[upbeat music] Welcome to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehrer. And I'm Daisy Alioto, and I'm very relieved that Francis is back. I'm back. Um, it was...
You know, it's, [laughs] it's been a long two weeks without me, I know. But- Well- I'm back... long for me, but not for you. You were chilling in Mexico. I was chilling in Mexico, work offsite.
Um, I'd never been to Mexico before. Interesting. Yeah. I still haven't really been to Mexico 'cause it w- you know. I would say, yeah. We were like doing a beachside thing. Well, maybe we can do a little
Tasteland Mexico City, um, jaunt. That would be fun. [laughs] That would be fun. I have an open invitation from one of our freelancers that lives in Mexico City. I'm like, I don't- Just stay at their house. Yeah.
I was like, "I don't... Are you, you sure?" It's like... And she was like, "Yeah, whenever." You should do it. This is how the chorizo is made, people. Yeah. Um, anyways [laughs] Sorry.
Speaking of chorizo, who are we talking to today? Sorry about that. We're talking to Matt Rodbard.
He's a writer, editor, and author of food and culture books, with more than two decades of experience working in television, magazines, book publishing, and online media. Uh, he has a podcast called Taste. This Is Taste.
Um, yes. Mm. Um, he has taste, but he doesn't have land. [laughs] So... [laughs] Well, neither do we. [laughs] And neither do we. We just got the- No, we have millennial real estate on the time, though. Yeah.
Oh, God, good callback. Um- Good callback... anyways, I'm a fa- I'm a fan of his work. I'm a fan of his podcast. We've had his, uh, often co-host, co-podcaster, Eliza Barbaranell, on the podcast before. Yeah, we did.
He's also the founding editor of- I remember her from Casey... Taste, the publication. Yeah I should say that, of which This Is Taste is a part. Anyways, um, I was at the Webbys last night.
You were at the Webbys last night, and you took a selfie with the Rizzler. I did. Well, it wasn't a selfie. Our mutual friend, Ari, uh, did take the photo. Um, I have to say- Okay...
this picture of me with the Rizzler is- You look much older than him. Well, [laughs] I... It's 'cause I'm about 21 years older than him, [laughs] give or take- Yeah... a couple of years. Uh, but, uh...
Okay, so he was there because he won an award w- uh, with this video that our mutual friend, Ari, from- Mm-hmm... Air, my old employer, my old boss, uh, they made a video with him. They won. Uh, they had a whole table.
I was not sitting with him. I was sitting somewhere nearby. I didn't win, but I would like to say for the record I did not pay to enter. No, which is the only way you can win. You have to pay to enter. Yeah.
Which is like any awards show. Like, you know, I think the Oscars you don't, but the Grammys, the Emmys, I know you do. Um, anyways, the Rizzler, it was 10:00 PM. It was his bedtime, um, I imagine.
Far be it from me to say, I suppose. But I was really impressed by his composure, uh, his willingness to take the picture. Um, yeah, I... Shout out to that guy. He's... I don't know.
He's- Five boobs for the Rizzler's maturity level. Five boobs for the Rizzler. You know, he is properly rated, perhaps underrated. Uh- What beverage was he having? I don't know. I was, uh...
[laughs] What beverage were you having? I was... I had some white wine. [laughs] Anyways, Matt's here. We'll get to that. Okay. Well, I'm assuming the Rizzler did not have white wine. The w- the Rizzler did not [laughs]
have... The Rizzler had no Chablis. I just hope you did something special for him. [upbeat music] Um, okay. I was just talking about the Webbys. I was at the Webbys last night, um, not as a winner, but as press.
Uh, but I wanted- But as a loser... as a l- as a l- Come on, Daisy. [laughs] I didn't even apply. I'm actually not a loser because I did not submit Creator Spotlight or Tasteland to be a Webby. What?
So I was just there as press, um, which was great. But I wanted to bring up some food Webbys, um, just briefly. Okay. [laughs] So there's a number of, you know, food-related categories.
We're not gonna go over all of them but, um, I was there in the capacity of writing about... They've got this new creator category, right? Like, the, the... It's... The Webbys have always kind of had creator
awards, but now they've got a specific one.
But anyways, this was the one that was most interesting to me, the Most Viral award in the creator category, categories, um, which is the Webbys one, which is the formal voting body, right?
And then there's the People's Voice- Mm-hmm... which is the one where anyone can vote. But, um, Most Viral took the formal award, not the People's Voice, for Sometimes You Need to Eat an Entire Cucumber.
Most important question, are we talking English cucumber, or are we talking, like, some kind of fancy varietal that is- Oh, it was... Did you not see these videos? [laughs] I did see these videos. You did? Yeah.
So it must be English. I think it's an English standard. Um, but- Oh, is this the TikTok guy that makes the cucumber salads and shakes them in the container? Yes, that guy. Okay, yeah. And he does it in a lake. Um, okay.
He's cool. We'll, we'll do one more though, uh, before we move on from this. The creator winner for the food and drink category specifically, the Webby, the formal Webby, went to The Babish Culinary Universe. Okay.
And the People's Voice went to Joshua Weissman. Weissman, he's the biggest food creator on YouTube, like hands down. Uh, and he just split up his, his universe.
He's doing his, uh, around the globe stuff, and then he's back to his traditional Weissman in the kitchen slapping his ass, like, you know, flexing his muscles.
And I like that pivot for him, that he's back in the kitchen, not just doing like the top 10 chicken sandwiches around the world kind of stuff. Which is no shade, I like that stuff too. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
What do you think, Francis, about the, about the... These guys, Babish and Weissman? I- Yeah, I think... I mean, what's, what's most interesting to me is, like, the definition of creator.
And I would say both of these guys are creators, but they're so matured as a type of creator, right? Like, when I...
This is, this is like one of my ongoing bits on Creator Spotlight, my, my other newsletter and podcast, is like what does it mean to be a creator? He has a lot of bits. I have a lot of bits. [laughs] Two...
But I have two definitions. One is more broad, which would fit really anybody, fit all of us, fit anybody on any category of these Webbys, right? Is, um, somebody contributing to the corpus of the internet.
Uh, but my more specific one, especially as it relates to my usual work, is like somebody, uh, creating content for distribution online to an audience beyond their immediate friends and family who is trying in some ways to monetize it.But another thing that I've kind of removed and added from my definition at various times is this idea of independence, right?
And I think, um, Babish is part of this network, like of maybe talent... They're both part of talent management networks, but I think they're both still relatively independent.
But it's like, it's like when the Grammys have Best New Artist and they've been around for 10 years, right? Like- Yeah. It's like H.E.R. gets that award every year. Yeah. [laughs] Like, I feel H.E.R.
has been the best new artist for, like, the past 10 years. Like, the, it's new every year. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, what about...
So I, I, I, listened to your recent episode with Robert Sietsema, one of my favorite food critics- Yeah...
who, as we all know, um, we've talked about this actually multiple times on the podcast, was laid off from Eater around six months or so ago, and now he has a newsletter on Substack. Uh, it's- And now I don't read Eater.
I couldn't tell you the last time I went to the site. I stopped reading after that. I, I still, I actually still check it, like, once a week, but I used to check it every morning.
Um, I, I, it's, I'm, I'm much less informed on New York food now. You know, actually food is one of the categories that I just don't know if we're gonna be doing a lot of linking from Clone. Um,
you know, it's like how much culture of the tech and culture do we wanna be doing? But I, maybe I should add Eater to the blog roll. Y- you should add Taste to your, uh, Clone.
And by the way, as a sidebar, congratulations. Super fly design. Thank you. I think I was, uh, visitor 11,750. Mm. Uh, what an endorphin rush to have that at the top of your page every day, must say. Thank you.
It look... It's, it's terrific. I love that. I love what you're doing there. Thank you so much. Yeah. It's really cool. The response has been really positive. Very cool. Sorry, I had to say that. No, I think...
