Eating their way through Boston with BeantownEats

Click for photos from an evening at Oak Long Bar + Kitchen, recommended by BeantownEats bloggers.

Boston is a city full of numerous restaurants, fun bars and delicious food. Because of this, the city is home to many food bloggers, but none do it quite like BeantownEats. The website, which covers food and drink, was created by Jon Berkowitz, a graphic and Web designer, and Lindsey “Lin” Lavoie, a physicist by day and blogger by night. Berkowitz and Lavoie, a couple living in Boston, strive to bring the latest in Boston food and drink, including restaurant and bar reviews, as well as different recipes.

The website was created in March of 2010, Berkowitz said, after the couple had decided to share a list of their favorite restaurants with each other.

“Somehow from that act and our love of dining out became the idea of BeantownEats.com,” Berkowitz explained.

Berkowitz’s background in graphic design led to a relatively easy creation of their website on WordPress.

“It was the logo design and colors that took some time,” Lavoie said, as they wanted to focus on attractive colors that complimented each other, not a typical Boston color like red of the Red Sox.

Although social media wasn’t a main concern when Berkowitz and Lavoie first developed their website, they recognized the importance that social media had on gaining the popularity their site sees today.

“At first, we weren’t really looking to get our website popular,” Lavoie said, “it was mainly for us to share our dining experiences with our friends and families. We quickly realized how important Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are.”

Despite an initial lack of interest in gaining popularity, they quickly saw success. One month after launching their site, Berkowitz and Lavoie received their first invitation to a dinner event.

“Since then, the number of invitations has steadily grown as our followers and familiarity has increased,” Lavoie said.

Attending free dinners and events is not the focus of BeantownEats, just a perk of the website.

“We are not able to attend every event due to our work schedules, and we really try to only attend those that we think our readers would want to know about,” Lavoie said, as they focus on creating a quality website.

Lavoie also explained that when her and Berkowitz are invited to an event, they make it clear that it doesn’t mean they will be writing a review on their website. This is because they don’t like posting negative reviews; they want their website to focus on good places to eat in Boston and what bars have great cocktails. It isn’t simply restaurant reviews, so they don’t want to promote a restaurant they weren’t satisfied with.

Independent food bloggers like Berkowitz and Lavoie, are becoming big contributors to restaurant reviews, but BeantownEats “tries to only focus on the positive experiences,” Lavoie said.

“We don’t consider ourselves food critics,” Lavoid said. “Instead, we simply want to share with our readers the places that we have enjoyed and would recommend. I think most people with food blogs and websites realize that a negative review can have a real impact on a business and we keep that in mind when we write our opinions.” Lavoie said. This is why BeantownEats doesn’t carry a review on every restaurant they go to.

This attention and care that goes into selecting restaurants to review is why Rebecca Traverse, a graduate from the Culinary Institute of America and baker at Flour Bakery and Café, is an avid reader of BeantownEats.

“Finding a great restaurant can be hard; there are a lot of good or decent restaurants, but you never know if it’s going to be great,” Traverse said.

“I’ve come to trust the reviews on BeantownEats, I’ve tried out new restaurants based on their reviews and none of them have let me down so far,” she added.

Although Berkowitz and Lavoie have a relatively large group of followers, with over 2,200 on Twitter, and constantly receive dinner invitations, they have yet to sell any ad space on their site.

“We have always been open to the idea of advertising if it was for a local product that made sense to be on our website,” Lavoie said, but they haven’t found the right advertiser.

“We love supporting local products that people in Boston know and can find. After all, the website is dedicated to the city,” Lavoie added.

Despite fully enjoying their experiences with BeantownEats, both Berkowitz and Lavoie have full-time jobs, so the website can get to be a bit much.

“At times, it can be very tough and a bit demanding,” Berkowitz said.

“There are times where we are just too busy with work and our personal lives that we get overwhelmed and need to take a step back with BeantownEats stuff. We never want to get burnt out from our website and always want to have fun with it,” he added.

Berkowitz and Lavoie have tried many restaurants throughout the city, but there is one that sticks out to both of them: Clio.

“We went there over the summer for my birthday dinner and it was the best meal I’ve had thus far,” Lavoie said.

“For those that have yet to experience a Todd Maul and Ken Oringer evening, I urge you to give Clio a try,” Berkowitz added.

Food blogging is becoming a popular tool for restaurant reviews and ideas. Watch the video below for a look at how people within the restaurant industry feel about these bloggers. 

Social media and the ‘aporkalypse’

When Britain’s National Pig Association put out a press release stating that a bacon shortage was unavoidable for next year, the social media world went into a tailspin. People took to their computers and smart phones to post their concerns over a lack of bacon. News stations released articles about the horrors of a lack of bacon at the breakfast table- but was this really the issue? The answer is no.

One press release, intended to ease Brit’s fears over rising prices in bacon, turned out to be a major story. People almost immediately accepted the validity of the press release, and did little research into the issue at large. It seemed that once people saw ‘bacon shortage’ it was all they could think of.

I created a storify on the issue; I documented the various levels of concern people had for the issue, as well as news pieces on the topic. I included tweets and Facebook posts, as supplements to the news articles. I also included articles, published more recently, that explain why this bacon shortage has been misconstrued.

The major issue of this story concerns crop failure and drought; it has little to do with pork and pig supply, except the obvious fact that pigs eat crop supplies. The crop failures and drought is an issue that people had been warned about, yet it barely resonated, as they had yet to see the effects of it. It wasn’t until it was linked to pigs that people really saw the impact.

The storify that I created shows the problems that can arise with social media. While it can often be a great tool in the spreading of information, it is this quality that can also hinder society. People need to be more weary of what they read on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Stories can often get twisted or exaggerated, as people have very little limitations when they take to their computers.

To learn more about the issue, read my storify here.