Stimulus status, Yelp alert, Davis out, The Mogadishu crew, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, October 9th, 2020
Hello Friday,
Everything will probably have changed by the time you read this, but:
Let’s get to it…
The Relief – I’m sure you have all been riding the roller coaster of presidential engagement in COVID relief bill negotiations (and the potential $120B earmarked for independent restaurants in the current House version), but no matter what Trump tweets, we would all do well to remember that a lot has to happen in congress before a stimulus package gets anywhere near the Oval Office. With that in mind, here’s Jake Sherman (I presume) in Politico Playbook last night:
“OK everyone, repeat after us: Stimulus talks are in the same place they have been since July. The two sides have not coalesced around a top-line figure, legislative language or any of the component parts of an agreement. The White House is divided on a deal, Hill Republicans are all over the place, and time is running out. This may be the longest negotiation we’ve seen outside of health care reform in 2009-2010, and yet so little has changed over the last 10 weeks. So, while Washington’s most eager duo -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin… may be heading back to the negotiating table, that would represent status quo.
“And status quo here is stasis.”
The Modal – Per Eater’s Jenny G. Zhang: “Starting today, Yelp will display warnings if restaurants and other businesses are associated with racist conduct, the review platform announced on its blog [on Thursday].”
Looks like the new “Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert” is at the far end of an escalation process that begins with the usual temporary disabling of a page due to an abnormal influx of reviews. After that, the Yelp blog says, “We’ll default to a general Public Attention Alert to inform customers someone associated with the business has been accused of, or the target of, racist behavior. We’ll only escalate to a Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert when there’s resounding evidence of egregious, racist actions from a business owner or employee, such as using overtly racist slurs or symbols.”
But Yelp went a step further in a statement to Eater, saying the criteria also includes “symbols or sentiment that clearly discredits the Black Lives Matter movement.’”
They also say that these alerts will always be accompanied by links to credible news stories about the issue, which brings it all full circle because Yelp already calls these abnormal surges of negative reviews, “Media-fueled.” So… Step 1: Media publishes allegations. Step 2: Readers Yelp-bomb restaurant. Step 3: Yelp puts up a warning and links back to published allegations.
May as well just skip the whole process and put up a pop-up that says, “Oh shit! Look what Eater found out!”
The Departure – On Instagram yesterday, Mitchell Davis, Chief Strategy Officer at (and often public face of) the James Beard Foundation, announced: “BREAKING!! I interrupt the news cycle rollercoaster to share that I’m leaving [the Beard Foundation] at the end of this month. After nearly 3 decades I’ve decided it's time to move on to pursue new horizons and personal projects.” No word yet on what those projects might be, but I swear to god if it’s a newsletter, Mitchell… (Best of luck to him!)
The Conference – The International Association of Culinary Professionals’ (IACP) annual conference is online this year, and has a lot of smaller panels / workshops that may be of use to those of you hoping to hedge the whole restaurants thing with some more writing or media (though I would scrutinize any price tags hard, and if you want some informal advice on any of these topics, just ask me!). On October 21-22, you can log in to such content as: “Food TV in 2020 and a Post-Bourdain World,” “Pitching Yourself as a Podcast Guest,” and of course, “The Art of Newsletters.” Full schedule, tickets, and info here. NB: Newsletters aren’t art, they’re science, and you can tell the panel I said that because they sure as hell didn’t invite me to their stupid talk. Not that I care or whatever. Whatever.
The Project – Sort of an odd one, but a while ago I started noticing that restaurateur Maria Font Trabocchi, of DC’s Fiola (and the rest of the Fabio Trabocchi Restaurants group) fame, was posting pictures of herself in Somalia on Instagram. Her account pre-pandemic was mostly the restaurants, trips to Europe, assorted luxury, and family, and these Mogadishu pics never came with any answers as to what she was doing there. So when I saw her post one recently alongside several other chefs (most tagged in this saved story from Michael Fusano of Fiola Miami), I finally asked what was up. She would only tell me: “Times of COVID has made possible for a dream team to develop a culinary program to feed properly the missions from USA and European and African nations who are helping rebuild Somalia.” That and: “Education and training academy for Kenyan and Ugandan chefs.”
Asked if there was anything else going on, she replied: “Something is cooking.”
And last but not least – “A renovated hotel on the edge of downtown D.C. is marketing itself as a monument to equal rights for women — but the opening chef at the bar and restaurant inside is a man.” According to Gabe Hiatt and Tierney Plumb in Eater, at the new bar, “cocktails ($16) come in names like ‘Empowermint’ and ‘Earhart,’” and “the hotel did hire a women-owned design company and created opportunities to pay female artist for their work. Andrea Sheehan, the founder of Seattle- and London-based Dawson Design Associates (DDA), commissioned a massive pointillist portrait of late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that’s made out of 20,000 hand-painted tampons (the release notes organic tampon company CORA donated them all).”
And that’s it for today!
I’ll see paying subscribers here Tuesday for next Family Meal, and everyone else on Friday. If you want to get Tuesday’s Family Meal on Tuesday…
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