I’ve been asked this more than a little, and back when I was mainly in advertising, I was asked the same thing about that field, too, and really, the advice isn’t all that different, though the economic conditions are. On the minus side, it’s not a great time in history to make a living at writing about food and drink, but on the plus side, at least it’s never been easier to break into the field. That’s because it’s never been easier to get people to see your work without already having been published.

The first thing is that you simply must write. Writing is not just about being smart and clever, it’s about having the energy and focus to do a lot of it, and quickly. So go get yourself a free blog at Blogspot or Tumblr, and start writing. A lot. Write about what you eat, but also start doing the kind of thing that someone would like to publish—interviews, lists, think pieces, whatever. Blogging about your personal experiences is good practice, but you need to show you can do more than talk about yourself.

Yes, it’s true you’re working without getting paid. You and everybody else. Every mathematician started by doing geometry in high school. Every baseball player played it in the street with other kids before signing with the Yankees. You need to do a bunch of writing for free first, to 1) get better at it 2) prove you can do it, day in and day out. That’s the way the world works. (Believe me, a year from now you’ll be glad some of what you wrote wasn’t paid for, or seen, by anybody!) Don’t think of it in terms of a living yet, because that’s too depressing— the only way you’ll make a living at it right now is with the rare staff job at a paper or magazine.

In fact, I’m all for having a different job entirely when you’re young; I think you’ll be a better writer for being out in the world, working and interacting and gaining a wide range of skills, than if you spend 12 hours a day typing inside the cramped confines of your own head. Go work in a cannery like Steinbeck or sail on a whaling ship like Melville or whatever it takes to have some experiences and observe other people. (Tending bar is good too, especially for food writers.)

Two more things: learn how to promote your stuff in a non-obnoxious way on social media, and use it to make new contacts online. And if you can take pictures with a decent camera, do. Being able to supply photos with an idea always makes it easier to sell. One more thing to start getting practice at now.

A few months pass, you’ve got some pretty good pieces, and you want to actually get published. There are a lot of places that will give you a shot… for free. Well, eventually you’ll want a firm policy against doing that, but for now, the exposure is worth more than the tiny fee you’d make anyway. So look for publications, see what they actually publish—don’t pitch Best River North Bars For Hooking Up to a publication that focuses on recipes for moms—and pitch them ideas that are like what they do, but not exactly what they’ve already done.

Here’s the secret of pitching (indeed, any job search). The person who hires is not looking for someone who is fabulous to be their new best friend. The person who hires has too much work and is looking for someone who can take a chunk of it out of their hair and come back with a finished piece. That’s it. Be their no-fuss solution, show them you can solve that problem for them with no drama and minimal help from them and return with a perfectly good piece, and you’ll soon get more assignments than you ever expected.

Respect the parameters of the assignment. If they say 500 words, turn in 475 to 510, not 1200.

You’ll get edited at this point, and one important thing is learning how to respond to editing. Some of it will be very good advice about sharpening your points and making your writing more compelling. That’s the best thing that can happen to you, even if it stings a little; that kind of editing is your grad school. Some of it, alas, will be somebody who knows less than you about your subject, screwing your well-thought-out piece up. Learn the difference and how to take it in stride. If someone is really hard to work for, simply fade out of their pool of pitching writers without a fuss, getting a reputation for being a pain to work with will get around.

Now you’ve got half a dozen pieces published. It’s time to professionalize your online image. This could be your blog, or it could be on a new site, but you need to find a way to look like a pro, not just a blogger, and to highlight your published work and direct people to it. The game here is, you pitch an editor who never heard of you, the first thing she’ll do is go to your site and see who you are. You want her to see your published pieces and instantly know you’re a pro who can get assignments done (see previous point about “solving that problem”).

And from there, it’s just a matter of getting better at writing and at networking over time— and pitching places that pay better. The things writers have always done, but you happen to live in the time that offers more online tools for doing it without having to have gone to the right school and made the right friends than ever before. Good luck.

Finally, the world is full of more advice about actually writing than I could ever repeat, but when it comes to food writing, an especially sensual subgenre, you can’t do better and pithier than Mr. Samuel Clemens:

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream. —Mark Twain

The 2004 Chowhound Westernathon, some long-gone Indian restaurant where the last diehards assembled after 14 hours. How ancient is this history? We were taking food pictures on actual film, that’s how ancient.