Well, okay. We were gonna talk about Clone a little bit anyway. We were gonna talk about Clone at some point.
Um, I do, I do wanna, you know, as, as, uh, by using the, the Robert Sietsema transition though, I do still wanna talk about that.
So one thing that I found really interesting is right around the time he was laid off and all these, a, a few other of his colleagues were, were laid off from Eater, um, Mike Chow of Foodbaby, New York, he had a listicle, speaking of, you know, 10 best chicken sandwiches, a listicle of like, I think it was like the 24 best slices of cake in New York City that was published in Eater, and it was his first byline in Eater, though he'd been used as a source for longer features twice.
Um, and I found that to be really interesting and not really a coincidence, right? That, like, right when a bunch of these much more longer tenured writers were laid off, Mike Chow- Yeah...
the Instagram guy- Are you, are you, are you sensing a, a sea change shift? I have, I have a thought on that strategy. Mm. Uh, but I, I get a sense, Francis, from your, the, the windup that this is not your, the Eater...
This is not like the Lockhart Steele Eater that you, that you loved before. Well, we sort of talked about it in the context of, like, Lindy Man and Cold Healing and GQ. Okay.
Nick Cocchi then bringing them in- Which is like-... all around the same time... instead of the... I mean, Gawker is a prime example, and it, that legacy carried through Deadspin and now Defector.
You take these writers, you give them a platform, and they build their platform through their affiliation with the publication.
Now, the strategy is take people that already have a platform and, you know, bring them onto the publication in hopes that they will bring their audience with them.
Um, which is, I think it's a short-term versus a longer, long-term game. Agree fully. I think it's absolutely an audience development strategy from, from Eater, and I, I...
I'll just say, my take on Eater, I think they're doing terrific journalism, like Uchita Macklynthal, like Rebecca Marx at Eater National. I think it's worth reading. I think what Jaya Saxena is, is writing is great.
I'm not trying to stand for Eater. I... These are just longtime colleagues. Mm-hmm. So I just have to say I, I read it- No, I love Jaya... and link to it.
Uh, and I think it's really, really important work, and we can talk about the death of the, of the website or the webpage, of the single page, the article text on the scr- on the screen 'cause I have a lot of thoughts.
But I think it's an audience development play to bring in creators to do text-on-page articles and hoping that there's a halo effect for traffic, uh, from Foodbaby or whoever it may be writing these listicles.
They gotta do what they gotta do to, to- Mm... develop audience, right? Um, I don't, I didn't read that piece. I'm not sure if it was good or bad. Um, tend to probably not read a Foodbaby byline, uh, in Eater.
At least, so I'm not drawn to it by the byline. But I, I think that they're just trying to get any, th- by any means possible, get people to read eater.com and click on the page. I... No, I totally agree.
And I mean- Yeah... look, I will, I'll en- I'll engage with a Foodbaby Instagram post. [laughs] It's no shade to him, and it's no shade- No doubt... to, like, you know, what you have to do to, to survive.
Um, but it is more, to me, like, a bummer in that I specifically went to Eater to read Robert's work, right? Um, so now I, I go there, but much less.
But one thing Robert said on that episode you did with him is that, um, the food critic is being supplanted by social media, which not necessarily a new thing, but you guys talked about how that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Yeah. I mean, Robert is somebody who, uh, I think has a, a really great take on everything. I don't think he's bitter.
I think that he knew that this day would come for him, and he doesn't wanna be the, the grumpy old guy talking about, you know, shading the creators who are out there doing what they will, which could be giving really poor, lukewarm takes about restaurants.
Some of it's paid and completely PR-driven, and some of it is very thoughtful, and it is maybe suppli- supplanting or at least complementing the, the food critic.
And I think with Robert, it's like, go to his Substack and pay 30 bucks a year and b- and get Robert, uh, get Robert's, uh, take on the city. He's publishing multiple, uh, Substacks a week.
It's good stuff, and he's doing the work, which with, when it comes to food writing, you really can't growth hack this thing.
Like, if it's, if it's literally, like, local journalism covering a city or covering a state, you can't growth hack it. You have to literally go in, put your butt in the seat, order the food, try it out.
Like, there, that's why it's very, very... There's a low margin with food media because of the, the time it takes to do the work and the cost it takes to do the work. So I think he has a really good... I love that.
Thank you for listening to the episode.
I think it was really important that he got it out there that he's just, you know, still being Robert and riding his bicycle around, going to all the great restaurants that we have never heard of.
The Bill Cunningham of food media. Oh, my gosh.He is tireless. And the Robert Sitsema documentary will happen. I, I'm sure there's a young, um, uh, entrepreneurial filmmaker who, who will be linking with him.
And, you know, I thought the Jonathan Gold documentary was very, like, up and down. It was fine. It was a pretty good documentary.
But I think Robert's is, is a totally different ballgame, and I hope somebody actually does that 'cause I think it would be a terrific piece. Well, you said he's writing a memoir, right?
He's writing a memoir, like, slowly, and I think, uh, I, I've been able to acquire a bunch of early editions, or I guess editions [chuckles] of Down the Hatch, his- [chuckles]...
original, you know, copy and paste zine that he did at his, his, his job after hours. He stole the copy, uh, pr- uh, ink from the, from his job.
And he's, he's such an original voice out there, and, and we gotta treasure Robert for his work. Are they making a Keith McNally movie? Ooh. Well, you guys read- Somebody has to have thought of it by now I, I bought...
I ordered the book the other day. I have not read it yet. I haven't read it yet either. Well, I- And it wasn't Balthazar the other day... I flex- I, I got the Mc- McGally. Ooh [laughs] I got the McGally. I...
What a flex, and I read it. [laughs] And I also read The Great and Carter back to back. Mm. I was doing... I, I, I didn't read, uh, the- Perfect double feature... I didn't read the Lorne.
The Lorne is just too much, and, you know- Mm... hagiography perhaps. But I think the... They're both very different. I thought McNally's was... It's... He's so l- like, he's so literary. Mm-hmm.
The man loves books, and it's tremendous to see his, him flexing, especially, um, in the early sections about the books he read as a kid, and, you know, his, his, uh, his relationships with, um, really the, the highest, uh, level of, of London, um, the, the, the, the, the, the world of, of plays and, and l- like academia.
Mm. He was in that, those circles at a young age. Really cool, cool book. Um, one more thing on the, the food creator aspect I wanna talk about- Yeah... is I've been noticing...
This might just be my own personal feed and, you know, my own algorithmic curation over the past few years, but I feel like I've been starting to notice more critical people making these Instagram Reels, right?
Like, as perhaps, you know, your, your eaters lay off their last staff food critic, um, specifically people like Rob Martinez in New York City, I think he's really good. James Dimitri in London.
This guy Johnny Novo in New York City, who just does rotisserie chicken reviews. These are all people who I think aren't doing purely positive, promotional, basically freelance marketing for restaurants.
Not that it's not that too, but there's, like... They're going to say, "The chicken was dry. This tea sucked." You know, this kind of thing. Uh, and I feel like I wasn't seeing that as much a couple years ago.
Maybe this is some kind of recency bias. But I do think that there is more and more thriving, actually critical engagement with, with some of these people. France, I love the mention of Rob Martinez.
He's been on our show, and I, I really respect his work, and I, I think you're absolutely right.
And I, I think that's a matter of, of more, uh, folks moving on to Reels and TikTok, uh, for their, their food, their food knowledge. And, and really the audience is becoming more discerning.
And so the, the stretchy cheese pulls from the sisters i- is for a certain audience, but I think if you wanna look at food critically, there's a, there's people who are just migrating over, uh, to this social video platform that we, we all love.
And you're right. The, the, they're, they're talking shit sometimes, and it's important to, to see it. I think it's, like, very powerful to have somebody on mic and on camera say, "I don't like this food because..."
