Questions and creations with Amanda Laird

By day Amanda Laird is a Communications Specialist with Canadian News Wire. But when she clocks out at the end of the day, Laird returns home to a very orange kitchen and cooks up a storm. On her blog, Mise En Place, she posted recipes and photos of her creations, which range from banana muffins to turkey sandwiches to tomato stew.

I had a chance to do a Q&A with Laird about her blog, twitter feed, and involvement in Toronto’s foodie scene. The response is as follows.

What brought you onto twitter?

As a PR professional, I not only have a natural interest in communications, it’s my job to understand and use various communications vehicles. Originally I signed on to Twitter for professional reasons – to connect with other PR and communications people. When I started my blog in early 2009 it quickly became social and that’s when I started to connect with other food bloggers.

When you tweet about restaurants and meals, do the restaurants ever tweet back?

From time to time, but that’s not why I’m tweeting. I think there are a lot of people who tweet because they want a reaction from a company or a restaurant, especially when they’re angry. But for me, Twitter is more like a miniature online diary.

Have you participated in any foodie meet ups organized on twitter? If so, what was the experience like?

I went to Cupcake Camp Toronto last winter and it was an awful experience. Just way too many people vying for too few cupcakes. We left after a short time but at least our money went to a good cause. But that’s not to say that all meet-ups organized on Twitter are bad or poorly organized. I’ve been to a couple of non-foodie meet-ups organized on Twitter that were awesome, like HoHoTO. Unfortunately I’ve been unavailable for each and every foodiemeet that’s ever been planned.

How do you think the growth of social media has affected the local foodie scene? the local restaurant industry?

Social media is very good at connecting people who are passionate about the same things. Before the Internet I may have loved cooking and eating but there were really few ways to connect with other people who loved the same things, especially since something like cooking can be pretty solitary. I think social media has only made “scenes”, foodie or otherwise, stronger. I’ve been able to connect with so many people through Twitter that I probably would never have met, online or in real life, otherwise.

What makes a good restaurant feed? A good foodie feed?

I don’t know if I can pinpoint certain things that make me like someone’s Twitter feed. I tend to follow people who share interesting links and people who are funny, that gets me every time. When following a brand or something like a restaurant, I want that extra little piece of value – like a deal or a discount.

In September you blogged about a panel discussion you participated in sponsored by the Chicken Farmers of Canada. Have you gotten many similar opportunities as a result of your blog?

There have been a few. I’ve been asked to a couple of press events, including an evening with Curtis Stone where he cooked us dinner using recipes from his latest cookbook and used cookware from his line that’s carried at the Bay.

From time to time I get samples from PR companies to try out and write about. I’ve done it a couple of times, but I’m generally pretty picky about what I’ll write about. My blog is described as a diary of my kitchen, and mostly the food is the backdrop to something else that I’m writing about like childhood memories or celebrating an anniversary with my boyfriend (who’s now my fiancé).

But I’m a PR person too, and I know what it’s like. So if your pitch is well-written and your product is something that I would normally buy I’ll probably write about it. But that’s not why I blog; I do it because I’m a writer and I love writing and I’m passionate about the food that comes out of my kitchen.

A sample of one of Laird's creations:
The Valentine's Day Skillet Cookie

The directions, pulled from Laird's blog:

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
2. Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt, set aside.
3. In another large bowl, cream butter and sugars (about two minutes if you’re using an electric mixer).
4. Add egg and vanilla, mix until fully incorporated.
5. Add flour mixture, and beat until just combined.
6. Stir in chocolate chips.
7. Transfer dough to a 10-inch ovenproof skillet, and press to flatten, covering the bottom of the pan. Bake until the edges are brown and top is golden, 40 to 45 minutes. Cool on a wire rack about 15-20 minutes.

Eats, beats and tweets at Nyood

There isn’t much Roger Mooking doesn’t do. He’s head chef at Nyood, a restaurant on the same strip of Queen St. as The Social and 69 Vintage. He’s also the host of Everyday Exotic on the Food Network, an MC, vocalist, songwriter, and producer. In August 2008 Mooking released his debut album, Soul Food. Well-wired and web savvy, Mooking hosts a vlog on his website and regularly tweets, using the handle @rogermooking.

One night at Nyood Mooking decided to tweet while he was calling out orders as an experiment, and found users quickly tweeted back, from both inside the restaurant and out. The tweets started a conversation about Nyood that was seen by countless followers.

