eHistory

[Holly Moore]

Happened upon this while wandering Google:

INDEPENDENT FOOD SITES BAND TOGETHER IN NEW EGULLET.COM COMMUNITY

The smartest local restaurant reviews and food guides, together in one

place for the first time

New York, NY -- August 1, 2001 /Xpress Press/ - Question: Where can you

find all the best local and regional food information, and then talk about

it? Answer: eGullet.com, the Internet's fastest growing gourmet community,

now including Fat-Guy.com, Food Bytes®, Mamster's Grubshack, The Food

Store London, Holly Eats, and more.

Scores of local, independent restaurant guide Web sites have long served

their communities, acting as the sophisticated gourmet's alternative to

the big, generic, impersonal national and international cityguide sites.

But despite their excellence and superiority, there was no way for the

little guys to compete in the marketplace, what with the superior

geographical coverage of the conglomerates. Until now.

The eGullet.com community, officially launched on August 1, 2001, brings

together the best independent food sites from around the world, and throws

one more ingredient into the mix: Message boards for each of the world's

major gourmet regions, hosted by the creators of the affiliate sites for

those regions. The eGullet.com discussion community also includes message

boards for cooking and recipes, wine and spirits, and more.

MEET EGULLET.COM's CHARTER AFFILIATES AND HOSTS

NEW YORK (Steven A. Shaw a/k/a The Fat-Guy)

Steven is a New York-based food writer, lawyer and publisher of

www.Fat-Guy.com. His writings appear in Gotham, Hamptons, Commentary and

other magazines. He has hosted the New York Times dining and wine

discussion forums for three years. You can hear his on-air restaurant

reviews each Thursday on WNEW 102.7 FM on the Ron & Fez show. At

eGullet.com, he hosts the Restaurants, Dining and Travel New York and

About Fat-Guy.com boards.

NEW JERSEY (Rosie Saferstein)

Rosie is a New Jersey Monthly columnist on the internet at

www.njmonthly.com ("Table Hopping with Rosie"), creator of Food

Bytes® (www.foodbytes2.com) and founder of perhaps the first-ever Internet

food discussion community. She created Food Bytes® in 1990, before most

people had even heard of the Internet or e-mail. She hosts eGullet.com's

Restaurants, Dining and Travel New Jersey and About Food Bytes® boards.

PENNSYLVANIA (Holly Moore)

Holly runs the HollyEats (www.hollyeats.com) Philadelphia-based site. He

wrote a column on food and restaurants for 14 years for Philadelphia's

City Paper, and did the "Dinner and a Movie" segment on Michaela Majoun's

Morning Show on WXPN radio. He holds a degree in hotel/restaurant

management from Cornell University. Once a McDonald's employee, he was

involved in the development of the Big Mac. He opened and ran Holly

Moore's Upstairs Cafe during Philadelphia's Restaurant Renaissance and

taught the business management courses at the Philadelphia Restaurant

School in the Eighties. He hosts eGullet.com's Restaurants, Dining and

Travel Pennsylvania and About Holly Eats boards.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST (Matthew Amster-Burton)

Matthew is the creator of Mamster's Grub Shack (www.grubshack.com), a food

site with an emphasis on the Pacific Northwest. He has written for, among

others, the San Francisco Chronicle, Addicted to Noise, and Extra!, and is

also a neighborhood restaurant critic and food writer for the Seattle

Times. He hosts eGullet.com's Restaurants, Dining and Travel Pacific

Northwest and About Grubshack boards.

UNITED KINGDOM (Andy Lynes)

Andy is a self-proclaimed "incorrigible food evangelist" and publisher of

The Food Store (www.alynes.freeserve.co.uk/contents.html). He was the

first-ever British competitor in the Sofitel Amateur Chef of the Year held

in Lyon on 2000, when he collaborated with Bruce Poole of Chez Bruce on

the competition dish. He has apprenticed in the kitchens of Jean

Christophe Novelli, Henry Harris (Fifth Floor), Matthew Harris (Bibendum),

Tim Powell (Le Pont De La Tour), Paul Rankin, Robbie Millar (Shanks

restaurant, Bangor Northern Ireland), Alex Aitken (Le Poussin,

Brockenhurst), Alex Floyd (Leiths), Shaun Hill and Tom Coohill

(Ciboulette, Atlanta Georgia). He hosts eGullet.com's Restaurants, Dining

and Travel United Kingdom and About The Food Store boards.