It definitely, um, has more power than a, uh, than a written article and a takedown. Mm. And I think you're seeing it also in traditional food media.
So you're seeing, uh, M- McKenzie, uh, out in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle, uh, critic is doing video, uh, reviews es- essentially or, or getting on, on camera.
I think you're gonna see The New York Times critics, uh, and possibly the new critic do more video reviewing. So I think there's definitely... You're seeing it in more traditional spaces as well.
I think the LA Times has done it as well. Um, McKenzie Chung Fagan, sorry, I couldn't remember her full name. Mm. But she's such a terrific critic out in San Francisco.
I just think it's like w- they're finding the audience where they are, and I think the people who have been really married to reading text on the page are just not doing it anymore. Mm.
I, I, I feel this is a little bit of a theme I want to talk about [chuckles] as somebody who edits and really puts a lot of work.
Eliza Barbenal, uh, my co- my co-editor here at Taste, we commit a lot of time like you folks do at Dirt to working in rounds. We're in the Word docs. We're doing the line edits, but it's frustrating as fuck, man.
It's frustrating right now. I, I'm just being honest, being candid. You mean, like, because the amount of attention share going towards short form video versus text? Yeah, and podcasts too. Mm. And just with AI, um,
you know, becoming the go-to, and just, you just have to recognize this, this rapid sea change is affecting... And, and it is traffic, and I, I say it to anyone in our, in our world here.
We, uh, we don't have page view KPIs on our business plan and on our, our editorial plan. We publish the work we think is important, and we hope the audience will be- will find it.
We did this big story about Trader Joe's last year, uh, that by Adam Reiner, his terrific piece, and that got a million page views literally. So- Wow...
we have breakouts once in a while, but day, you know, week to week with our slate of stories, we're struggling to get people to read it. And this is, like, my mom. Like, my mom's not reading- Yeah... Taste right now.
[chuckles] And I'm like, "My mo- " It's like my mom, man. It's not because my mom doesn't wanna read Taste. It's that she's on social video. She's listening to these podcasts. My mom reads Start.
She was the first person- Hell yeah... to text me about my Polo Bar poem in black. [chuckles] Your mom is awesome. I love that your mom is reading Dirt, as she should.
And my mom, less awesome, at least in terms of reading Taste. At least. Maybe she... Your, my mom is reading Dirt, frankly. That might be, that might be her- Yeah, we got her.
Well, I still think about the illustration on, um-TJ's story about horses Oh, that's a classic. [laughs] It was so good. Yeah. I think it was even, like, was it a GIF? It was.
We did some animation with that, uh, and that was- I honestly- Yeah... y- I mean, the more s- there's slop there is, we always sort of like... I mean, we've never, like,
done s- all stock photos, but a lot of our artwork, unless it's a special package, is a bit of an afterthought. It's like, "Oh, God, somebody spin up something in Canva." [laughs] Yeah.
And honestly, like, the worse everything online starts to look, the more I've wanted to double down and invest in custom illustration. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think, maybe this is, this is a bit of a controversial take.
You guys don't have to co-sign. [laughs] But as a woman, I will say I was out, I was at, um, Meriwether Coffee the other day meeting somebody on Hudson Street.
There was a line, obviously, and there were two women in a row who had, like, clearly had work done. They had basically the same nose, the same face, TikTok face.
[laughs] And then there was a woman standing behind them who had more of a, like, distinctive profile. And I, I realized that, like, my eyes could not rest- Mm... on the first two women.
It's like my eyes just, like, slid past them. I couldn't, like, really even, like, look at them. Yeah. Like, not because they weren't attractive to look at.
They were beautiful women, but, like, there was nothing to hang my gaze on. But then the third woman, I was sort of, like, kinda staring at her 'cause I was like, "She looks distinct."
And I feel the same way about the internet right now. Like, obviously do whatever you want with your face. Your body, your choice. But I think, like, there always is a pendulum swing back to
w- the things that actually are distinctive and attract our gaze. And, like, the more sameness there is, the more the things that just don't look like everything else stand out. Mm.
Um, and the problem is, like, you have to have enough people drawn to that and willing to pay for it to support it,
but I do think it's possible to move people over and take them from being consumers of slop to consumers of Tasteful bespoke content.
Um, it's just figuring out what is the pathway that you build from one to the other, and, you know, how do you take somebody who, who d- grew up not paying for content and turn them into somebody who proudly- Yeah...
pays for content? Or n- if not content, something else in the world of your publication, maybe it's not content. Like whether advertising revenue too, yeah? Yeah, yeah.
I cosign, uh, on that big time, and I think having big art is important to us at Taste, and Ellie Skirza, I think, did that alone.
We, we, we definitely have a visual identity that people come back for, and deviating from the mean and having, um, not Canva or AI-generated art or even, like, the standard food photography, I think we at Taste have bucked doing too much art, uh, f- like, food photography driven lead imagery on our, on our, on our homepage and on the, on the social, uh, crops that we do for all the, the platforms.
I think we just need to have... I mean, Illo doesn't always play well with SEO, but SEO is dead, so good riddance.
And it just is important to have a, a strong visual identity that I think Greig Carter writes about in his memoir. Back to that- Mm-hmm...
is like, you know, big art and having a real point of view with art direction as he does at Airmail now, is so key to being that place that, you know, maybe you don't have a million UVs, but if we have a really high quality 200K UVs and a really big newsletter following, you gotta invest in that stuff.
And y- we, we pay our illustrators, and I, I just firmly believe that a visual identity is how you, you get people in.
This is how I think about, like, laying out the newsletter, laying out Career Spotlight every week is, like, I do the test of, like, scroll up and down really quick, and if it all kind of looked the same, then [laughs] then we fucked up and we need to, like, make some custom- Mm...
graphic or find the right screenshot or, like, some Instagram posts from, you know, s- the person we're interviewing, whatever.
But I, I think it's easy for people to forget that a newsletter is a visual medium, I think even before it's a written medium, you know? Um, that's...
Which is a line I got from, uh, Ernie Smith, who writes the newsletter, Tedium, that he's been doing for, like, a decade.
But he got his start as, like, a, a newspaper layout guy, like, 20 years ago, and ever since he told me that, it's like y- you know, it's, it's, it's the details of, of the headings even, whatever. But, like, I...
You know, you, you have to think about it in terms of visual texture. The information doesn't matter if it's not attractive enough for people to stick around and consume it. Yeah.
That's why I think so many magazine editors m- keep their jobs, because... And I mean, like, the, the ones from the '90s and the early 2000s. Mm-hmm.
I think that when you, uh, think visually and you think of the story as a full package, that's why Janice Min has a great job. That's why Greig Carter is still working. Ti- uh, Tina Brown is still doing her...
I mean, she's doing Substack, but I think she was on a podcast recently talking about she just needs Substack to come to her and, and meet her somewhere with the visual identity of Substack.
I think it really frustrates her as I'm paraphrasing. Good luck, Tina. Yeah. That was on the, the Mixed Signals seminar podcast. Oh, shit. Yeah. Great. We got Mixed Signals hive here. Yeah. I'm... I, I...
It's a terrific podcast. They, they've- Yeah, it's great... they've really, like, jumped ahead of a lot of pl- a lot of media podcasts, um, with a great, with a great mix of stories. Um, but I think that that's like...
There's... Like, consumers are having changed, like, full stop. They want every element to be premium and cool. Mm-hmm. And- Yeah... and, and I, I think Dirt... I, I mean, I, I really...
When you say you think do Canva, I... Like, Dirt has a visual identity to me.
I mean, it's fully internet, uh, online first, obviously, but you guys are, are clever, and you have a lot of humor with, with your lead illos and with, you know, even for the screenshot.
And, like, you have to do it that way. You just can't just throw up. I- it's why I literally throw up. I am gonna throw up when I think about- [laughs]... some of [laughs] the way this art is literally thrown up.
