August 2006
Food Blogs
by Celia Cheng
CRAVINGS
The Experience
Nobu
Salads
Peasant
Pizzas
Patsy’s
FAVORITE FOOD BLOGS
Snack
Diner’s Journal
Waiter Rant
When you live in New York City, you’re always looking for your own underground path of social activities. This includes restaurants, bars, clubs, etc. Underground doesn’t mean that it has to be beneath the radar, it just means that you want to have your own familiar spots and routine. Some of us prefer lower profile neighborhood joints while others enjoy the energy of the hipster limelight. Either way, everyone’s looking for their own comfort zone.
Ben Leventhal is a New York native and has his preferences down pat. Several years ago, when Ben met Matt, a newbie to the City who didn’t know places to go or things to do, Ben was inspired to start a blog called She Loves New York(SLNY). The concept is basic: Ben addresses you, the reader, as “Matty” and gives you lists of recommendations based on his knowledge about how the City works — what’s hot, what’s not, easiest time to secure a reservation at certain restaurants, etc. It’s a guide geared towards men, with tips on how to impress girls by being “in the know.”
The site is unique in its voice and persona. The design is sparse, using simply a red typewriter typeface on a white background. When you first reach the site, the phrase “SHE LOVES NY” is the only content on the page. To enter the site, you don’t click on the actual words but rather a specific hot spot in the white space just below. Once you enter, the navigation is unique as well — there’s just a list of words, some highlighted (active content) and others not. The site is overall rather cryptic and very intriguing. The design illustrates the concept. There’s an unmarked entrance, and the entire site speaks in the New York nightlife vernacular. There’s not much hand holding going on. You either get it or you don’t.
While Ben still identifies closely with SLNY, he has been working on other projects too. (The content on SLNY has not been updated recently, but the majority of the information is still relevant.) A former television executive for VH1, Ben’s been busy running Eater full time as a business with partner Lockhart Steele (of Gawker). Eater is the food-focused sister site to Curbed, the successful real estate blog. Ben has also acted as a consultant for Urban Daddy, another e-mail magazine that keeps you in the know. It’s all a natural progression as Ben started writing for Daily Candy early on. Naturally, I agree with him that websites that work best are those that reach the point where the line between passion and commercial gets blurred.
In a city where everyone wants to be in the know, there are boundless opportunities to set up online resources, especially when there’s barely any entry cost to speak of. But having been actively involved in online media for the past five years, Ben notes that there’s a lot of competition out there these days and it’s important to keep innovating and creating a viable idea with originality, and to not just regurgitate what’s already out there. His goal is to continue creating web properties of substance, and to make money doing it.
Today, blogs are setting the agenda as a significant piece of the information output puzzle. Eater aggregates what others are saying and brings news to the forefront faster than traditional media like The New York Times can, but Eater is not trying to be The Times. There’s more freedom in the online medium, and the blogosphere plays by a different set of rules. The two types of media are already coming together, but it will be even more interesting to see where this fusion is headed.
