From the Magazine: Food Fight!

Ever wonder how your (food news) sausage gets made? If you’re at all interested in food, food writing or media, you’ll want to read John Marchese’s excellent article in the September issue of Philly mag, breaking down the rabid professional food blogger scene in Philly, from the Inquirer to City Paper to Foobooz.

And of course, Restaurant Club. Well, sorta:

Around the same time Lazor came on the scene, Art Etchells, an information-tech guy who loved food and beer, decided to start his own website, called Foobooz, that would report on restaurant specials, events and gossip. In 2009, the Grub Street franchise run by New York magazine hired a Philadelphia-based blogger (she’s now this magazine’s food editor and says any comment she would make for this article would be “the pot calling the kettle black”) to manufacture up to eight posts a day on the local food scene. Around the time a New York publication decided Philadelphia was ripe for a restaurant blog, this magazine decided it couldn’t miss all the fun and started a blog called Restaurant Club.

Ah, inside baseball, serpent eating its own tail, etc. This is our favorite part though:

There’s a genetic disorder called Prader-Willi syndrome that affects children, making them always hungry, insatiable, for food. Nowadays, it seems some mutant form of Prader-Willi is becoming epidemic in the population. We are always hungry, insatiable, for food information: the next hot chef, the new restaurant, the unlikely, surprising dish. Whatever strange bacillus causes the obsession seems to thrive in the host of the Internet, which is the natural home of any virus.

When did you first notice the symptoms? Was it that table of diners who kept asking the waiter about Chef? Not the chef. Chef. As in, “What does Chef recommend tonight? Is Chef making anything off the menu?”

Click here to read the full article online.