Like, uh, like the, like the patterned background with the bad Zillow art. Like, that's fucking-So bad. I'm, I'm-- I can't believe that still works on the internet. Yeah.
I, I do think we have a distinct visual identity, and it-- and I like to think it's not just that, like, Daisy touched it at some point.
Um, and I do, like, when I was working together with Walden, we would often align on the same idea of, like, when he wrote about why the price of eggs is such a sight for political paranoia and projection.
We were both like, "This needs an illustration." I think we texted each other at the same time, like- [chuckles]... broken egg. Um [laughs] you know? Yeah. So, uh, and that's what we ended up doing.
But I -- like, Beehive recently, um, just changed the way that you, you do your design build. Like, all of the capabilities are the same, but they changed it a little bit.
And in the course of migrating our newsletter, some of our presets got changed. And the one that I noticed was actually the angle of the corner on our quotes, on our block quotes. Mm-hmm.
And it was, like, a breakthrough moment for me because I've never been so... I am definitely aesthetically inclined. I don't always focus on details like kerning or- Mm-hmm... um, you know, the angle of the corner.
But I was like, "I've looked at this every day for the last- [laughs]... two years," basically. I was like, "Something is wrong."
[laughs] And I, like, screenshot both of the corners, and I'm comparing them, and I'm showing Kat. I'm like, "Do you see this?" [laughs] So we sent it to them, and they, um, they regressed us to the old, uh- Oh...
system for a little bit so we could write down all of our presets, and then they migrated us. And now it's working beautifully, and I think- Very cool...
it's a great example of, like, the relationship that you want with, um, your platform provider. But it's so funny that, that, like, it-it's, it's the angle of the corners, you know? Mm-hmm.
And, um, you know, it plays into everything. We just published a piece in Prune, um, by Sam Wells, and Sam wrote to me and said, "I'm not a writer. I haven't published before.
I'm a woodworker, but I have this idea on, uh, to write about the legacy of Thomas Moser and his relationship to Shaker design and scale." And w- you know, what is Shaker design? All corners, all joinery.
And so I think, like, all of these things that don't seem related and seem like they must fall in the binary between offline and online aesthetics, it's all part of the same conversation that we're having with our readers about, like, the world that we want to build for them and the world that we all, like, ultimately want to inhabit.
So we were talking a little bit before this about the relationship between, uh, a written product and an audio product. Mm-hmm.
Um, Matt, what is the relationship between Taste as a publication and This Is Taste as a podcast, and how has that changed over the last, you know, almost a decade?
Really great question and, and we are about a decade old, and we didn't have a podcast when we launched in 2017. Uh, we, we soon launched one in '18, and it was a, a, a little bit of a more... It was a more minimal show.
We did once a week. We were really focused on doing four to five features a, a week at that point. Uh, we certainly have flipped it, uh, in the past two years.
Uh, and that's simply because we are seeing tremendous interest engagement, uh, from our podcast.
And for us, you know, here at Penguin Random House, which is the parent company of Taste, uh, Crown Publishing Group, we really want, uh, engagement with what we're writing.
You know, we, we aren't about just throwing shit up, and, and I, I really wanted to come to where the audience was at.
And looking at, you know, just the Spotify numbers, and Apple is in a black box, as you know, so we don't know our Apple audience at all.
But looking at Spotify, which is about, you know, 15% of our audience, you know, our completion rate is, is really great. Like, we, we have 50%, 60% go into the last quarter of the pod.
And that all is to say, like, we just want people to engage with what we're doing here at Taste, which is covering the, the, the culture of food, frankly. And
we just felt like we needed to scale back our features, so now we're doing one big feature a week plus two newsletters, and every other week, we're publishing a terrific, uh, cooking column from Zola Gregory.
And w- with the, with the added time and resources away from the features, we're in the pod world, and- Mm... we're publishing three to four podcasts a week, which is, uh- Which is insane.
It's a high metabolism pod, but it is insane, and Clayton, our terrific lead producer, is, is to credit to, like, keep up with the pace of the editing, and I, I really commend Clayton for just keeping up with it.
And for us, it's i- I think the always-on pod is, is where we need to be right now. We have tremendous download dra- traffic, and we have a lot of partnerships built around our, our audience.
But really for us, it's mostly we wanna commit full episodes to people who may be getting the C segment or D segment or not even booked on other shows in our cohort. We just wanna give them the space.
So we give our audience the choice. Do you wanna do four hours with, with This Is Taste a week, or do you wanna dip in and do one?
Um, we find a lot of l- uh, listeners are somewhere in between and doing a couple episodes a week. But it was just our...
It's kind of our editorial strategy to, like, think about each episode as, uh, a real portrait of the guest. Uh, and then we have other segments. You know, Liza and I like to catch up for our Three Things segment.
We'll have a lot of journalists on, and we just launched- Food writers talking about food writing. Yeah, we got this YouTube show that has been really fun, and we're trying to really, uh...
We, we don't do a lot of, like, full episodes on YouTube. We, we do mostly social clips.
But we wanted our, our only, like, full episode show to be f- talking about the industry, talking about work, like what you do on, on your show, on your podcast.
You talk about a lot of the, the, the work in the, in the, in the, in the industry, and we wanted to do that, but featuring, um, writers we love. So-We talk about money. I, you know, I- Yeah... I think people like that.
I met somebody recently, um, in the publishing industry, and they were like, "Can I ask you a rude question?" [laughs] And I was like, "Yeah." And they just wanted to talk about money in a real way.
Like, basically, how do you make this work? And that was a lot of our conversation with Sarah Leonard recently of Lux Magazine. Yeah. Um, you know, we're, we're doing an award together, uh, for the best hybrid, um,
criticism personal essay about work, and I'm, I'm actually really hoping we'll get some strong submissions about the food industry, um, because I think that those critiques are really fun to read. Um,
and yeah, I think there is an appetite for real conversations about how the sausage gets made. This is the second time using a version of that phrase- Into it... on this very day. Um, but what are like... Okay, obviously
money, distribution, dwindling number of places to do text criticism, all of these things are important topics of conversation ongoing.
But what are some other themes that you're tracking, both across various episodes of the podcast or sort of like threads that are currently running between the features- Yeah...
you know, that, that you're selecting, and, um, and the podcast- Great question... and the topics.
Well, w- money definitely is at the center of our podcast, and we talk about money a lot, and, uh, this can, this plays out in many different forms. We have a lot of, uh, chefs and operators, uh, of, of various renown.
You know, the biggest, uh, you know, Jamie Oliver was just talking about money recently, and we have, you know, chefs who just operate one restaurant in New York.
And we're always talking about money because right now the restaurant industry is at, at a great inflection point, to use a cliche, but it really is, where, um, the dining, uh, the diners, really the, the, the ethic of the diner and the, the real, uh, behavior of the diner is changing, where these prices that we see on restaurant menus, not just in New York or LA, but in all cities, are eye-popping, eye-watering.
Irrational hospitality, as, uh- [laughs]... we would say. Irrational hospitality. Like Colin Nagy on the pod. I love Colin. I love Witty. That is a, that is a great, great, great, great subject.
Well, you know, I feel like every culture, every podcast is, is about money, except for podcasts that are supposed to be about money, and they just- [laughs]... end up being about restaurants. [laughs] You know? Like...
[laughs] Yeah. I mean, the, I mean, we, we talk about restaurant culture because it's on all, all the great podcasts. I mean, how many times does How Long Gone talk about restaurants? Yeah. Hell yeah.
It's literally every 40 sec- Cry. The most famous restaurant podcast there is.
It really is, and I've had both Jason and Chris on the show, and Jason's written for Taste, and they have really sharp minds about the industry and trend.
But we talk about money because the diners are seeing these eye-watering prices and they're saying, "Are we getting ripped off? Is this just...