Ten years ago, something beautiful was released to the world when, through careful planning and calm consensus, LTHForum…

no, that’s not how it happened. It was crazier and more haphazard than that. Let’s go back. To Chowhound. Chowhound c. 2002 was where a bunch of us, though we weren’t an “us” yet, first started talking about food and, more importantly, meeting about it with strangers. We would meet for lunch, at Spoon or La Quebrada or Kang Nam or “Little” Three Happiness or Los Mogotes or Vito & Nick’s or whatever the enthusiasm of the moment was, and order the weird things with no concern— as we would have had with normal people— that something might gross somebody out. I learned so much and experienced so much in such an intense short time. But more than that, I came to feel that the city was mine at last. A decade after moving here, I no longer felt like a Kansan temporarily working here but that I belonged to the city, I understood the city, it wasn’t something too big and alien to ever comprehend. You want to know where to get great tacos? Here. I read a post about it. I made a movie about Maxwell Street. I’m the guy that knows Chicago.

But Chowhound was an imperfect vessel for our aspirations. The management didn’t like us planning events on the board, they didn’t like us seeming like a clique (even though we tried to be as welcoming as possible). I didn’t think they were necessarily wrong by their lights— we were taking something public and impartial and making it our clubhouse, even if we’d welcome anyone into it. But at the same time, I didn’t feel obligated to spend the rest of my days answering the same questions from tourists over and over, either, as remains Chowhound’s primary purpose. We outgrew it, plain and simple.

Me and the late Will Philpot, for whom the Will Special sandwich at Riviera was named, at TAC Quick, 2004. No idea who the mom and kid are, or who took this picture with my camera.

For a while we planned events on an email list, open to whoever wanted to be on it, but that was cumbersome, too; and there was an incident when Jim Leff (“Big Dog” of Chowhound) read some minor bitching about Chowhound on it and came unglued about its real purpose being ragging on him. It was time to declare independence from New York, and twelve of us became the core group behind it. I suggested that we launch our own discussion board and researched open source software we could use; Gary Wiviott got his hosting company, a bunch of Turkish guys, to install PhpBB (the fact that they also installed a Turkish character set would prove to be a problem years later), Seth Zurer put up the first logo which led me to design one that would be more distinctive (and easier to do on things like T-shirts), and through April and May of 2004 we slowly fiddled around with it, debating board organization, getting our feet wet with a few practice posts (here’s mine, a thread that was still active as of last August).

We were getting closer to going public when Rob Gardner mentioned it to somebody (Monica Eng, probably) in the press. Suddenly we were public before we meant to be. Hastily, we had to tell the email list what we were up to— and within about 24 hours, we suddenly had a board that had 125 or so members. In retrospect not at all a bad thing, to be off to a running start; and a very good thing to instantly not just be one homogenous group of friends but a large group with many varied interests, who from the start engaged in multiple conversations and revealed new sides of themselves that Chowhound’s more limited focus had not made room for.

We declared the date of that announcement, May 27, 2004, the official public launch date of LTHForum. Was this LTH’s golden age? You could argue it wasn’t, since unbeknownst to 97% of users, it kicked off with a big fight over who “owned” it, who would be the Big Dog, loudly argued on the sidewalk right in front of Little Three Happiness itself, as a legless beggar in a wheelchair, clueless about the argument but happy to join in the shouting, yelled something like “You tell it to The Man! The Man always be tryin’ to rob you!” (I kid you not— or at least so I was told, I was out of town that weekend.) The issue of ownership (of what was supposed to be a communal hobby), and egos more generally as we started to get media attention, would simmer for years behind the scenes and eventually split us apart three or so years later. When the issue became public I had people tell me we should have nailed ownership stuff down right at the beginning, to prevent the embarrassing situation that finally ended the old LTHForum. In which case, I said, none of it would have ever happened at all. It was never about (phantom, to this day) internet riches; there’s nothing ownership would have given any of us that was worth more than a few good years of collective creative ferment and shared enthusiasm and adventure. Certainly none of the things I’ve done since— Sky Full of Bacon, Beard award, writing for Grub Street and the Reader, whatever— would have happened without it. (You can get a sense of what we were like in this podcast I asked Michael Nagrant to do with us.)

Road trip to Milwaukee: Jake’s Deli, 2004.

It had its few years, and life moved on (remarkably, this blog has been around almost twice as long as I helped manage the many unique personalities of LTHForum in their interactions; only one of those seems like an eternity). A version of LTHForum exists, and some people still use that in that generous, open-spirited way and discuss things in detail that nobody else is talking about, and bless them for it, while others use it in, well, ways that end in screaming in Thai restaurants. Which is pretty much 180 from the spirit in which it was founded, I’ll just say that. But some friendships from those early days have lasted the decade and more; and in any case it’s a very good thing that the comrades of those days have spread out across the world and infiltrated all kinds of things from media to local organizations and farmer’s markets.

