Hype and Anti-Hype

For three days this week, a New York based blog by the name of Snack has been canvassing the restaurant industry with the question: These days, is it still possible to have a stealth restaurant opening?

The question was first posed to the city’s chefs and restaurateurs
Then the PR machine
And finally, the media.

In a nutshell, the general consensus was an emphatic "no". Colman Andrews of Gourmet magazine summed it up this way:

"Short answer: No, I don't think it's possible to have a stealth opening in New York City. Something like seven out of every ten New Yorkers apparently has a restaurant blog, and they've got the city covered. Unveil a storefront anywhere in Manhattan with tables and chairs set up inside and I guarantee you that within half an hour somebody will be knocking at the door asking what kind of restaurant you have and when it's going to open. Half an hour after that, it'll be on restaurantnerd.com."

Andrews was referring of course to the numerous restaurant obsessed blogs in the city such as Eater.com and restaurantgirl who aggressively pursue a game of one upmanship, with information about new restaurant openings being the booty and the status of being “first leaker� as the ultimate prize.

Long gone are the times when it was enough to have the first review of a restaurant out in print. These days, the quest for new restaurant sightings is a full time job with bloggers who are on the scent grilling site construction workers, city licensing clerks, retail leasing agents, wine salesmen and suppliers in order to get any whiff of new restaurant activity. Some drive around the city for hours every day looking for suspicious building or renovation activity, others even maintain stake outs in front of boarded up restaurants waiting for the nanosecond that the plywood comes down in order to rush in to take photos.

As one restaurant owner joked: “Last night I had a dream about opening a new restaurant in Queens. When I woke up I had to log on to my computer to see if [Eater] had already posted it.“

Another, not joking, remarked: “We started peeling off the brown paper that was attached to the inside of the front window pane, and here is this guy, on the sidewalk side, already set up with a video cam and ready to press the lens against the glass. I felt like a voyeur had caught me in my bedroom with my pants down.�

The pressure of all this attention seems to dividing the restaurateurs into two lines of reaction. Those who try to hide from it by keeping the street front construction plywood nailed up until every last napkin has been crisply folded, and who make construction workers and suppliers sign non-disclosure agreements – an impossible task, really. To those, like the restaurant in the picture above, who try to turn the situation around to their advantage. We’ve even heard of public relations firms that disguise their own people as construction workers and have them wait around the sites for the bloggers to show up so they can hand feed them their own select bits of information. Apparently they’ve never had to wait long.

Personally we are waiting for April 1st when some restaurant using this last control method gives absolutely conflicting information to the various web tipsters. No doubt it would make an interesting form of online, social commentary-style, performance art.

Which begs the question here, are things this bad yet in Vancouver? We’d say yes and no. There are still many local restaurants that go virtually ignored and who have to hang bunting in their windows for attention, but they tend to be in the suburbs. With the surplus of new media in this town (both online and print), the mood of competition has noticeably intensified, with most new downtown restaurant venues now subjected to a media dogpile and seeing “first news� about them proudly flaunted on websites like freshly bagged trophies.

Perhaps the only new restaurant connected to a well known chef that has managed to sneak under the radar for a significant length of time before discovery was Crave. And that was because chef and owner Wayne Martin initially did nothing to change either the exterior or the interior of the restaurant, but instead, quietly went to work solo in the restaurant kitchen.

The bird-watching of restaurants may be an fascinating game, but in the end it’s all about staying power. And for that, relationships will have to be built because the chatteratti will always flock off answering the call of the newest, latest and shiniest. Of all the new restaurants that opened in Vancouver since late 2006, it’s going to be interesting to see who is still around, or even talked about a year from now.