" But then we talk to, like, Camilla Marcus, who ran Westbourne in New York for years, this really progressive thought leader in the industry. Uh, she worked at ROAR, which was a, a, a, an alliance for industry workers.
And you know, we talked about payroll tax. Mm.
And how payroll tax, that 30% tax that's added to every dollar that you, you, you spend on labor, um, is a flat tax that is being taxed for anybody in New York, whether, whether, whether you run a watch store with two employees or a restaurant with 77 employees.
And the fact that, um, the watch store has to pay the same tax rate for their employees versus the restaurants. And you know, Camilla had a very simple, simple solution.
It's instead of 30%, let's, let's make it 10%, and the money that's saved from the, the 20% for payroll tax, allow the restaurant to invest that back into their, into their employees, into the payroll.
Um, so we talk, uh, a- a- and for benefits and for paid time off and all the things we talk about. So we talk about that a lot on the show.
We also talk a little bit about the, the way that restaurants are, are, are cool and not cool, and like the way neighborhoods are cool and not cool, and to use broad strokes.
But I love that we can talk about the changing tastes of diners in like cities like New York and LA, and how that will trickle down effectively to the rest of the country, uh, eventually.
So we, we talk about how QSR restaurants may be dead right now, but, uh, you know, restaurants that are special occasion restaurants, people are thr- are g- flocking there for a lot of reasons, cap- you know, cultural capital or just people are spending less and spending better.
Mm-hmm. So these are, these are themes we're always... Restaurants are always at the, the center of what we're talking about it seems. This is... I don't know if this is just a personal tr- [laughs] trend in my life.
Yeah. But, uh, in the same way that I've stopped...
When I say I've stopped, you know, reading Eater, that's also more of a proxy for like I've stopped trying to stay up to date on like, oh, what are all the new restaurants opening in New York, right?
I'm, and I'm definitely somebody among my friends where it's like, "Oh, Francis, I'm going out in this neighborhood tonight. Like, where should I go?" And I'm like, you know, "Here's five ideas."
[laughs] But I'm kind of having less of those ideas. I'm, I'm becoming more interested in like I just wanna go... I live in Ridgewood.
I just wanna go to like the few local restaurants that I know I can get into, and I don't have to make a reservation, and I don't have to think two weeks in advance I wanna go out to dinner here.
Which for the past couple years I, I was more like, "Okay, I'm gonna, you know, I wanna eat at Bonnie's, so three weeks- Yeah...
before the day I'm gonna go, I'm gonna set an alarm at 10:00 AM and I'm gonna get that reservation." Yeah. But I, I just kind of... I mean, I love going out to eat, and I will go every weekend pretty much, uh, or more.
But, um, yeah, I'm kind of burnt out on, on like how much there is. Yeah. But that might just be a personal- Yeah, I'm not trying to have a cool restaurant experience right now. [laughs] You mean cool- I'm not...
like you're not trying to go to like the, the new, the new dame or the, you know, the, et cetera kind of- Provêta... the, yeah, exactly. A great restaurant I've heard.
I'm not, I'm not craving to go there myself.Not even on my radar. You know, the, I think the last restaurant that I saw recommended by somebody and went because I saw it be recommended was, um, [lips smack]
uh, Jason Diamond recommended Daphne's. Yeah. And I went and had a nice time. Um, but Francis and I have been talking about, um,
this sort of like reversion to the classics, and is it because I'm, I'm getting older, I'm growing up, I'm in search... Like, novelty doesn't mean as much to me. I'd rather have consistency.
I don't have real tolerance for playing the reservation game or, God forbid, waiting online to get in somewhere.
Um, or is it, does it sort of represent something about the zeitgeist and fatigue with microtrends that's now carrying over to culinary microtrends as well? Absolutely.
Uh, I think it's, the exhaustion is real when it comes to following the, the new and noteworthy restaurants. Mm-hmm. And I think there's also d- it's unproven.
I think savvy diners, people who've lived in New York for some time know that the first six months of a restaurant can be extremely shaky, and what you don't want is to go to a restaurant on week three and, and really be disappointed from the, from the get-go.
If it's like you're seated 20 minutes late, or they ignore you at the, at the table. And I think, like, there's a little bit of that creeping in when we're looking at all these new restaurants.
We're thinking about every single bad restaurant experience we had at brand-new restaurants, and we're like- Mm... just feeling, feeling that anxiety. And I think what we should be doing is both.
I think we do need to support new restaurants. Obviously, it's important to go out and, and check out the new places, and, and, and be a, a great guest.
But we have had this wonderful ongoing dialogue with Michael McCarty from Michael's. You know, he's been running these restaurants in New York and LA since 1978.
And w- I asked him straight up, like, how do you, how do you, uh, beco- how do you support a, a restaurant that's had some, some heritage, that's there for... And he's like, "Just go a lot."
[laughs] A- and I think it's... I think about that all the time. I think about, like, places. I'm just gonna name some names. Like, think about, like, French Louis in Brooklyn. I think about Thai Diner. Mm.
I think about places in Koreatown, like Hanbat, Choryang.
And like, these are places that aren't being written about really that much, and these are places I just love going to because they're absolutely great restaurants that have five, seven, 10 years on them.
They're hurting, some of these. Maybe not those places that I mentioned, but places that are at, like, places that are at year one and year two that aren't gonna get into Grub Street as much.
Um, they really need your support. So if you think back, I, I still use Swarm,
which I fucking love, so I look back at my swarm, and I always look back a couple years, and I'm like, "Where did I go over the past couple years?"
And then when I'm thinking about where I wanna meet friends or just to have a, have a drink or something with a- Mm...
with a catch-up, I'm like, I wanna go to the places that I know that I'm gonna get a great experience, and maybe they need my support more than ever. What do you think about this trend of not having physical space?
I don't mean like a ghost kitchen. Uh, but a restaurant that doesn't have physical space but only exists as a pop-up, and I'm thinking of Shy's Burgers, for example. Um- Or, uh, Thai- Make Thai? Like- Yeah. Right? Yeah.
I mean, I mean, Haz was, was a great example- [sighs]... of that pivot, right? Yeah. Going from pop-up only to physical space. So what do I think?
I think that having, knowing labor costs, knowing the cost of real estate in New York, I'm, I'm such a fan of, of a restaurant, of chefs who wanna put themselves out there in a pop-up setting.
Eliza- Can I say something potentially controversial? Yeah, please. Uh, uh- The pop-up is sort of the newsletter of restaurants. I like it. [laughs] I like it.
So do you mean you subscribe for, like, a couple weeks, then you unsubscribe? Is that the- No... cognate? I just mean it's like, it's direct, but it's also, um,
it, it's a little bit more free-floating than the restaurant, which is a little bit like a, a res- a website, a.com website. It's exciting. I think it's... The i- the newsletters excite me.
When I get Dirt, I'm just excited. Mm-hmm. And I think when I see a pop-up... You know, Eliza, uh, talks a lot about the pop-ups around New York. She's a big fan of them. She supports them.
I think she has a lot of empathy and just supports. And Redora in Brooklyn does a lot of pop-ups that- Mm-hmm... show, um, incredible talent.
My, my biggest issue with pop-ups is that literally it's so inconsistent if it's good or bad. Mm-hmm. And you have to kind of go in with the... It's like a contract that this might not be the most polished cuisine.
It certainly won't be, on a service point, be that exceptional because how could you run a restaurant and make it exceptional on the service side after being open for 30 minutes?
[laughs] But on the flip side, it shows incredibly, uh, I would say exciting, uh, cuisines that maybe don't have brick-and-mortars, and you're supporting, you're literally putting money into the hands of somebody for the work they're doing.
It's, like, such a direct payment when you're doing a pop-up, and it's, like, maybe helping them pay rent for that week. Mm.
It might be helping them invest in a brick-and-mortar where they need to pay that fi- $30,000 key money that they haven't been able to figure out.
