Tempers are flaring in the kitchen

Julia Moskin has an article in The New York Times about chef wars:

New York City's restaurant world has never been cuddly, but last week may have seen its first shouting match prompted by a Twitter post. During last Wednesday’s snowstorm, the owner and chef of JoeDoe restaurant in the East Village, Joe Dobias, tweeted that his deliveries from upstate purveyors had arrived, but not fish from a local supplier. He didn’t post the supplier’s name, but the next morning, Robert DeMasco of Pierless Fish— who also delivers to restaurants like Daniel and Esca— called Mr. Dobias to tell him that his business was no longer welcome. Then things became loud.
Mr. Dobias, who has been airing grievances on the Internet since opening the restaurant in 2008, shrugged off the conflict in an interview on Thursday and said that he had found a new purveyor. “What are we, teenage girls now?” he said. “How is it good business to make decisions off some lame thing you read on the Internet?”
Mr. Dobias is an extreme example of how chefs are now going online to confront customers, bloggers, critics, rivals and sometimes even their bosses.
“Maybe he should get to work instead of spending his time Twittering,” said Mr. DeMasco, adding that the delivery had arrived early but that Mr. Dobias hadn’t been there to receive it.
For many chefs in the current economic climate, cooking no longer seems enough. To make their names, they need to develop online personas as well as culinary ones. And, with instant access to the web, chefs— who have traditionally been walled up behind the dining room— are bursting out and talking back, often more profanely than can be conveyed here.
In January, the chef Jason Neroni of Blanca, north of San Diego, blasted back at anonymous critics who had posted negative comments on Yelp.com. “Yelp is for cowards,” he tweeted, who don’t have the courage “to say anything while in your restaurant”.
Ulrich Sterling of Agua Dulce in Midtown recently vented on Twitter about customers who email from the table. “I don’t care what email you have to send out,” he wrote, it can wait. Stop. Drink. Eat. Enjoy the company.”
Ryan Skeen, who was unhappy as executive chef at Allen & Delancey on the Lower East Side in November, said that he deliberately— and successfully— provoked the restaurant’s owner, Richard Friedberg, into firing him with a series of posts on Twitter, culminating in “Get me ...out of NYC I can’t do it anymore” on 11 November. “I knew that Eater would pick it up immediately,” he said last week in an interview, referring to the website that breathlessly covers the New York food world. “And then the owners would have to do something.” He was fired days later. (Mr. Friedberg said Mr. Skeen was let go because of the way he ran the restaurant; “Twitter had nothing do with it; I never even read it.”)
Mr. Skeen, who said he is now developing recipes for a new restaurant in Manhattan, has barely posted since. “My girlfriend and my publicist told me to cut it out,” he said.
But it seems likely that more and more chefs will be jockeying for attention on the Internet. The lure of free publicity is enormous.
“JoeDoe is a character I play online to keep my name in front of people,” Mr. Dobias said. “I just need them to come into my restaurant, and then my food will do the talking and I can shut up.”
Other chefs see an opportunity for control. “Before the Web and Twitter, restaurants were completely controlled by the press, and chefs and restaurants just had to sit back and take it,” said Kristine Lefebvre, wife of the Los Angeles chef Ludovic Lefebvre. “Now we have a voice.”
Amanda Cohen of the East Village vegetarian restaurant Dirt Candy was displeased by a New York Times Dining Brief review last year, and wrote a lengthy response on her restaurant’s website. When Sarah DiGregorio of The Village Voice wrote last month that the tofu at Baohaus on the Lower East Side seemed “slicked with mucus”, an owner, Eddie Huang, responded online: “She was probably right,” he said in an interview. “With tofu, if you don’t fry it just right, it does get mucus-like, so I posted on Yelp that everyone who came in would get a free tofu bao. And I made sure they were perfect.”