For me the legacy of that time is everywhere that LTHers have spread the gospel that Thai and Mexican food matter, that great food is all over the city, that there’s so much that’s interesting out there to taste and do and it all should be talked about in many different ways and places. It’s Cathy at Culinary Historians, and Hammond at the Sun-Times, and Melissa Graham with Purple Asparagus and Rob Gardner with The Local Beet and Seth Zurer with Baconfest and on and on. It’s the next generation of food writers— apparently 10 years is long enough for a next generation— for whom Burt’s and Lao Sze Chuan and Cemitas Puebla and the Will Special (whoever Will was) and mother-in-laws and 30s style burgers (wherever that description comes from) are just part of the fabric of the city, places we all go and things we all eat, naturally, impossible to imagine a time when people didn’t. We all reap the benefits of that intensive, creative, crazily obsessed time, and take what we gained then with us to whatever we do now. That, it turns out, was the only part of LTHForum that anybody ever truly owned.

So I look back in fondness on this tenth anniversary, and thank all who were present at the creation or close enough, we happy few, we band of brothers (of both sexes). Let’s go grab a bite sometime.

LTH kids in the doorway of Podhalanka, 2004.

In the last few years there have been several documentaries which sought to explore the world of food at its very highest level. Such films as Jiro Dreams of Sushi and El Bulli: Cooking in Progress show how working with food and seeking perfection can become a kind of spiritual quest.

After making so many shorter films about food, I wanted to find a similar subject which would allow me to explore food at the highest, most artistic and spiritual level. That’s why I am excited today to debut the trailer for my upcoming release, Edzo Dreams of Cheeseburgers:

So the Reader, where I’ve been foodblogging for the past few weeks, runs a thing in its print issue showing what the most-read blog posts— across all sections, not just Food & Drink— were during the previous week. Here’s how I did:
Week 1: The top two most-read blog posts for the whole site, #1 and #2.
Week 2: #2 and #4.
Week 3: #2 and #5.
Week 4: no ranking, not shown.
Week 5: #1.

Week 6: #1 again, third time in six weeks.
Week 7: #2 and #5.
Week 8: #4.
Week 9: no ranking, not shown.

Grub Street shut down its blogs in cities outside New York today; I learned about it this morning and, not surprisingly, had no more than about 20 minutes before Twitter blabbed it to everybody. I can’t speak for others but I wasn’t shocked that the day came that a New York-based publication shut down operations outside New York; I’ve been in enough ad agencies expanding and then shrinking to be unsurprised by that happening eventually. We’re in an age when things grow fast and die fast, you have to make that work for you, or go work at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.

I am very gratified by, but also slightly uncomfortable about, the kind words of sympathy that have flowed in because I don’t feel like someone who lost a job, mainly because I have at least two others at any given moment. At most I’m merely underemployed again. (Not to discourage your kind words, keep ’em coming!) But I’ve long been the guy who worked to keep his own brand alive— Sky Full of Bacon came about initially because I figured it was too hard to stand out as a food writer named Mike or Michael in this town, and needed something more memorable— and developing and being known for a set of portable skills that were bigger than any given assignment (and reinforced each other). I am grateful to a year and a half and change at Grub Street and my editor Alan Sytsma for expanding my access to the restaurant scene immensely, giving me countless opportunities to devise my own opportunities without having to pitch them to anybody most of the time (easily the thing I’m worst at in this game, reading the minds of editors to figure out what they’ll want and haven’t assigned yet), and letting me do so many things just because they sounded cool to me, which by the way reminds me that I haven’t posted this video which ran at Grub Street yet:

Anyway, no hard feelings, at the very least the next Key Ingredient will appear in about ten days at the Reader, and I have no idea what I will do next with what I’ve learned and can do, no actually I have about 20 ideas at any given time but I have no idea which of them will pan out. But there is no danger of my disappearing, as long as there is self-promotional breath in my body.

And yes, really, thank you to everyone who emailed or tweeted kind words of support, for being readers then and friends now. For a decade now I have tried to cover food in a way that was personal, funny, thoughtful, and not just about grabbing bucks but about what food means to us on every level, and I will continue to do that, probably in several places at once, as usual.