So I think it's, like, really when you're supporting pop-ups, it's not really about the food, and even, and the m- and the cost of a pop-up too, it could be a little higher than you're used to paying if it's, like, a fixed menu.
I would say, like, understand that you're in contract with that, with that pop-up chef, that you're helping support them like a, like a Patreon kind of model. Mm. That makes complete sense.
It's like the, yeah, yeah, you want the, you want the food or maybe you wanna read the, the newsletter, you wanna listen to the episode of the podcast, but it's more of, like, the community. It's this, like, social...
It's about the social fabric at that point- Yeah... in a way that's more appealing than when you're eating at, like, you know, X new big money restaurant backed by X millions of dollars to be, you know, in a hotspot.
Have you guys been to Bridges yet, either of you? 'Cause I have not. No, but that's exactly what I was thinking about [laughs] as I was saying that. [laughs] I was like, what are you talking about? I have not been, no.
Uh, I did read... There was, um, I read-Okay, speaking of a newsletter that I, I don't currently pay for, Emily Sundberg's Feed Me, there was before the fold, I did read, [chuckles] I do read it- [chuckles]...
but it's, I get stopped at the- Yeah... at the paywall. Um, but she was quoting Eddie Huang in his, uh, h- his new venture with Places, which is some app.
Anyways, but he had this good line about, like, there's, there's a difference between a hot neighborhood and a hot block, and everybody on the hot block is, like, an orange wine-seeking Resy vampire there to, to drink orange wine bef- before the, before dawn.
But he was talking about bridges. He's, uh, one of our, our finest- Mm... uh, writers in the food space and food writing, and I love that Eddie has a really robust Substack now, and his, his podcast is a lot of fun.
So true. I think, uh, you get these blocks that become, um, absolutely inundated with, with the hype and the lines, uh, and it doesn't define, um, a res- a, a neighborhood.
Um, and certainly it doesn't define, uh, that era, that time. It just is what's happening in the w- in the culture. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I think I lived in, like, Clinton Hill/Fort Greene.
I lived in Clinton Hill/Fort Greene, well, around 2017, and a little bit of that was happening, like, on Fulton Street.
Um, but it comes in waves, obviously, and I think, uh, I, I think, I mean, like a good meal, the pacing of those openings depends on whether it's going to be a net positive or a net negative for the block.
So much choice, and you got those... You have that landlord, you know, charging you that, that rate every week and, or every month, and it, those, those, those bills come very quickly.
So that's why, back to my original point, look back at the restaurants you loved over the past 18 months.
If you're of a, if you're a list maker, a Google Map maker, look back, just look back at the data that you've created around your restaurant-going. It could be literally your photos.
Just look at your photos, and, and just remember the places that you liked two years ago. Mm-hmm. Just go there.
Like, support those, 'cause those are the places that maybe were hot for a second, but then they may be struggling.
And, and if you had a good experience the first time, chances are your experience the second time is gonna be, gonna be positive. This is where- This is- Yeah...
so this is maybe, like, a, you know, recession indicator type of moment, but the way you're talking about this also makes me think o- of media and the idea of evergreen content, right? Yeah.
And the idea that you, you don't need to be dumping so much resources into creating the new thing every week, every week.
Like, you've got that great article from three months ago, six months ago, five years ago that's sitting there that people would still be interested in, that people would reread even if they've already read it because it's been so long.
Yeah. And, like, it's... And I think that's something people forget, and that's hard to, like, "Well, how do we make this fresh? How do we get it out there again?"
Um, but the, yeah, this idea of, like, evergreen restaurants as a r- or, or, like, older restaurants as the foundation for, for series, for whether it's like, whether it's a Taste, whether it's a Grub Street, whether it's, you know, any of these, these, uh, Instagram reel creators.
I wonder, I feel like that is something that it, it's, it's one of those ideas that isn't an original idea by any means, but it's, like, something that more people are going to arrive at in this moment of, especially of, like, you know, tightening the purse strings, um, more food media about longtime institutions re- Oh, yeah.
Reimagining. Great point, Francis. I think you, you definitely wanna cover the evergreen.
I like, I like the comparison because I think we, we surface some of our older stories because we do write a lot of stories that are evergreen.
And I think it's in this time of great news cycles, not just, uh, politically, but on the tech side, just so much news cycle content is being consumed that it's nice to surface a story, even if the byline says 2019, it still has a lot of value to our readers.
And we, in our Friday newsletter, which we, we put out, um, as kind of a digest of, of the week in writing and, and some audio, we just, we like to surface older stories from publications because, yes, there's lots of value there.
It doesn't need to be the new shiny toy for these types of, these types of reporting. And I love the tie back to the idea that a restaurant doesn't have to be the shiny new toy.
It can be an absolute, you know, just a classic place and really deliver. I have way... So I just remembered this, um, great data point from this newsletter I like, Push to Talk.
Uh, this guy, Ryan Rigby, he writes about the video game industry, which I, you know, played a lot of video games when I was younger.
I barely do anymore, but his newsletter is one of my favorites because he's so smart and, like, the, the stories he finds.
So the title of this one, it's from a few months ago, from September actually, Are Old Games Killing New Games?
And he has this graph here that, um, in 2023, 61% of all playtime on video games was spent on games that had been released over six years previously. Wow.
And in 2023, just five games, most of them released over a decade ago, together accounted for more playtime than every game released in 2022 and 2023 combined. Wow. That's stunning. I mean, it, it...
I don't know the game industry one bit, uh, except for The Last of Us, which shouts what a show. Uh, I wanna play this game.
[chuckles] But, um, I think there's something to do with just when a story or a restaurant has some seasoning on it- Mm-hmm... has some time, uh- Cast iron pan. Well said, Daisy. You...
That's why this is a great podcast. [chuckles] Those lines tying it together. A well-seasoned cast iron pan. For the record, I do use soap, but that's for another podcast. [chuckles] Controversial.
Because like list- I use, uh, steel wool. Yeah, steel wool is the way to go. I, I sometimes I, I pull that out.
But I just think, like, having a little bit of time, um, be it a video game, be it a, a restaurant, be it a, a great feature, um, I think that you're gonna obviously find new audience too.
Remember, like, old restaurants are new to cert somebody. New, new, old stories are new to somebody. So they may have just found your publication.
They may have just found that neighborhood and moved there, and like, "Let's, let's try out some of the, the local places."Yeah, I'm trying to do a better job with that actually. I, um...
Somebody said to me, something to me over the weekend about, um, froyo being a recession indicator.
[laughs] And I remembered we had a piece about that from last year called Froyo Monium, and I was like, "Ah, I think it's ready. It's time to dust that off."
But I'm, I'm curious, uh, whether you're seeing a bit of a froyo revival right now. I walked by Tasty Delight recently. There still is one on the Upper East Side, and- Mm... I was like, "I gotta fucking go there."
Yeah, I think froyo is definitely gonna be a ressa- Mm... is a recession indicator. I think, uh, I wish 16 Handles had survived. I still have a really, really, really soft spot in my heart for 16 Handles. Mm.
Um- Well, I'm sure there are, like, 16 Handles T-shirts are on Poshmark. Oh. Marked vintage. That's a great gift idea. Vintage Y2K inspired. $23. But, you know, d- do you g- Daisy and, and Francis, do you guys...
I feel like there's a little pressure that we put on ourselves when you, when you post an old byline.
You said dusting off as, as a joking, but there's almost, like, a pride thing how we, like, only need to be doing new stuff- Yeah... all the time.
Which I think is a, a mistake, 'cause I think- I've never put pressure on myself in my life, so- I appreciate-... I can't speak to that... that. I, I just think we internalize, like, am I being lazy?
Am I being less ambitious to, like, resurface old content, big air quotes there- Mm-hmm... using content in which I've only used. No, I, I mean, you're right.