Both Mooking and restaurant manager Sacha Elwakeel saw the potential twitter held for Nyood and talked about different ways to incorporate twitter into their service. Instead of simply strategizing a plan to gain followers, they decided to take twitter to the next level and give it its own event.

The result was Eats, Beats, and Tweets, a two night event that kicked of the Winterlicious festival on January 29. Nyood hired DJs to spin during dinner and projected the restaurant’s twitter feed onto the rough white wall opposite the bar. Before the event Nyood contacted all of its reservations to make sure they had the restaurant’s twitter address, and gave out its password--scarface--to any diners who didn’t want to join.

During the event Nyood staff met with each table, helping newbies set up accounts and post their first tweet. Elwakeel says many of the guests hadn’t used the service before and signed up to participate. “Twitter owes me big,” he laughs.

Guests tweeted to request songs, comment on dishes, and order shots. “They were fascinated they could order drinks without talking to the bartender,” Elwakeel says.

Initially Elwakeel wasn’t so sure about the whole mobile revolution. “My pet peeve is people bringing blackberrys into the restaurant,” he says, pulling out his own to peck at the buttons and imitate a distracted diner. “I thought: how can I turn this into a good thing?”

Testing out twitter on such a large scale was a bit nerve-wracking, Elwakeel admits. “It’s a big risk letting people comment,” he explains, “I can control the food and the atmosphere, but I can’t control new technology.”

But the evening went well, and was successful enough that Nyood is considering planning a similar monthly event. “The only problem was that we were focused on twitter and not the tables,” Elwakeel says, explaining that tweeting added an extra task for a staff already working at break neck speed.

“It was a fun thing,” he says. “But would I do it every night? No.”

BBQ brings foodies online and out of town

Buster Rhino’s Southern BBQ is far, far away from the neighbourhoods Ontario’s resto hot spots usually reside in. The restaurant’s address is 2001 Thickson Road, south of the 401 in Whitby. But a location off eaten path hasn’t stopped Buster Rhino’s from becoming one of the most buzzed about restaurants outside of city limits, or a trending topic amongst Toronto’s tweeting foodies.

In May 2009 Buster Rhino’s owner Darryl Koster signed up for twitter. The former owner of Status Technology, a business that built databases and the back end of websites, Koster knows a lot about the web. When he started tweeting, the messages were mostly about business, but he soon got to know prominent foodies like Joel Solish and Suresh Doss, and the dialogue then turned into a conversation between friends.

This is the most effective way to use the service, Koster says. “If you don’t converse with people on twitter, it won’t work for you,” he says. “You have to interact.”

Koster found the followers he interacted with both online and in his restaurant became friends and vocal advocates, urging others to get out to Whitby and try the BBQ. “Your friends are always the best advocates for you,” he says. “Referrals are always more sincere than advertisements.”

After a few months of interaction, if you are successful, you begin to build up trust with your followers. They know what you post about and are willing to try your suggestions, if you have pleased them in the past. This connection can be much more powerful than the traditional bond between advertiser and consumer. The belief is that unlike advertisers, friends never lie.

To demonstrate how a viral message can directly affect business, Koster refers to a recent tweet he posted stating that the Queen St. restaurant Cowbell has the best burgers he’s ever tasted. Ten people tweeted back asking, Really?! The best?? By the time he tweeted a re-affirmation, thousands of people had seen the conversation and received the message: Cowbell’s burgers are really, really good.

Koster says at least one customer tells him they learned about his business on twitter every single day. Buster Rhino's has also held a series of tastings Koster promotes on twitter, and so far each has sold out. He says he’s fortunate—the local internet has been good to him. He knows other restaurants haven’t been so lucky. Koster refuses to name names, but says he’s seen many restaurants hurt by foodies ranting about them on the web. “I’ve seen several instances on Chow Hound when someone was torn down,” he says.

The only way to influence crowd sourced sites like Chow Hound, or to gain positive chatter on twitter, Koster says, is to treat the crowds right, every time. “Make sure you serve the best food you can and treat all of your customers with respect. That’s just the way to operate a good business,” he says.

Buster's smoked pulled pork, photo snagged from lipsofcrimson on Flickr

@whetmyappetite catches z's on the car ride, also grabbed from Flickr

*Note: Buster Rhino's has a second location, also off the eaten path, at 30 Taunton Rd. E in Oshawa, which opened in February. Please excuse the pun.

