Pizza City Fest Has No Sauce

Steve Dolinsky, aka the Hungry Hound Food Guy, has always been a fraud. 

I’m not saying he’s not good at his job as a food reporter. He’s one of the best to do it in Chicago.  

When Phil Vettel and Pat Bruno were acting as de facto cheerleaders throwing out stars to big restaurant groups like New Orleans krewes tossing out party favors during Mardi Gras parades, Steve was burrowing into every cuisine in every corner of the city. 

Before I became a food writer, I even admired him. As far as his food reporting goes, I still admire him. 

But admiration, as vendors at Pizza City Fest this weekend and every restaurant who ever got taken advantage of during his pre-pizza food tour business, and honestly any food business whose bills he avoided or walked out in his career knows, comes at a cost. 

While Steve casts his gaze across everything, you only catch the glint in his eye if you can do something for him. 

I learned this early in my career. Steve used to dine out on Thursday nights. Maybe he still does. He was very Machiavellian. If he saw you making a name in food journalism, he’d take you out to dinners and try to co-opt you with niceness. 

It worked on me for a bit. But I noticed on those Thursday night meals that the Hound was not paying his bills. Often where lots of free dishes appeared, no receipt ever showed up.  

This happened once at Gemini Grill. I asked him about it. He told me not to worry about it. 

I went home. I started Googling. I found a Sun-Times profile of Steve, where another journalist discovered the same experience I had, that Steve didn’t always pay his bills. In this article the reporter says he “doesn’t have a big problem with accepting the freebies and perks that come with his position as an arbiter of Chicago dining trends.” That article led to an ethics clause he had to sign with ABC7. By the time we dined out, that clause was in place, but he was still violating it. 

I never got invited back to dinner after that. Soon I found out I was no longer on the list of World’s 50 Best Voters, a panel that Steve controlled. I found out because the results had come out and I never voted on it. 

I asked Steve about this. He said, “We need people who travel more.” I was working a full-time job that had me in a different city every two weeks at the time. No one, arguably, traveled more. Even Steve didn’t travel or if he did it was on a paid-for-dime because soon he was quoted in the New York Times about taking a junket to Stockholm with a lot of other 50 Best voters. 

During this period I’d also get a call from a restaurant owner or publicist at least weekly about how Steve had walked out on another bill or took free stuff without any prior arrangement. 

I’d often email Steve about this and he’d always say stuff like I can’t afford dining out, I have to pay for my kid’s school. His kid’s school was a private affair with $20,000 annual tuition.  

That same school benefitted from his Pigs and Pinot fundraiser each year, where he’d close off an alley behind his house and roast pork and get as many chefs or restaurants that he covered to donate food and drink and gifts to fuel the party. Many of those who donated suddenly showed up on his TV coverage in the weeks and months afterward. 

At a time when media salaries were falling, Steve also ran a consulting business media-training chefs and restaurant owners. He said that he had a rule where he would not train people locally, only in other cities so there was no ethical violation. That may have been true, but he was taking money from people he might still cover in the future. 

It was a pattern. He also started a food touring business where he’d charge tourists and then throw his might around to get free stuff from restaurants he featured. I had a restaurant owner call me in near tears when Steve showed up with a tour group and ordered hundreds of dollars in sandwiches without pre-arrangement and walked out without paying. The owner told me the charges represented 20% of his revenue for the day. 

This resulted in an absurd social media event whereby I shared this item, but did not name Steve. Anthony Bourdain DMed me and asked about it, even knew somehow that it was Steve, and then retweeted my tweet. My social lit up like a slot machine. Though neither of us had mentioned Steve by name, he responded to the social melee and outed himself. He claimed that no such thing ever happened. The restaurant owner asserted that wasn’t true. I heard that Steve went back to the restaurants after that and tried to offer pay or get the restaurants to claim what I said wasn’t true. 

