Eater, that scary food-news-driven website with a deluge of information, is going from a fun food blog to super food-established. Yesterday, it announced big stinking news. The website has hired three full-time restaurant critics. Former Dallas Morning News and Atlanta Magazine‘s critic, Bill Addison, is one of them, along with Robert Sietsema (Village Voice) and Ryan Sutton (Bloomberg).
What does this mean for the way we consume and view dining reviews? That’s the million-dollar question.
“From the nascent days of Eater in 2005, the days of Gansevoria, angst towards Brooklyn, and Del Posto obsessing, one of the only hard and fast rules read as follows: No Restaurant Reviews. Eater’s bread and butter from day one has been restaurant news and gossip; the site neither had the expertise nor the inclination to execute restaurant reviews. Now, Eater has all three.
First, the inclination. As newspapers and alt-weeklies across the country slash dining budgets, shed restaurant critics, and place less emphasis on reviews in general, Eater is hiring three full-time critics with dining budgets. Restaurants are a vital part of culture, of the social fabric of each city, and deserve to be assessed seriously. In collaboration with our parent company Vox Media’s world-class product team, Eater aims to build the technology to approach restaurant reviews in a dynamic, modern way suited for the way we eat (and think about eating) now. That development is underway now, with the goal to debut it later this year.”
For more on Eater’s decision, go here.
