There was a time when enjoying a meal meant sitting down with friends and family, sharing tales from life's rich pageant. "That type of dining is dead," says David Skonting, director of the Northeast Ohio New Media Foodie Club. "Sure, dining is still about sharing a meal with people, connecting with others, but we're advocating doing so on a much bigger scale."
Skonting and his cronies spend as much time with iPhones and Blackberries in their hands as they do knives and forks. The club's members are encouraged to bring laptops, so that every moment of a meal can be recorded and posted to the Internet's annals of anonymous dining. Others rely on their mobile devices, providing Twitter and Facebook updates as the meal progresses. "Checking in with FourSquare was just the beginning," says Louis Daley, who will open what he calls a "cyber gastropub" this fall in Avon. "We are planning an aggressive Swarm marketing campaign." Twitter subscribers can earn the much-coveted FourSquare Swarm tag by luring large groups to certain destinations at the same time. Daley says that Twitter followers who participate in "swarms" at his restaurant will be rewarded with complimentary cocktail napkins and extra ice cubes in their water.
The Swarm tactic provides a solid group of customers, but creates havoc for staff members. "Of course, we love the business, and we love the tips," says a host from a popular restaurant who preferred to remain anonymous. "Unfortunately, it negates much of the efforts we make in terms of scheduling to avoid huge influxes of patrons. Our primary goal is to provide excellent service, and having 50 people arrive at once, playing on their computers and Blackberries disrupts the entire restaurant."
However, NONMFC members disagree, pointing out that business is business, and restaurants should be grateful for the coverage and reward them for dining there. "We're basically the new food critics," says Samantha Brawn. "We talk about the food and tell the chefs who we are. We take pictures and post them on our blogs. This is great publicity for the restaurant, and I've had many chefs apologize after I've posted about bad dining experiences.
"The restaurants need us; the chefs need to reach out to us, offering us special dining experiences, so we have something to write about." Not to be outdone, traditional media–advocates are jumping in on the action, albeit in a way they know how.
Every Sunday, the Paper Boys, a new social group dedicated to the preservation of print media, meet at a local eatery or coffeehouse, and bring copies of various Sunday newspaper editions. "Our numbers are really growing and certainly holding strong," says Paper Boys founder Richard Dullard. "This so-called 'new media' will never replace the print product, it's just a fad. We'd just as soon ignore the whole thing." At the time of writing, the group had six members, with no new applicants in two months.
For more information, look around the Internet. [Photo by Kevin Nortz]