I think, though, like, I, I, f- I saw a great quote from Tyler the Creator recently. He was like, "I'm still promoting the thing that I... Like, the album I published a year ago, and I'm gonna keep promoting it- Yeah...
for a year. Like, why would I s- I put, like, years of work into that. Why would I stop?" And maybe, you know, in an article you're not necessarily putting in years of work, but you're still putting in that high scale.
And I mean, I'm guilty of this too. Like, I will promote a thing for twice over a week, and then, and then I kinda move on, and I forget to go back. But you kind of just forget it's there. But, uh...
Or, like, in marketing, like at my last job, we always talked about, like, you know, z- 90% of the people that you w- 99% of the people that you want to see this thing aren't gonna see it the first time.
80% of them aren't gonna see it the second time, and so on and so on. Mm-hmm. So, like, you're not n- like, you're not gonna alienate people by posting it 5, 10 times, promoting it 20 times, right?
Like, you're just actually gonna reach a higher saturation of your potential audience. Yeah, that- That's exactly it. Yeah. That's exactly it. I mean, I, um, was doing...
going through our, our survey last night for Blank where we asked people what's the best book you read last year. Um, and one book that came up a lot, I, I did not say how often a book came up when I ran the results.
I just said, "This is every book mentioned." Um, but there's a book called, I believe it's God of the Woods. Yeah, by Liz Moore. Came up a lot. Mm-hmm.
And I remember seeing it when it first came out and saying, "I'd really like to read that."
And, um, it took seeing it, like, three times in the survey to be like, "I'm definitely gonna read that in the next couple months."
And this is a conversation that I've had with publishers when they wanna advertise in Dirt, which is what are your expectations? Because we expect to be one of six mentions that cause somebody to convert.
You know, do you need that to see them convert off our newsletter specifically to feel like this has been a success, or do you have other ways of, um, counting this exposure, uh, as, you know, fulfilling your KPIs?
Um, because we... I don't wanna make any guarantees around- Yeah... conversions.
But I can guarantee if somebody sees it in Dirt and then they see somebody tweet about it later, that we will be a crucial node in that person eventually buying that book, because that's how I think, and that's my relationship to books.
Yeah. Did you guys read The Most by Jessica Anthony? Mm, I don't- No... even know it. I just got, I... We... I'm sorry this is a tangent, 'cause I totally agree that connecting the dots is part of- [laughs]...
the way we think about our partnerships as well. Like, we're not gonna... It's not, like, CTA link track data and, like, you know, conversion of sales.
Um, it's about working with a brand that you really like, uh, a media brand, and that the audience is quality, right? It's brand safe- Mm-hmm... and quality. But The Most is amazing. It's a novella. It's like 130 pages.
It's... The, the logline is basically 1957, uh, housewife, uh, alcoholic husband, um, enters the pool and doesn't wanna leave in her apartment complex. And w- Oh, we did an interview with her. Oh, cool.
[laughs] There you go. There you go. I didn't say I'd never heard of it. Flex, flex. [laughs] Did I say I'd never heard of it? I don't know. Flex. Flex out. Um, I have- Oh...
heard of The Most, and we did cover it in the newsletter. Thank you very much. It's, it's in paperback now, and, like, we, we- Great cover... great cover. I think putting a pool on the cover- Oh...
I don't know if this is, like, the David Hockney effect, but my eye immediately goes to it if there's a swimming pool. It's... And, like- It's cool. Look... yeah. The, we read the...
I read this, my wife read it, our friend read it, and there's eighth grade, uh, their eight-son in eighth grade read it in the weekend. We, like, passed it around. Mm. It's a, it's a really quick read. So great.
So- Love a quick read... I was gonna say, Daisy, with... I mean, we're, we're talking about all this evergreen content, et cetera. Like, one of the best examples of this is how, how much you've promoted Bad Waitress.
That's, like- Oh... the Dirt story, and I feel like you guys post about it, like, every, every other month or something. And it's- Mm... and there's no reason not...
I mean, I've only read it once, to be honest, but, like, every time I see it, I'm like- Read it again... "Yeah, that was a really good story." [laughs] Read it this afternoon. Yeah.
What's the Bad Waitress, um, author update? Is there, uh, is there anything happening? I love that piece so much. What do you mean? Like- What's she up to? I feel like there's, like, a- Is Becca still a bad waitress?
[laughs] No, no, sorry. Rebecca. I didn't, I couldn't remember her name 'cause we'd emailed before. I mean, I feel like there's- Wait, are you, when are you having her on your podcast? Oh yeah, we talked about that.
Uh- You should have her come on to talk about the Anthony Bourdain biopic, which she wro- also wrote about for us. She's- Yes... she's the person whose opinion I would trust the most on that. Mm.
Say her last name just so I remember- Schuh... and so everyone... Schuh, okay. S-C-H- All right... U-H.
Ve- that's m- for plug to her on the podcast, but also so I remember to, to reach back and, uh, and, and talk about that incredible piece. I think Bad Waitress...
Well, okay, it's always, it was always gonna be worth talking about because it's well-written, but it is only becoming more relevant over time.
Yeah.Um, you know, it's as relevant as it's ever been, so Um, one thing I really wanna talk about before we get to the end here, Daisy, we, we, we were talking about this a little bit off mic before- Mm...
uh, but Clone was written about in- [laughs]... Neiman Lab today. There was this bit- Which I missed. I didn't- What- It was written about on the 8th. I only saw it this morning. Oh, oh my God, five days ago.
I mean, if you're gonna write me in Neiman- Come on... at least send me the link- [laughs]... if you're not gonna interview me.
But, but this bit about, um, you identifying yourself as a founder and, and that people not necessarily liking that, and people grading on that- Well-... and people not recognizing themselves as small business owners...
I came up with this Instagram bio in two seconds for this thing, which was, like, your favorite founder's favorite bookmark, and some people had a very strong negative reaction to that.
And I, I mean, my response to that criticism is a little bit facetious because, um, I- it was not, uh... Y- there was a little snark in it, and I think, like, I don't care.
And we know that founder- You know, it's a blog... tends to mean startup-y- You have to have a little bit of snark in it... techy. Yeah, but I'm like, everyone w- who's charging for their Substack is a founder.
Like, my... I tweeted, like, "You don't have a newsletter, you have a small business on a rentier platform." Mm-hmm. And I, I don't understand why it's so hard for people to admit that.
Like, you hung up a shingle, you're taking money from people, you have founded a business. And I know that your vision of founder is, of founder is, like, Elizabeth Holmes and the worst people alive- [laughs]...
but it's also the person that runs the coffee shop that you go to every day. Mm.
And it's not that I think people should have more respect for the title, I just think people should be a little bit more honest about all the points of economic exchange that they're involved in in their creative consumption- Mm...
and in their creative, like, in the stuff they themselves create, especially if they're charging for it.
Because it doesn't serve anyone to pretend that you're not running a business, and in fact, you leave yourself incredibly vulnerable for manipulation by the platforms like Substack that you're working with. Mm-hmm.
But s- it's almost like the thing of being- End rant... of being alienated from- That's not a... [laughs]... from your food, to, to, to, to make an analogy. Smiling. Mm-hmm.
Is, you know, like, if you eat at insert here fast food restaurant, like, you should be aware of, like, the slaughterhouse conditions and supply chain and, like, how fucked up that can be.
Um, but, [laughs] to take it back to, like, the small business media thing, it's like, you know, if, if, if you're on Substack and, and that's how you're running your business, like, you should be aware of the value relationships and that, like, you know, Substack makes money by basically providing you these tools for free.
You get this, this, you know, subscription fee- Yeah... if you start doing that. Andreessen Horowitz is making money on them. Andreessen Horowitz, like, blah, blah, blah.
J- the whole chain and supply chain- You're the pig... of like how these tools come to you. You're the piggy. [laughs] And, and, like, how money is exchanged, how data is exchanged.
