor of Time Out Chicago.  Look around and over the years there’s been so many photos of them at free media dinners hand in hand, Jeffy getting the intel to pimp for his publication, and Vicky the dangled carrot, “Hey, look if you hire me, my boyfriend will write about you!”

Surely, that doesn’t happen?  Well, look here, Time Out is indeed promoting the restaurant and there’s no disclosure of their relationship. There never is. There is no mention of free meals being had or taken.

Maybe additionally worth mentioning is the influencer @chicagoismyboyfriend is also in this photo to the right. Did she post about the restaurant too? She did. Did she post that her post was an ad or in exchange for a free meal? No, she did not.

But, she could still be objective right?  I don’t know. She went to Warlord a few weeks ago and trashed it as not worth it. What I know about Warlord is they don’t do comps and she had to wait in line like everyone else. Some of her critiques may have been fair. You will wait for a table at Warlord. They get slammed. Sometimes there are pacing issues.

On the other hand, she gets mad at Warlord’s shrimp because it’s too much effort for her for too little reward. She claims the steak is fine but that you can get steak anywhere.  You can get steak anywhere, but very little of it is dry-aged as long as this one, and generally it’s priced twice as much if it is.

But, again, because she takes free meals and glorifies those spots and then goes to a place where she didn’t get a free meal, and doesn’t like it, how do we know what is real? If she’s wrong, 70,000 followers who trust her are likely now, “Fuck, Warlord.”

I know. Mike, why you gotta be such a cop? Can’t we all just have fun? It’s probably hard for anyone to believe this, but I hate writing this stuff. I only want to promote great culinary art.

But, we live in a society where the highest ethical platform of our land, the United States Supreme Court decides that each justice is the only person responsible for self-disclosing his or her own ethical lapses, aka the veritable wolf in the henhouse scenario. Talking about food journalism lapses is probably the lowest stakes, but it’s important for the culture to question these things.

I also want to acknowledge nothing is black and white. Victoria and Jeffy are by all accounts very good people. I do not know them personally, but I know a lot of people who do. Jeffy used to write about my work when he worked at Eater Chicago and for that I’m grateful. Victoria is known for her generosity.

But also, when it comes to professionalism, Victoria and Jeffy and Chiboyfriend, they don’t care. They think this is the life and the scene they’re entitled to.

Last year I wrote about how Doug Psaltis of Asador Bastian is a noted fabulist, and months before that Eater Chicago documented Psaltis’s physical assault of a Lettuce Entertain You employee. Vicky still went to Asador Bastian after all that and glorified Psaltis’s work in raving IG posts. Was that juice worth the squeeze?

Though Jeffy is in charge of editorial content, he’s also in charge of inviting and curating restaurants for Time Out’s for profit food hall, his own clients who will be pimped in his magazine above chefs who aren’t in that hall. It feels like Jeffy and Victoria and food influencers will do anything for business, a free meal, and your attention. Will you still give it to them?