Saint Louis Makes Twitter its Bitch...

My Twitter Dream (a.k.a. Saint Louis, MO)

Now that I’ve beaten the living hell out of the evil that is social media in the form of Yelp and other such sites, maybe it’s time to look at the good side of social media. I mean not every form of social media could be chucker-block full of a-holes looking to give one star to a restaurant for having the audacity to serve them gazpacho… chilled…Can they?

I was looking around at different cities and found some shining examples of who’s doing great things with regards to food and social media. St. Louis, MO is perhaps one of the best examples I found of what good can come with the proper use of Twitter, Foodspotting and other social media sites. Sure there are probably bigger, better and (badder-ist?) cities that are somewhat further ahead, with NYC, Chicago and LA coming to mind. But as an outsider looking in, I couldn’t imagine being more comfortable than in the STL.

It all started with a likely business trip to STL that started me looking into the food scene there. I already had a friend on Twitter in the form of @mcharcuterie who is a prominent and respected fixture in the STL food scene. So I started by picking her brain as to where I should go and eat. Being as sweet as she is, she was happy to oblige and proceeded to give me some general ideas as to where I might find some good food. Finding out I had a culinary background she immediately said, “You know who you need to talk to is Chef Joshua Galliano @cookingkid, you and him can talk shop and really figure out the food scene around here.

@mcharcuterie got started in social media several years ago because she was tired of reading in the paper about food events that were happening all around her... after the fact. Social media filled that void and then some. She started taking pictures of the foods she was eating at these various events and local restaurants and sharing them through Foodspotting. This took off and really got her some attention to the point @stltoday did a story on her. Now she has nearly as many followers in the one year she’s been using twitter as my local food magazine has for its entire existence...more on “them” in a minute.

Thinking to myself, Awwww how cute…she knows a cook I can talk to. Not wanting to be unprepared to talk to him and being the nosey bastard I am, I looked this guy up so I would know whom I was dealing with. Holy Shin Splints, cook indeed…this guy has a cooking pedigree and background so deep that by comparison…there was no comparison. I was trying to figure out what I would ask this chef first and how to phrase my e-mail so as to avoid the mention of my so-called culinary school…then I got an E-mail.

It had only been some fifteen or twenty minutes since my friend had thrown the idea out there and had given me the contact info and that “son of a bitch” (meant with the highest respect and meant as more of a state of shock blue collar New England thing) had already composed an email with no less than thirty or so places “to start with”  as well what I should eat at each place, farmers markets, butchers and specialty stores, and if I had any questions I could feel free to contact him. *blink….blink* Where the hell do I even begin?

I’ve sent emails, tweets and on a few occasions tried to contact local chefs here on the seacoast, Boston and New York and each time getting a chef to reply is like pulling teeth. I’m not talking the Mario Batali’s of the food world here (who is actually very much into twitter and communicating with fans and patrons), as very few of them had anywhere near the cooking chops as Chef Galliano. Yet this man took the time to drop me an email that was more than… “Here are three fine dining places…good luck in STL.” I was truly awed by the act of kindness and thought perhaps this was the exception rather than the rule.

I am happy to report…it is most assuredly not. If I am looking for restaurant recommendations for STL or nearby cities (and one time Kansas City), thoughts on an ingredient, farmers market info or where is the best place to buy such and such a food… everybody from Chefs like Gerard Craft @GerardFCraft, Joshua Galliano @cookingkid, Kevin Nashan @knashan John Griffiths @jgriffs and many others will more than likely weigh in…

These are some weighty chefs here people! Don’t just take my word for it; ask the good folks who nominate chefs for James Beard awards. Yet somehow these people are reachable. The gruff but loveable freelance writer Andrew Veety @amveats will put his two cents in, and sometimes five if the topic so moves him...as will writer Evan Benn @EvanBenn a beer columnist (best job ever next to inventory taker for a blind liquor store owner). It seems as though everybody in this damned town has something to say on food.

Restaurants often get involved, the local craft brewers, the Saint Louis Brewers Guild, food stores, Food trucks (which there are a ton of and damned near all of them awesome, the ones that aren’t awesome are by all accounts are great and striving for awesome) farmers markets, Bloggers @AmuseDouche11 @sippinstl @MoEats and @ironstef  as well as the local “cibo” (see urban dictionary…I reserve the word foodie for assholes) population like @CashewChicken or @jpjernigan.  It’s a very comfortable, fluid and God help me…symbiotic relationship between all food related entities.

I’d seriously love to mention everybody from Saint Louis who has reached out and offered help, kind words or recommendations…but there wouldn’t be enough room to gush about how awesome they all are.  The good people of Saint Louis understand it is about the greater good of all parties involved. I don’t want to make it sound like a tree hugging bark eating commune, so let’s just say this…. Saint Louis, Missouri has embraced Twitter and made it... its fuzzy little bitch.

Their own Food magazine @SAUCEmagazine actually promotes all foods… from the humble sandwich shop to the best in fine dining and everything in between. Every week they give shout outs to everybody and anybody in their food community, they promote cibo folks, bloggers, restaurants, chefs and anybody else who has something to say regarding what’s happening in the STL food scene. In return the people there look to SAUCE as a current, relevant and integral part of the food community.