Like, it's, I don't know, it, it, it's important to, like, de-alienate yourself from that. And you can participate in it, but you should think about it. [laughs] I gotta say something.
All love to the people I know that work at New York Magazine. [laughs] The second New York Mag joined Substack became a headline, I was like, "You fucked up.
You guys fucked up so bad," because that headline does everything for Substack and nothing for you. Mm. Yeah.
And in fact, uh, Corey left- He left the company after five days, and- I was like, how do you- I mean, w- how, what was the deal there? What was the story there? What is Adam- How do you fumble like that?
What is Adam Moss- How do you let that happen to you? What is Adam Moss thinking right now? Like, Adam Moss, like, made that magazine, like, truly, like, a vessel that you wanna put on your coffee table.
They fucked up so bad. And, and the new editor, of course, David, uh, uh, that, uh, s- same tradition.
So why the fuck would you go into a platform that does everything against aesthetics that you care just so deeply about? Mm. I mean, I think they were just, like, trolling a little bit, frankly.
I, I, I subscribed for the first day or two, and then I just unsubscribed 'cause I was like- [laughs]... I don't... Dinner Party's a cool thing.
I, I get it once in a while, and I know the- But do you get Dinner Party off... You get it off their regular distribution? Yeah, I get Dinner Par- I like Dinner. I like what they're doing with it.
And it was the same content? I, I mean, I couldn't even r- I think it was maybe cut down a little bit, but I think that they're... And, and you know what? I got love for Substack folks.
Like, I like Austin a lot, Tedesco- Mm... and I think they're trying things out, but I, I don't know why New... It's not the perfect fit for New York Mag, and it felt exactly right. Well said.
Substack got everything out of that, and New York Mag got shit, so. I would be extremely upset if a headline like that was written about my company, and I've done a lot to never put myself in that position. Yeah.
They're just playing, or they're, they're just, they're testing stuff. Yeah, but no company should ever benefit from your long decades of brand- Mm...
and reputation building more than you do- Well, what this is, though-... with every single step that you take... it's a bet. I mean, what...
It's a tr- they're hoping that they're trading that association for, for user growth, right?
And, like, to me, what I see Substack as is it's Patreon plus Twitter plus basically a, a startup accelerator for small media businesses- Mm-hmm... um, with a newsletter feature attached. Yeah. Like, that's...
So it's pe- it's, it's New York Magazine, I think, treating it as, as Twitter. Yeah, yeah. And they wanna be first mover too. Remember, New York Mag is so brilliant at that.
They're first movers in so many areas of media, and they're a first mover on moving onto Substack as a established legacy media brand actually caring about Substack. I haven't seen too many other.
I've seen brands go on, but I haven't seen publications do it, so I think they wanted to be a first mover. Uh, that's more, probably more important to them than having Substack steal all the headlines.
Well, everyone's now seen that headline, and they're not gonna do it, so first mover- [laughs]... last mover is- No, I, I, I, I, it gave me- I'm sorry I'm hammering this hard, but I really think, like,
brand and reputation is everything. Never, ever, ever give it up to somebody who's been around- Mm... so much shorter than you have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Especially New York Mag is such a good brand. Yeah.
It's, it was an interesting, yeah, experience. It's a big halo for Substack, and, uh, and Substack, I give them credit as founders for what they've built, but they do not deserve that halo- [laughs]...
from the mainstream publishing industry.Mm-hmm. Rentier, it's the re- the, the Rentier Newspaper. Um, we should- All software is rentier, but like- That's true... a lot of times it has, like, utility as well.
[laughs] Let's wrap it up on a positive note. Yeah. Uh, Matt- Fine... what is, what is the most- What is one thing... Rose and thorn. No, I'm just kidding. No.
What's the most memorable thing that you've eaten so far this year, and one thing or place that you're excited to eat? Um, I w- I was in Vancouver, and I had buri sushi, which is, like, the square blowtorch sushi- Mm...
so it's, like, slightly different. Mm. It's like you get it sometimes in omakases, but Vancouver has this amazing, uh, uh, history with this style of sushi, and I just think it's, it really hits me in the right spot.
I love that style of sushi. I had it a couple places in Vancouver. Um, I also went to Stissing House this weekend. They're just so, so- That's the one upstate, right? Yeah, it's- That's on my list... it's in Pine Plains.
Mm-hmm. It's really a g- a great restaurant. They're in year three. I just think that they're doing such amazing work, not just in culinary, but style of service, and just, like, a really, really cool place to visit.
So Stissing House was great. Seasoned, but not too seasoned of the concept. Not too seasoned. They're, like, coming back- Tell us about- Year three. Year three... what was the second question?
Oh, um, a place that you are, that you hope to eat soon, or, like, a thing that you hope to eat soon. Yeah. Or maybe it's what you're making for lunch. [laughs] I don't know. Oh, no. I, um, what do I wanna eat?
I mean, I'm, I, I think... I'm going to Portland this weekend. Hmm. Which one? Uh, sorry, good call. It's exactly the right, uh, follow-up question. [laughs] Uh, the one that, the Oregon, uh- Bad Portland...
I haven't been back for eight years, but I went, I went to college there. Yeah, what a wonderful city. I haven't been in, uh, about a year, and I love going there for food. And, um, I want to... I just think, uh...
My friend Jordan Michael who writes for Taste is writing a novel about Portland. Hmm. I, I, w- I r- read his manuscript. It's fucking so good.
Um, and I just wanna go to some old school places, and Jordan's gonna take me to a few. I, I'm, I'm cool with some of the newer places, but I want some, like, '90s to early 2000s Portland- Mm...
in, in- You gotta visit M. Sealy Katz in the oldest perf- niche perfume house in Portland while you're there- I-... and see if they can hook you up with a new signature scent. Thank you for...
Daisy, that's a great recommendation. M. Sealy Katz going in my phone. I have, I have one recommendation for you. Please. Maybe it's a little too new. Uh, I think it's about 12 years or more by now.
One of my favorite places. I know you're not a drinker- Yeah... anymore, but you don't need to be a drinker to go here. It's called Stammtisch. Okay. Um, German restaurant. It's the best... My father's from Bavaria.
I went there with him. He said the best German food he's had outside of Germany, and better- Mm... than most in Germany. I haven't been there for eight years, but I know this- Love that... stuff kick in.
And it was, you know, what, for, like, a pretzel or a schweineschweinshaxe, or an- any, I mean, any classic German food that, you know, you could find at whatever, like, s- 50-year-old tourist trap German restaurant, but actually good.
Such a great rec, Francis. Mm-hmm. My, my grandmother was born in Munich. Oh, there you go. So there you go. I, I love that food so much, and I, I just think Portland has many dimensions.
Obviously, you live there, and I just think that that pre-Portlandia Portland is what I'm trying to get a little sense of. [laughs] Um, because there's such a cool history of Portland in the '90s. Mm-hmm.
Uh, and I wanna, I want... That's, like, one of my big goals with this trip. Portlandia is so nostalgic. We should... We'll stop in a second here.
[laughs] Portlandia's so nostalgic for me now 'cause I moved there for college a year after it started, and I left a year before it ended. So, like, I re-watched- Yeah...
a few episodes recently, and it's been long enough where I was like, "Wow, this is, this was my Ivy League documentary." That's, like, real Portland to you. Yeah.
[laughs] It's like Greenpoint depicted in Girls doesn't exist anymore. All right. We should wrap it up. This- Okay... was... Was this Taste, or was it Tasteland? [laughs] It was both. It was both.
You're getting a double dose of Taste today. Thank you, Matt. Thank you for coming on, Matt. Thank you for having us. Francis and Daisy, thank you so much for inviting me. I love your show. Uh- Thank you... it's so cool.
Appreciate it. Absolute pleasure. All right. See you next week. [outro music]