A couple of months back I had the privilege of introducing a friend of mine and a well-known figure on the food scene, to another pair of friends of mine… also well-known figures on the food scene. They hit it off well and found many points of compatibility, and so I’m excited to be able to share their news with the world today.

Chicago’s beloved butcher shop The Butcher & Larder is going in a new direction in the next few weeks with the addition of two new partners to the team of Rob and Allie Levitt. They are Jon and Andrew Landan, the twins who have become renowned for their tireless work promoting the Chicago social scene. The revamped shop, The Butcher & Landan, will continue its dedication to farm-sourced, naturally-raised meats, but at the same time will add features reflecting the increased popularity of whole-animal butchery on the social scene, such as an on-premise DJ, Ladies’ Nights, and bottle service in “Protein,” the shop’s new second-floor lounge.

Says Rob Levitt, “We are totally, one thousand percent devoted to giving you the most awesome meat service imaginable, including curated sausage flights and private roasted offal salons. At the same time, I’m tired of cutting meat all day and looking forward to being able to balance that with the all-night party that Alli and I dreamed of our shop being from the moment we opened it.”

As for the Landans, whose interest in nose-to-tail cooking and whole animal butchery has long been known on the club scene, they’re excited about adding meat to their portfolio of exciting nightlife activities. “We looked at how much we were spending on the gym,” said Andrew, or possibly Jon, “and said why do that when we can haul half carcasses from Q7 and Slagel back and forth in the store and get the same workout?”

The newly revamped shop expects to kick off with a VIP party in late April. To learn more about the concept, watch for the upcoming Sky Full of Bacon video “The Fabulous Butcher Boys.”

Me in full Guy Fieri mode at a fundraiser for Share Our Strength, in which local food writers were challenged to identify ingredients blindfolded.

One year ago tomorrow I took over Grub Street Chicago. Actually, I started posting two weeks before that, but at that point I was filling in after Nick Kindelsperger’s departure (mainly because I had just done the same several weeks earlier when he went on vacation). It took two more weeks for me to officially become the guy.

At the time, I must admit, I wondered if I could do it; I had done it for one-week stints and usually overdid it so much (wanting to show off) that I was exhausted by week’s end. It was also a question for me if I wanted to continue on the path that had gone from being fervent advocate for small joints without publicists at LTHForum to covering mostly mid to high end chefs with Key Ingredient; I mean, I liked reading about Next and Graham Elliot and so on, I certainly liked eating at them, but writing about them for most of your day… it was a question worthy of some thought deeper than “What, you mean I can actually get paid for this?”

In the end I decided that writing for Grub Street offered the most important thing any job can— the opportunity to make my own opportunities out of it. So sure, I cover the sceney-scene, and some of it means covering total BS places, but it also means that when a glitzy place like Nellcôte comes along, I can focus on the side of it that’s more real and chef-geeky and interesting to me, and not just whether or not it’s hot enough to draw a Landan twin. In the end, I think that given a choice between seizing an opportunity to see what you can make of it and shying away from it, you should usually do the former and see where it goes. So I did, and have had many reasons to be glad I did. Any gig where covering Charlie Trotter merely proves to be the stepping stone to getting an inside look at a barbecue competition (they have the same publicist, as unlikely as that may seem) is offering something way more diverse than just the chance to eat on the cuff at fancy hotels.

Anyway, to mark the occasion, I thought I’d link ten of my favorite things I wrote during the past year there. (I left videos out of the equation, because they’re already linked to here on the masthead.) Most of it’s daily journalism, and as easily discarded, but a few were done with more care and bear rereading now. Here goes:

• The taco slideshow (of several national slideshows where I contributed a Chicago section, this is the one I devoted the most love and care to, including shooting every single photo myself)
• Giving Michelin crap about ignoring Next
• Occupy Next? The Economics of Privileged Dining
• Interview with Andrew Zimmerman (I’ve done several interviews I’m proud of, but this one probably has more solid, no-BS commentary on being a chef and training young people than any of them). Part one; part two.
• My sociological analysis of the Marilyn Hagerty-does-Olive Garden brouhaha
• My take on the Trib’s somewhat one-sided take on Charlie Trotter
• Is This The Worst New York Times Piece on Chicago’s Scene Ever?
• Edward Gorey at the Opening of RM Champagne Salon
• My Oral History of the 24-Hour Chowathon (part 1; part 2)
• Swedish Restaurant Owner, Leader of Vanished Community, Dies

Scouting tacos for the taco slideshow. Photo credit: Liam Gebert.