Steve had a hefty social media presence himself, including thousands of Twitter followers he lost over night when Twitter purged fake accounts, likely purchased bots. Steve’s response to this was he was experimenting. 

Steve tried a lot of things to make money, including real estate and trying to teach journalism at Medill, where some of his students this week told me stories of him often asserting wrong things and never wanting to be corrected. One student told me he told his class he never took free food, and then that student saw him at a media dinner and asked him about that and he said it didn’t count. 

Ethics have always been situational with Steve. I have heard horrific stories about his personal ethics as well, but this is not a People magazine cover story.

Sticking to food, we arrive in this moment where Steve is operating his second year of Pizza City Fest, leveraging his power as a reporter to get those he potentially covers to work the festival. I don’t think there’s any explicit quid pro quo, but just like those folks who donated to his fundraisers or comped him free meals out of fear, many vendors who wanted to say no to this venture felt they couldn’t because they could be penalized with no coverage in the future. Given how I’d been kicked off the World’s 50 Best panel in retaliation, I’d say their instincts might be right.

Steve is making a profit off those he covers. He is donating to Slice Out Hunger (it would be great to see the receipt for this against the bottom-line profit) a New York based organization. The charity aspect is admirable, but is it a deflection? 

Still, these folks participating in Pizza City Fest are grown adults who make their own decisions, and they experience the benefit or suffer the consequences. Based upon social media reports and Reddit and a lot of first-hand vendor accounts from yesterday, it sounds like many of them suffered. 

Vendors and customers have reported that some of the vendor tents didn’t have power until almost two hours after the start of the event. Some vendors reported small ovens relative to other vendors. The event ran out of some of the all-you-can-drink booze promised as part of the $95 base ticket.  

Some vendors have told me that Steve and the partner Salt Shed weren’t even providing free water to the vendors. 

Attendees which included some prominent restaurant folks I spoke with as well as civilians reported waits of an hour or more for a single slice. To achieve all fourteen slices promised, you’d have to wait the entire two days of the festival, which wasn’t an option given that tickets were for one day only. 

Some customers reported only getting one or two slices before leaving and going out for, wait for it, pizza at an actual restaurant. 

If this was Steve’s first year operating the fest, we would expect some hiccups, but this was the second year. The first year had a lot of grumbling about failures as well, but it didn’t sound as massively awful as this year’s version which has now been compared to Fyre fest of pizza. 

Reddit and the Pizza City Fest IG lit up. Many negative comments have been deleted, which is ironic that a journalist who expects others to be transparent is covering up the truth on their own socials. I’m positive the assertion here will be the account was hacked or the social team went rogue. 

How else explain that pedestrian tourist pizza like Giordano’s got featured at the fest and on Pizza Fest’s social feed? One tactic Steve has used over the years to deflect from his ethics is to double down on negative reviews to assert that he’s principled. If money wasn’t on the line Steve wouldn’t be caught dead pimping Giordano’s. 

I know it’s easy to read glee or jealousy in these paragraphs, but there is none. I want from Steve, and all food journalists and influencers, what I have always wanted, openness and transparency and an adherence to a code of ethics that protects the sources and the journalist. 

There is no joy that thousands of customers had an awful experience yesterday. It is horrible that businesses who are just getting on their feet post-pandemic are now associated with a logistical nightmare that probably offered many first-time customers negative exposure to their businesses. 

I call on my fellow food journalists to also tell this story. I hope they do. Though I have already seen a lot of folks who benefit from Dolinsky’s shine propping the Hound up on social media ignoring the public backlash and saying how great everything was because they got a book or a tour or something else pizza related to sell. 

Honestly, Brandon Johnson, champion of the people should also investigate Pizza City Fest for consumer complaints and potentially look into compelling refunds for day one attendees. There are reports Pizza City Fest is giving refunds and inviting people back for free on day 2. Vendors and restaurants should also reexamine their FOMO about collaborating with the Hound. Unless of course they just love the Fyre.