WORLD FOOD (Ellen R. Shapiro)

An intrepid travel writer and photographer, Ellen (www.byellen.com) is the

author of three books including New York City With Kids (Prima 2001) and

former Senior Editor of Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine and "Off

the Beaten Path" columnist for Condé Nast's Concierge.com. She has

journeyed to the four corners of the globe in search of unusual

destinations and unique travel experiences. She has written for major

national travel publications about, among other things, wineries in South

Africa, New Zealand and British Columbia; trekking in the Nepal Himalayas;

Michelin three-star dining in Europe; climbing Mount Kilimanjaro; SCUBA

diving all over the world; journeying overland through Africa;

archaeological digs in the Mideast; Southeast Asian cuisine and culture;

cooperative camping in Alaska; and solo dining and travel for women. She

is a PADI SCUBA Divemaster, nature photographer and Sierra Club

backpacking trip leader. She hosts eGullet.com's Restaurants, Dining and

Travel Off the Beaten Path board.

The brainchild of former culinary student André Brujon (eGullet Founder)

and technology writer Jason Perlow (eGullet Community Director), the

rapidly expanding eGullet.com community will announce several additional

affiliates, covering the world's major gastronomic regions and issues,

throughout the remainder of the year. "We are also currently in talks with

affiliates for France, California, Canada and elsewhere, as well as for

Wine, Travel and Cooking," says Perlow. "We expect the community will grow

to 15-20 affiliates by the end of this year, covering most major culinary

regions and topics."

"Jason Perlow, Steven Shaw and I were talking a while back and we observed

that in most every city in the food-civilized world there is an

independent site that beats the pants off CitySearch and the other

conglomerates in terms of the quality, personality, credibility and depth

of its content," says Brujon, explaining the birth of eGullet.com. "But

how can such a regional site compete with the behemoths? We needed, in

essence, a conglomerate of our own. But then how to have a cartel, a

union, what have you, but still maintain the individual personality and

idiosyncrasy of each site? The answer was to create a function outside the

individual sites (interactive message boards) that all would share, but to

not alter any of the individual sites in the least. I pictured a wagon

wheel, with a great site at the end of each spoke and eGullet.com as a hub

lending strength and support. Thus the eGullet.com community was born!"

"I was also dissatisfied with the state of food discussion on the

Internet," Brujon continues. "On the one hand, there is Usenet, which is a

nice technology but is subject to so much unregulated spam that it can be

unpleasant. It is also slow, and has bad archiving. On the other hand,

there are several food message boards out there but I've been troubled by

their tendencies towards censorship and clannishness in some cases, and,

in other cases, bad software. The nice thing about eGullet.com is that it

is truly a community of multiple users and multiple hosts, and is

therefore never at risk of being directed by the personality of just one

person."

"Technology-wise," says Perlow, "we are the most advanced food discussion

site by a significant margin. Our highly customized implementation of the

Ikonboard discussion forum software, combined with out leading edge

servers, gives us a big edge in terms of usability. The eGullet.com boards

offer the following features, among hundreds of others: The ability to see

all new messages since the last time you logged on. User registration to

protect against spammers and to allow e-mail notification whenever a new

post replies to one of yours. Advanced sorting and searching capabilities

-- e.g., threads are dynamically resorted, with the most recent thread to

have received a new post appearing first. The ability to insert HTML links

and other cool graphics stuff into posts. Editability and deletability of

messages. Users can conceal their e-mail addresses from others, or reveal

addresses and other information. Sophisticated statistics and

administration features. An attractive and efficient graphical interface.

In short, everything most discussion board systems don't offer."

With plans to offer live chats, food news, multimedia and more,

eGullet.com promises quickly to become the destination of choice for all

those who are serious about food.

eGullet.com: Read. Chew. Discuss.

[prasantrin]

It's a shame so many of the original participants no longer participate, but it's interesting to read how the site began.

[Peter the eater]

Thanks Holly, fascinating.

[Andrew Fenton]

It's a shame so many of the original participants no longer participate, but it's interesting to read how the site began.

Yes, Andre Brujon is particularly missed...