Apologies for the bad language but if you follow my Twitter feed, you know what this is about. I went to Andy’s Thai Kitchen, the new restaurant from the longtime chef of TAC Quick, and ran into a group of— I don’t want to say LTHers because that could be anybody; LTH insiders will do for now. There were three of them and four menus, so I didn’t presume to sit down, but as the place is small, I chitchatted with them from the adjacent table. When I addressed one of them, a former friend and now a Tribune contributor, directly he instantly turned belligerent, and in no time was screaming “Go fuck yourself!” at me. (Needless to say, I decided there was other company for lunch that wasn’t barking mad to be had, and left.) I now regard that as the unofficial motto of LTHForum, since when I called him out on it on Twitter and Facebook, the response of present-day LTHForum management was to deactivate my account. Calling out bad behavior was an unforgivable offense, but they apparently approve of an LTHer bullying diners out of a restaurant. (No word yet on how the Tribune might feel about a Trib stringer chasing other food media out of an establishment.)

Hmm, chasing people out of the great ethnic restaurants in town— now that is a strategy shift from when I ran the place. I don’t really have anything beyond that to say about the incident itself, but it does point to something I’ve never really talked about, which is the broader implications of leaving LTHForum when I did at the end of 2007 to pursue what would become Sky Full of Bacon and all these other things I’ve done.

David Hammond has mentioned that the growth of our community on Chowhound seemed to be spurred in some oblique way by 9/11— my time there certainly coincided with that post 9/11 period of foreboding— and if that’s the case, then you have to see our central mission, cherishing and promoting Chicago’s richness of ethnic food, as in some way being a response to 9/11, a celebration of the American ideal of immigration and cross-pollination, of the city as a place where peoples met peacefully and shared food and culture. We went to Thai and Arabic and Mexican and Indian restaurants, whether we thought about it or not, to keep our world from closing down into fortress America, to celebrate the polyglot world that comes together, uniquely, in American cities like ours.

And of course a big part of our spirit of adventure, on Chowhound and explicitly in how we founded LTHForum, was sharing it freely, staging dinners, inviting strangers, and above all, not keeping secrets— if you discovered something, you might sit on it long enough to feel you’d investigated it fully, but always, the idea was to get it out there for others to try as quickly as possible. It was as inclusive as possible, and we took joy in total strangers acting on our suggestions— or vice versa.

Beyond its social gathering role, I think LTHForum had a mission, at that point, to get the food media in Chicago to pay attention to more than just the strip along the lakefront— downtown and Lincoln Park, with a minimal awareness that there was such a thing as Chinatown. And the thing is… that mission was largely complete within a couple of years. Suddenly the food publications in town routinely dropped the names that had once been our secrets— Katsu, Katy’s Dumpling House, Uncle John’s BBQ, TAC Quick. (Even if they had heard of these places before, as they sometimes surely had, they hadn’t assumed their readers had, or would care to, until we showed them that we were their readers and we cared to.)

So when I left LTHForum around the end of 2007 over some personal and monetary issues (if you’re reading this, I expect you know how that turned out, many years later), part of the reason I did so without a lot of regret was a feeling that, hey, mission accomplished. And also maybe a sense that after four years, personally it was time to graduate.

Which has sort of made LTHForum the small town where the people I went to high school with still live, and where they haven’t changed, even though I have. At least that’s how I look at this incident; the anger of the person who is still there towards me who left is 1000 times stronger and more vehement than the fairly pallid regret I feel that things worked out a certain way.

But why is the LTH inner circle so worked up in the first place? I think one answer is that the evolution of interactive food media has continued. LTHForum, when we founded it eight years ago, was the cutting edge of democratic, populist food interaction online; newspapers had been one voice speaking to many, Chowhound was many voices speaking to many, but in a constricted way that didn’t let discussion really flow and community form. LTHForum was, at the time, as open and welcoming a platform as you could imagine. There were restrictions and moderation to keep the community peaceful, but beyond that, it was as democratic a platform as you could wish.

Jump ahead half a dozen years, though, and we have a very different world— the flattening of the food world into equals which was implicit at LTHForum has become the anarchically classless free-for-all of Twitter and Facebook, the universal achievement of “freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one” through blogs. The unity of a well-behaved, fairly likeminded community which was our strength in 2005 or 2006 seems too constricting when Twitter gives you an outlet to snark at the person who the moderators just pulled your post mocking. Instead of belonging to a relatively stable community, we are all continuously reshaping our food worlds and the audiences we talk to and belong to.

