Post script paper calls

Post script: just when I thought it was time to bring out the dinner mints, the Star called. They read my food article on Rabble and asked if I'd write a news piece for their paper. On the cover of tomorrow's living section, and on the web today, here she is: Using the web to find a foodie near you.

The last supper

All this waiting has been enough to make my stomach growl. So as I flip on my stove’s front element and set it to high, prepping dinner, I think to myself: it’s about time.

Three months ago I wrote, “This is the first of many meals to be discussed, dissected, and devoured.” Well, each course of my meal is finished. This morning with the click of a mouse my final feature at j-school went up on Rabble.

I set out to discover the dining set in Toronto that has moved onto the web. Bloggers, restaurant owners, chefs, and critics invited me into their world. Morning meetings brought the best coffee that has swam over my underdeveloped taste buds. Evenings meant dinners or a drink at an industry event.

I visited old restaurants and consumed new media. Each day I’d wake up to a full feed of the new foodies I’d started to follow on twitter. But the semester has come and gone, and with it my story. Another copy, with the photos posted here, will run in Futureale come May—along with Lauren’s column on Cowbell’s butchery sessions.

If we have to bring out the dinner mints (though Lauren says they ruin the good dining taste) now is the time. The marks are in, the story is up; I’m pleased with what I’ve done.

Thanks to all that picked up my calls, sat in front of my camera; offered interest and answered questions. In a city so easy to get lost in, this community is undeniably tight knit and vibrant.

To all the food friends I’ve made over this semester: I’ll see you on twitter.

*all photos are by Ryan Couldrey

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.”

Cupcakes corner the men's market

Mancakes? Here’s a trend I can get behind. Bacon, beer, and other bro favourites dominate the flavour and designs of the mancakes showing up on bakery shelves, says a trend piece in last week’s Gazette.

Online ordering sites and bakeries specializing in cupcakes for men are quickly popping up. They serve Rum and Cokes and Old Fashions for the men, Bob the Builder decals for the boys.

“Of course, nobody's seriously suggesting baked goods are gendered. But by riffing on sexual stereotypes, business owners have uncovered a rich new market for cupcakes with cojones,”
Carolyn Dobbe writes.

Manly? Maybe. But I’ve got to tell you: this sounds pretty gay.

Via Toronto Life:

The Drake turns Japanese

Watching what’s Big In Japan is a good way to track tech trends that may make their way West in the coming weeks and months. Take a stroll through Tokyo today and you’ll find black and white boxes filled with thick pixels on everything from poster ads to take out containers.

The boxes are QR codes, short for quick read, which mobile phone users can scan. The codes lead to links, offering product information and promotions. Designed in 1994 by Denso, a Japanese car parts manufacturer, QR codes have spread through Asia and many European cities.

Canada hasn’t been so quick to take to the codes. In 2008 Vespa used the codes in Toronto based ad campaign, but the adoption hasn’t been widespread. Soon though, we will see QR codes in our city, in the lounge of the Drake Hotel.

In addition to the hotel’s presence on twitter, Facebook, and foursquare, the Drake will soon start a QR program, which will allow guests to scan a posted code and become eligible for perks like free coffee or a line bypass, says Drake marketing manager Jenn Godbout.

Godbout, whose job it is to respond to both criticism and praise of the Drake on the local web, says adopting new technologies is part of the hotel’s larger plan to stay ingrained in Toronto’s tech community. The Drake has also hosted several social media talks and meetups and even had an evening of PowerPoint Karaoke.

“We love to jump on the bandwagon for new technology,” Godbout says. “It’s a big part of our brand. It’s important we stay not just in the game, but ahead of it.”

Hear that, Japan?

via: nexklix.com

via: Cliffano.com

Tweets of the week

Twitter allows you to take the pulse of a community at any given time. Check trending topics, influencer's feeds, and the back-and-forth conversation between your favourite foodie tweeters and you can find out everything from where the cool kids are brunching to what the Olympians are eating.

Between February 10 and 17 the chatter was largely about last Tuesday's Eat Drink and Give, Valentine's dinner date reservations, Olympic ceremonies and sports, and unbizarrely, bacon. Sample the week that was, below.

@ChefBangerter reminded followers Feb is heart month

Celeb @ChefMichaelSmth hit the Olympic sized #10,000 meal mark in Vancouver

@BusterRhinosBBQ had its own suggestion for an Olympic sport

And also tweeted some words about buying local

Foodies and industry folk alike flocked to a successful Eat Drink Give (via @TOfoodie)

@Mcutrara brought a farmer from Haiti to speak at the event

Couples across the city dined in near darkness. Chef's wives stayed home. Alone. (via @IvyKnight)

New Years celebrations were cause for cheap Chinese @LaurenDorphin

And lastly, your basic bacon-talk roundup, via @foodie411, @ortdavid, and @TOfoodie. The verdict? Bacon's better than everything but penetration.

Eating with the enemy

A few years back I had not-so-loved professor who was studying the blogosphere. She posed to us a question: where are all the reporter notebooks? The web is full of fact and opinion, but few journalists have used the weblog format to showcase the process of writing an article.

Any feature worth it's first few words is only a snapshot of the stacks of printed papers, scribbled up pads, tapes, and photographs that went into the final product. In an effort to showcase the individual stories of the people I interview for my final feature in my final year at Ryerson, I'm posting everything I can.

To that un-named prof: here it is, my reporter's notebook. Follow me as I'm dive into Toronto's food community and see how social media has changed its local culture. Expect posts throughout the spring on everything from my favourite Tweets to interview notes.

Content may be simulcast with Close Your Eyes--russless.blogspot.com and Ryerson In the Moment--ryerson2010.posterous.com.

The rest is as follows.