When there is a problem with a dinner service from a customer, it gets aired on twitter and solved on twitter in a smooth matter of fact manner that everyone understands as the only way to do things. They get social media…they understand that it is the future and have figured out the best way to use it so it benefits all people. Nobody is insulated and everybody is accessible. If you’re in STL and you need to find out where the next food festival, feast in the field, food truck gathering, beer fest, wine tasting, restaurant opening, restaurant charity benefit, Pop-Up or anything else food related is… Just find any one of the aforementioned people and if they don’t know…they know someone who does.

My Reality

Ah Portsmouth, NH…where do I begin. It’s a nice town of some twenty odd thousand people forty minutes north of Boston, and if you include surrounding towns and coastal communities you have maybe seventy to a hundred thousand people. Being an old New England seaport town means it is filled with quaint little boutiques that have words like Ye Olde and Shoppe in the title and usually means if you want to buy anything here you need not pull out your folding money… as only plastic or a first child will do. As a result of this “charm” it is also overflowing in the summertime with fanny-pack sporting affluent flatlanders from points south.

A fortunate ancillary benefit of the tourist industry is that the restaurant scene is quite nice with a goodly mix of fine, moderate and low priced dining establishments. Most do a fairly good job and most have something good to offer. The fact that it’s a seaport means seafood and as a result plenty of inexpensive, plentiful, high quality seafood is available at all times. There are Butchers, specialty shops, bakeries, excellent grocery stores, farmers markets, online food magazines, cheese chops, pastry shops basically all manner of food one could ever want with just one little problem…nobody’s talking to each other.

I did a review of a local restaurant that’s doing some really good food. In a follow up discussion I had with one of the chefs I asked him about his twitter account. I have one but I never use it. I said, I know I tweeted to you the other day and you never responded. His response…”what’s a tweet?” ARRRRGH! He told me he was into yelp, and even had a yelp sticker on his front door as do most restaurants in town.

Yelp is dead I told him. He looked surprised and confused by the comment. "Look...Don’t you ever get tired of answering stupid questions from people who don’t know what they’re talking about?" "Yes" he said, somewhat relieved. Well, that’s my point…most everybody who cares and knows about food, is on Twitter. Only foodies and peta assholes depend on yelp.

The downside to Portsmouth being so touristy in the summer is that it is cricket city in the dead of winter….well it would be if crickets could survive the seven to ten feet of snow and below zero temperatures one can expect from Portsmouth in any given winter. So restaurants survive with a feast or famine ebb and flow.

Through the use of Twitter it wouldn’t have to be this way…but still they chug on with little notice of such a powerful free tool at its fingertips. Often the restaurants here that are on twitter…with Grape Ape as my witness…PAY people to tweet for them. I shit you negative. They pay people to tweet for them because "it's too time consuming!"

After I started to discover the wonders that are the STL food scene, I decided I hadn’t put enough of the same effort into my own town so I went looking. I found my local online food magazine called @TasteMagazine and started flipping through what I felt was a decent effort… but it was missing some things. I tweeted them requesting a DM and got nothing. A few weeks later I tweeted again, and again received nothing in response. So I found an Email contact and sent off a note with my thoughts to help them make it more appealing for the readership or more importantly… potential readership.

I was happy to get a reply within five minutes to tell me they were extremely busy but thought that I had some “interesting ideas” and would reply within the next week or two….It has been over 4 weeks now and I have sent a friendly reminder that I’d still love to hear from them. *chirp chirp…..chirp chirp* So somebody shows an interest in what they are doing, and doesn’t even rate so much as a follow? So I thought maybe I’ll go through their followers and see who the real heavyweights were in the seacoast food world. What I found was shocking…

It was loaded with every “marketing spambot” known to man, and had I weeded them all out I’d probably stand a good chance of having more followers then them. Uh huh, just what I thought…@TasteMagazine has a bad case of cranial rectal inversion. It has what I like to call “Yankee” disease. Yankee is a national magazine based out of New England, based on New England and at one time… on New Englanders. Now it’s about multi-million dollar Newport RI mansions and Martha Stewart types and nearly unreadable except by people named Biff and Bunny Tipton. So if that’s what you’re looking to do Taste…you’re headed down the right track except for one small detail…readership…you’ll need a readership to drag to the land of the pretentious foodie.

So Portsmouth, it looks like we have a lot of catching up to do and without a flagship to guide us…it looks like it’s up to me and precious few others to single handedly yank some heads out of some asses. Saying this is akin to telling your spouse off in the mirror, when your spouse isn’t in the house…or even in the country. Because the reality is, hardly anybody in Portsmouth is listening to anybody else save for a couple of good food writers in @cjmcmahonSMG and @ RachelForrest. We are never going to be as large or as well put together as Saint Louis, but we sure as hell can do better than this.

So to you wonderful people of Saint Louis I say thank you for being so generous and giving of your time and if you’re ever heading to the New Hampshire seacoast, please do tweet me so that we may break bread and have beers together. Allow me to show you my New England. But whatever you do don’t ask me what’s going on food wise, because that would involve driving around with the windows down and our noses out trying to smell what’s happening. “Here…hold the wheel…I think I smell something!”