So the people who rose to become LTH insiders and the center of adulation in the wake of the departure of so many of the original LTHers, find that they’ve done so right when it stopped counting for much. You can be fawned over on the board but Twitter and Facebook will be out there, arguing (if a Tweet counts as an argument) that that place blows, or worse yet, snarking on, even parodying your purpler prose— and you may in fact have no way of even responding.

The instinctive response, which seems to be theirs, is to circle the wagons closer, guard the community against outsiders that much more. This is not irrational— it increases the value of the social side of things to those for whom that has value— but it obviously isn’t going to matter to those already outside the circle. And it’s led to a clubbishness and insularity— a suckup atmosphere at times, different rules for different people— that is antithetical to what LTH was founded as. (For instance, discoveries have been kept quiet, out of the awareness of the hoi polloi.) If this is a problem, I don’t have a solution; all I am doing is observing that just as LTHForum felt so cutting edge and like it was putting an end to boring, old school newspapers, now something else, basically anarchy, is making it seem out of date, not responsive enough to a community which isn’t likely to be moderated by anything except itself.

But I still don’t think that even if I was still at LTHForum to this day, knowing that that was happening out there would be enough to make me angry enough to scream “Go fuck yourself!” in a Thai restaurant at someone who’s simply moved on. I’d hope I’d have the vision to see that that’s just hastening the demise of one model for participation, and there’s no sense in going down with that ship. It was an exciting time to be at the cutting edge in 2004; it is now, too, whatever the cutting edge proves to be next.

UPDATE 9/15: So I am told– I can’t log in at LTHForum and see that it says that I can now log in– that there is a post at LTHForum explaining that, oh no, I wasn’t banned, that was a “probationary” period. Probation, obviously, is what you do when someone has done something wrong and you want them to cool down and think about the error of their ways. But they don’t tell me what I did wrong.

Was going to Andy’s Thai Kitchen wrong? There was certainly a likelihood that LTHers would be there that day, but since only a few LTHers would go nuts like that at the mere sight of me, it’s hard to know where I’m allowed on any given day.

Or am I supposed to stop being yelled at public places by enraged LTH insiders? I’ve actually gotten quite good at that in the last 5 years, versus around 2008 when it was more common, so I feel I’m being judged unfairly here for one little misstep on my part.

In all seriousness, talking about this in terms of my alleged offense and its disciplining shows that they remain clueless about the real offense here, which is a member who believes he can turn abusive in public with no consequence. (I have since learned this was by no means the first time other members have been abused by him in some fashion.) Yet the moderators specifically refused to answer a member’s question about whether he had faced any consequences for this behavior (which obviously means no).

Besides the disrespect for and even danger to other members, this obviously disrespects the restaurant and restaurateur to turn the restaurant you’re supposedly honoring with attention into the site of a brawl. Any word of respect paid to Andy’s Thai Kitchen on the board is a lie if you respect the man’s place of business so little. It will do LTH grave harm if it becomes known that its attention, and winning a GNR, means its members consider that license to treat your restaurant as their drunken clubhouse and have fights there.

This issue is not going to go away, though individual members already are, until the management of LTHForum recognizes that it has to deal with three serious issues:

1) What is the appropriate code of behavior for LTHers in public places? If you’re going to suspend members for what they say on Twitter and Facebook, clearly their actual behavior in public at a lunch that produces a post, or at other events, is within your purview. (One of the issues here is the reported feeling that this individual’s verbal abuse was, in some sense, coming with the approval of the management.)

2) What is the standard for respectful treatment of the restaurants written about at LTHForum?

3) What is the disciplinary system for members who violate these rules, and how can you ensure that it applies equally to all members and close friends of the management don’t get a pass?

Not to idealize the early years when myself and others were in charge, but we did strive to have transparency, to explain decisions (especially bannings) carefully, and I believe there was trust in our basic fairness and intentions. LTHForum needs to act now to regain that trust.

For the third time in four years, I’ve been nominated for a James Beard Award for my video work. And for the first time, it’s for a solo piece rather than a multimedia nomination for a piece done in conjunction with my friends at the Chicago Reader. It’s for A Barbecue History of Chicago, my story of how Chicago’s unique barbecue style reflects and was shaped by the African American experience in this city during the 20th century. Watch it here:

Here’s my account of winning last year.

There’s a new Sky Full of Bacon podcast coming in the next few weeks… after its premiere at a special dinner put on by FamilyFarmed.org at Uncommon Ground on Thursday, February 23. Here’s the link for the dinner, which is 3 courses including wine at Uncommon Ground in Chicago.