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Investigative reporting with a threat
By adamg on Mon, 04/01/2013 - 7:31am
Update: Ye ed. should have checked the date.
Food blogger (and attorney) Richard Auffrey says he's given a local chef an ultimatum: Move out of town or he'll post details about how the guy is using meat from "large scale, out of state farms" instead of the little locally sourced purveyors his restaurant's reputation is staked on.
If nothing changes this week, then next Monday's Rant will identify the chef and restaurant, providing the evidence I possess. I received much support on both Facebook and Twitter for outing the chef if I possessed sufficient evidence of his deception. My outing will not be without repercussion, but I am willing to take on those consequences to expose this fraud. Once I identify the chef and restaurant, the restaurant owner will have the ability to verify this matter on their own. All they will have to do will be to analyze the invoices for the local meat producers and determine there was an insufficient amount to have fed all of the restaurant's patrons.
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Comments
I'm sure the restaurateur in
I'm sure the restaurateur in question is absolutely terrified.
Overwrought much?
For chrissake. He's not putting antifreeze in the wine or knowingly serving E. coli-tainted steak tartare; he's serving meat that meets federal standards, he's just getting it from more than 50 miles away (like every other restaurant in town). Yeah, it's kind of a crappy thing for the chef to do, but do you seriously believe all the claims made by every restaurant serving cheeses handcrafted by local artisans using only the finest tears of virgin unicorns?
Even if this guy's crappy cellphone video turns out to be as incriminating as he thinks it is, this isn't exactly career-ending for the chef in question. I also seriously doubt this Monday Rant has the readership or sway that its author thinks it does.
Unless the meat is
Unless the meat is radioactive who gives a fcuk where the cow was brought up.
Mr attorney blogger, dont you have ambulances to chase.
And Fish is FIsh, right?
Who cares is it's Cod, or a Chilean stinkfish. You paid North Atlantic Cod prices, and thought it was, so all is good!
If you’re swindling your customers out of their cash by offering cheaper food than what you're advertising and lying about it, well, yeah they do have a right to know. Now, that might make you a great chef, or your customers flipping idiots; but it is breaking the trust in that relationship.
And in a city with so many good options and places to patronize, why go to a place that sees their customers in contempt?
Shows what the hell you know
It does matter.
Maybe you smoke and didn't grow up on game meat so you can't tell, but it does matter.
Sustainability and local sourcing matter, too.
Antibiotic use in the industry is making the drugs useless for humans as well. That matters.
Checking the date
I'm about 70% sure this is an April Fools Day prank.
Well, fraud is fraud
...and believe it or not, even in a town where the Cheesecake Factory routinely has lines out the door, there actually are some customers who care about a restaurant's sourcing practices, and try to patronize places that favor local, sustainable, non-GMO, grass-fed, organic, etc. ingredients in the kitchen.
You may think that's silly. There's plenty of silliness going on in consumer restaurant choices: somebody out there listens to the Andelman brothers' recommendations, when it's obvious that those whores would smack their lips and point you to a puddle of wino vomit in an alley if the puddle had bought ads on the Phantom Gourmet.
There are many mid-high and fine-dining restaurants that make that higher-quality ingredient sourcing central to their marketing. If they're saying one thing about their supposed philosophy and pushing the heck out of that fact to draw in customers, yet are doing another, that's clearly fraudulent.
My advice to Auffrey was, "You had better make sure your evidence is unimpeachable, or you'll be looking at a libel suit."
Also, isn't the way most investigative reporters approach such an issue is to publish their findings first? Seems like throwing down that gauntlet this way gives the alleged offender the opportunity to burn the evidence, prepare for PR damage control, and otherwise do anything they can to undermine the accusations.
Agreed on all counts.
Agreed on all counts.
The thing that investigative reporters DON'T do is publicly threaten their story's subject before publishing their findings. Because that's not investigative reporting; that's blackmail.
I don't think it's really
I don't think it's really that silly. If you're lying to customers, that's pretty serious. But the way Auffrey is presenting this, you'd think he has evidence that said head chef is actually a fugitive of the Nuremberg trials. It's all a bit overblown.
Didn't I see this on "Bored to Death"?
"That's some pretty tough talk for a guy who has to travel 100 miles for his raddichio!"
I mean that's how absurd this is. Not the deception, the fact that this idiot thinks he's breaking a story that affects millions of Americans.
Hey, pal! You want to do the world a favor? Find out something incriminating about the Keystone XL pipeline and stop acting like you're Bob frickin' Woodward.
Yes, I should have checked the date
The post now has a postscript; as somebody mentioned above, yes, it's supposed to be a joke. I got caught because, well, the blog author does tend to express some major wrath.