Video Chat

Last week Lauren Wilton, Joel Solish, and Mary Luz Mejia sat down with me to talk about how social media has changed the food community. As active community members, bloggers, and tweeters, they've seen the landscape of Toronto's food scene change in recent years.

We talked about how and why they tweet, which restaurants have the best twitter feeds (and food), foodie meet ups, and followers becoming friends.

Meet my video stars

Last Thursday these three made the trek to the Ryerson campus, where I led them down the long dark hallway towards our online computer lair. There they sat down before my video cam and chatted about eating, tweeting, and the like.

I'll post the full video tomorrow, for now, meet my guests:

The Dos and Don'ts of online marketing

It’s Barry Martin’s job to bring food brands online. As head of the advertising agency Hypenotic, Martin develops web strategies for the likes of the Gladstone Hotel, Fiesta Farms, the Ontario Culinary Tourism Alliance, and the Southbrook Vineyards.

At Hypenotic Martin studies each of his clients’ businesses and finds out with it is about them that resonates with their most loyal customers. Hypenotic uses that insight to plan websites, blogs, and video shorts for the brands, hoping to engage current customers and make new ones out of food lovers surfing the web.

Opening up the corporate conversation to the public and finding out what consumers have to say about your business can be daunting for any brand, food-based or not. To help Martin has laid out a few DOs and DON’Ts for online marketing.

DO:

Be authentic: “Balance your promotion, make sure your perspective comes clear and you’re not just broadcasting restaurant specials,” he says. Using the web to communicate with customers is your businesses’ chance to tell its story and connect with people who care about food as much as you do. It’s not just another promotional channel to inundate users with traditional advertising.

Reveal yourself: “Open the kimono,’ Martin says. “Let people see what’s going on in the kitchen. That’s what builds loyalty these days.” When customers come into a restaurant or grocery store, or buy a bottle of wine from a liquor store, they only experience the tip of your business. If you use the web as a channel to share the more intimate details of what you do, customers are more likely to feel a connection to your brand and become long-term shoppers or diners.

Communicate: “Communication on social media is about engaging,” Martin says. “One person has an off palette or comes in a bad mood and everyone who searches on Google ends up reading their rant. You need to get out there and balance that out.” Bad experiences go viral more quickly than good ones, and they are going to go viral whether you respond or not. Responding to customer feedback, both good and bad, gives you a chance to create positive relationships and combat negative reviews.

Turn your best customers into Brand Ambassadors: “Try to turn people into marketers for you instead of trying to do it yourself.” Martin says. Every good business has its most loyal customers. If you can engage them online and have them talk about your business, it will have more impact than trying to broadcast the message yourself.

DON’T:

Talk at users: “Don’t think this is just another chance to broadcast shit people are trying to ignore,” Martin says of social media. “Spend your energy and resources simply looking for an audience.” The web is full of people searching for recipes, food information, restaurant reviews, and local products. Consider what type of customers you have and make sure you have searchable content on the social networks and websites they are already using.

Engage alone: You get out of social media what you put in. Toronto has an engaged and wired food community that is discussing local issues online. By supporting local causes and charities, and involving your business in the events that are taking place to support local food, you have the chance both to create good will and to communicate with food lovers in a space where they are already sharing their passion for food.

Suck: This one is simple. Before you make the jump into the social web make sure you have a quality product people will want to share with their friends and followers. “The era of projecting at people, trying to get their attention and tricking them into trying your product is over,” Martin says, adding that when consumers have a bad experience with a brand, it quickly goes viral. “They can pass on that you suck really easily,” he says.

Separate online and offline activity: “The conclusion of social media not online,” Martin says. “These initiatives should lead to people meeting in real life.” Use social media to promote offline events where your customers can meet other people with a passion for food. Every event you participate in will have a halo effect online if guests have a good time and return home to talk about it on social networks.

A taste of Chinatown

Every few weeks our Online Journalism class is sent out to a new location to take a two hour journalistic photograph. This week Chinatown was our destination. While I sat in our air condition school news lab, my team of mobile reporters ascended on the restaurants and food shops along Spadina Ave. and up Dundas St., tasting everything they could.

The (multi-media!) results are as follows.

