Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Which chefs should you follow on Twitter?
Posted
by Jonathan Bender on
Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 12:00 PM
While the actual use of Twitter has yet to be uncovered, it can be as valuable a time suck as YouTube given the right search parameters and some interesting people to follow. So Fat City jumped into the Twitterverse to find out which chefs are worthy of the time you devote to procrastination.
The criteria were simple. The authors all had to be chefs. The tweets had to feel like they were being written by the author. And they had to be interesting for at least consecutive days. Here are our recommendations:
Grant Achatz -- owner and chef at
Alinea in Chicago. He tends to have quirky observations about diners, life in the kitchen and what he's cooking.
Popeyes Chicken. Just making sure you're still reading. It's always strange when a restaurant has the disembodied voice of a hipster.
IvyStark. The executive chef at
Dos Caminos in New York City. Her feed reads like a friend who just happens to be a much better chef than you.
LA Weekly also has a
list of Los Angeles-area chefs on Twitter and the
Kansas City Star profiled
local chefs with Twitter accounts last month. The difficult aspect is wading through the marketing language (appearances, new products and promotional tie-ins) and finding somebody who manages to avoid over- or under-use of what is essentially an online messaging service. Tweets are so short, yet it seems easy to alienate a reading audience fairly quickly.
Food Network Humor suggests that
followers are revolting in the wake of chef Tyler Florence's overuse of Twitter.
After looking at dozens of feeds, all we found to recommend was these three chefs. And maybe that's the moral of Twitter -- posting and reading tweets is a matter of personal taste, but you'll probably always ignore more than you read.
[Image via Flickr: tashmahal]
Tags: chefs, Christopher Kimball, Grant Achatz, twitter
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