Not many chefs use Twitter to do more than promote their specials. Ivy Stark of Dos Caminos, Chris Cosentino of Incanto in San Francisco, and Dave Schuttenberg of Cabrito are lively exceptions. But the few who have found their voice online have often done so in a spectacular manner, and those posts are often noted, linked and re-tweeted on food blogs like Eater and New York magazine’s Grub Street.
Last week, Mr. Dobias aired on Twitter a longing to run his bicycle over the editor of Grub Street, Daniel Maurer, because of perceived slights. “Obviously Joe Doe is feeling a little stressed,” Mr. Maurer responded on the blog, adding jokingly, “we’d like to offer him a massage.” Mr. Dobias’s tweet was deleted.
Mr. Skeen noted that chefs may get infuriated by blogs, but they benefit from the notoriety they generate. “They want us to be rock stars, which doesn’t have anything to do with what we do in the kitchen,” he said. “But, on the other hand, let’s be honest, we’re getting paid twice as much as we used to.”
Many chefs say they join the online scrum to protect their restaurants. They say the pressure for immediate success has become intolerable— bloggers, Yelpers, and the like weigh in too early and too often. According to Foodbuzz, a central site for food blogs, 11,000 writers upload posts to the site. “On the one hand, the Internet opened everything up, which is great,” Mr. Huang said. “And on the other hand, it lowered everything down, which is too bad.”
Baohaus, which opened in December, is much loved by commenters on Yelp, but Mr. Huang is touchy about online slights: last week, he posted a rant on his blog, in response to a post on Chowhound that mildly queried the authenticity of his boiled-peanut recipe.
For most chefs, using social media like Twitter and Facebook is a simple, conscious marketing decision to keep their names in front of the public.
Those who do it tend to be extroverted in person and online, like the Lefebvres, (Ms. Lefebvre, a lawyer, appeared topless in Playboy magazine in 2007 when she was a contestant on the reality-TV show “The Apprentice”). The Lefebvres took to the Internet last year to respond to a blogger’s critique that the tuna tartare served at their restaurant LudoBites was served too rare— it is raw, on purpose— and that the sweetbreads were “lackluster”, though as the blogger, Diana Hossfeld, admitted in the post that she had never had sweetbreads before. Ms. Lefebvre posted a lengthy response to Ms. Hossfeld’s blog that the writer said reduced her to tears. (They have since reconciled.) “I didn’t mean to take her apart, but her words were ignorant and ill-informed, and they would have stayed up there forever,” Ms. Lefebvre said. The Lefebvres have expanded their publicity campaign to Twitter. Last week, they tweeted on the progress of 2,000 portions of fried chicken and Mr. Lefebvre’s mood, leading up to Saturday’s L.A. Street Food Fest. “It’s a way for people to understand a chef’s process, and frankly, how hard we are working to make a living in this business,” she said. “Maybe following us, seeing how hard we are working, would make someone think twice before trashing a dish.” Ms. Lefebvre has found perhaps the most practical application for a chef’s Twitter feed: immediately filling restaurant tables when there are no-shows.
The online dialogue has not just been between chef and public, but between chef and chef. Mr. Dobias took a swipe at David Chang. Mr. Skeen called out his fellow chef Jim Lahey on Twitter, criticizing his decision to complain about a Times review of his Chelsea pizzeria, Co. And Mr. Huang of Baohaus violated the final culinary taboo last week when he posted a list of Asian restaurants he thought were awful, shattering a stone-etched code: do not criticize another chef outside the community. “I never wanted to be part of a community,” he said. “Why should I back you up when your food is dishonest?”
Mr. Huang has a particular beef with restaurants that dumb down Asian food, or that lower the high standards of flavor and technique that he identifies with his Taiwanese family’s cooking. He also said that exaggerated trash talk is part of the hip-hop culture he was immersed in as a clothing designer, before turning his talents to the kitchen. He called Joe’s Shanghai a “hellhole,” and said of Anita Lo’s Rickshaw Dumplings, “The dumplings are horrible and the kitschy Chinese branding is offensive.” He seems confident in his judgments. “I don’t put you on blast unless you are a serious problem,” he said.

Rico says it's the closest thing to oblivion that the Internet offers: Mr. Dobias’s tweet was deleted.