Hankering to expand our palettes, we took to the streets with empty stomachs and open minds to see what Toronto’s Chinatown had to offer. What we found were tasty and terrifying possibilities at every turn . From dried seafood to bubble tea and $2 dim sum, the district’s got something for every curious foodie. Here’s our list of the day’s weird and wonderful discoveries:

What: Durian fruit
Where: Hua-Sheng Supermarket, 293-299 Spadina Ave.
How much: $0.99 for 1lb, $2.99 for a frozen packet.
Smells like rotting fruit. The taste? Not what you’d expect. It’s off-sweet, with a hint of savoury. The texture is similar to that of a mango – soft and gooey.
Would we try it again? Maybe, if we were mentally prepared for the surprising flavour of that first bite.

What: Avocado milkshake
Where: Trung Tam Giai Khat Bubble Tea Shop, 449 Dundas St. W.
How much: $2.99 for a small milkshake.
Tastes like an un-salted avocado, in milkshake form. We didn’t see how it was made, but there’s definitely some dairy in there. Not as sweet as your typical milkshake, and the tapioca bubbles at the bottom threw a few of our taste buds off.
Would we try it again? We’re gonna stick with avocado in salads or in sushi. An extreme avocado lover might go for this, though.

What: Whole, dried sardines.
Where: ShunHing Dried Seafood, Ginseng & Herbs, 469 Dundas St. W
How much: Free (they wouldn’t sell us just one… apparently people buy these in bulk?)
This tastes exactly like it smells—awful. Be careful not to get the tail stuck in your molars, and try not to look these little guys in the eye while you’re scarfing them down.
Would we try it again? Hell no.

What: Aloe Vera Water / Young Coconut Juice w. pulp
Where: Hua-Sheng Supermarket, 293-299 Spadina Ave.
How much: $0.99 for a bottle.
If you can get past the clear globules floating around in the bottle, the Aloe water actually tastes pretty good—kind of like a tangy grape juice. We can only imagine the wonders it did on our post-weekend, booze-burned throats. The coconut juice, on the other hand, tasted far less like a pina colada than we’d hoped: its chunky texture turned us off.
Would we try it again? Aloe, yes. Coco-NOT.

What: $2 dollar dim sum.
Where: Bright Pearl Restaurant, 346 Spadina Ave.
How much: $12.57 for the four of us.
After braving the aforementioned samplings, we decided to treat ourselves to a much-needed feast. And feast we did, for a price that none of us (except Derek, practically a Bright Pearl VIP) could believe. We ordered some steamed sticky rice with meat in banana leaves; shrimp dumplings and rice noodles; and delicious steamed buns with BBQ pork. We left feeling satisfied, and no more broke than we were when we entered.
Would we try it again? We’ve made plans to return this weekend.

By Taylor McKinnon, Sian Lloyd, Jessica de Melo, Derek Kreindler and Russ Martin





For our photo slideshow, click here.

Finding fellow foodies online

Joel Solish has a hard and fast rule for dining out: no one eats until a picture of each plate has been taken. This documentation is common among well-wired food lovers, who share pictures and critiques of each meal eaten out with their fellow foodie followers on twitter and the blogosphere.

Solish opened his twitter account last February, fresh out of his corporate tourism job and new to work as a marketing freelancer. He says it offered the perfect distraction. He chose the handle @Foodie411 because he says he’d become a personal Yellow Pages for friends looking restaurant recommendations, and wanted to connect with other foodies online.

It wasn’t hard to find foodies to talk to. Soon after joining he started jumping in on conversations about local restaurants, farmers markets, and hot button issues, like factory farms. After attending a #meetup bake-off, Solish started hanging out with food tweeters on a regular basis.

Of the bake-off, Solish says, “It was incredible. It was the first time I met so many people that I interact with on a daily basis.” In December, he decided to host a meet up of his own, and tweeted an open invitation to Toronto’s foodies to attend a meat themed pot-lock at his home near Bathurst and Dupont using the tag #meetluck.

Now Solish is hooked. He’s got to know Doss and Chiu, who organize #foodiemeet, as well as other meet up regulars, a group whose tastes are so similar that only a match-making service like twitter could have brought them together. “They’re my friends. I’ll participate in anything they do,” he says. “That’s the thing twitter has been so successful with: pointing out who you should be hanging out with.”

Solish’s love of food began early. Every Friday night when he was a young boy, Solish’s parents would drop him off at his grandmother’s house, where he would stand in the kitchen for hours in awe as she cooked without ever consulting a recipe. “That’s where the passion came from,” he says. “And it’s nice to connect with people as an adult that share that passion.”

“It gives you an inner calm to be around people who are the same as you,” he says. “You don’t have to explain yourself. They get it.”