Q+A: Serena Dai, Editor of Eater New York

Interviewed by Allegra Hobbs

Study Hall: Under your leadership, Eater New York has executed some impressive investigative pieces on the restaurant industry, most notably on the accusations of sexual misconduct against Mario Batali. I feel that piece really sparked the ongoing important conversation about abuse and toxicity in restaurant culture. Can you talk a little about how that piece came about? Did you anticipate the chain reaction of industry revelations that followed?

Serena Dai: I think when all the Harvey Weinstein coverage came out, lots of people in the restaurant industry knew that shoes would start dropping in our corner of the world, too. Brett Anderson’s groundbreaking John Besh coverage ran shortly after, though he started work on it long before Weinstein news broke, and that kind of really set things off. The truth is that I was on high alert — I wanted Eater New York to be prioritizing shining a light on harassment in the industry. Covering restaurants means looking at the culture, and how people treat their staff is such a big part of that.

When the #MeToo movement started, Mario Batali was the first name I’d heard as someone whose behavior could have been a problem. One day, we highlighted a comment Batali had made about his Del Posto female staff where he pretty crudely referred to their genitalia. Immediately, our readers started publicly commenting on our Facebook about what they’d heard about him. One of them even ended up connecting our reporter Irene Plagianos with a primary source for the story. Because of those rumors and the cultural environment, I took the Facebook comments seriously. Plus, I trust our readers; they frequently send us reliable tips.

We have a tiny staff (at the time, the news staff on Eater New York was me and one other full-timer, plus two critics), and right off the bat, I asked to hire a freelance reporter to work on the story, who ended up being Irene. I’m incredibly lucky that our editor-in-chief Amanda Kludt wanted to invest. We weren’t initially positive the allegations were credible, so we paid Irene by the hour to just report and see what people were saying. It was a situation where even though she never mentioned Batali in her initial emails to former staffers, nearly everybody mentioned him as someone with a reputation for treating women inappropriately.

I can’t say that I anticipated the chain reaction — you never know what will happen. Despite everything, it’s still very difficult for people to come forward. There’s still a lot of fear of retaliation, and the women and men who have spoken to us are, in my opinion, pioneers.

Still, a shift is definitely happening, and it’s perhaps one that should have happened long ago. I’m grateful that people are finally taking misconduct allegations seriously and am hopeful that the conversation will continue. Particularly in New York, diners care about where their food is coming from; farm-to-table, seasonal fare is such a big thing. Shouldn’t we also take an interest in a restaurant’s ethos on how they treat the humans on staff in addition to the animals and vegetables that land on plates?

Do you feel it changed the way Eater is perceived as a reporting vehicle — as an outlet that breaks big news relevant outside the food industry? Do you feel that in turn has changed the way food reporting is perceived in general?

To answer that first question, I certainly hope so! Food media involves a lot of access journalism, and even after ENY published the Batali story, we still had restaurant owners, chefs, and PR people asking us for favors and changes as if we were their mouthpiece. But I think readers and lots of restaurant staff now see us as a place to go that will take tough issues within the industry seriously — whether it’s about misconduct or other things, like labor and discrimination. More and more tips have come in, and I do think it’s in large part because we’ve shown that we’re not afraid to publish damning information about beloved restaurants, if it’s warranted.

I don’t think ENY’s work alone is shifting perception of food reporting overall, but I like to think it’s helping to move the needle. Food media is frequently relegated to “lifestyle,” which has a reputation for being soft, positive, and increasingly, an Instagram enterprise. While there’s nothing inherently wrong about that, restaurants are a huge business, and they deserve the same amount of scrutiny and analysis that other industries like business and tech receive.

Part of the conversation following Anthony Bourdain’s death was about his curious, empathetic approach to food journalism that made it about so much more than food — I feel this is often the case, that with good food writing the work is often about more than simply food. What do you feel food journalism is ultimately about?

Restaurants are such a rich industry to cover — I think the beat can be about so many things: politics, business, identity, labor, the environment, tech, and the way food itself tastes and where to eat the best shit. Locally, restaurants are a part of the pulse of a city and can be such community centers. They also play such a huge role in real estate and the way a neighborhood functions. And particularly with international cuisines, the way a restaurant tells the story of the food they make impacts how diners will understand the country and people where that food originates. The culture and people behind the food can’t really be separated from the food itself.

Ultimately, the bread and butter of what Eater does is restaurant openings and closings, but the underlying thread for everything is that food is always about more than just food. I realize I sound very serious here, so I’ll add that the best part about covering food is that it’s a space where you can have fun and indulge in ridiculousness and delight, too, another thing I think Bourdain really got. I think it’s that intersection of joy and cultural consequence that makes it such a fulfilling beat.

Have you seen approaches to food writing and reporting change in notable ways during your time at Eater?

Eater has always taken an edgier, take-no-prisoners approach to food media. For years, before my time, food photos were even banned from appearing on the site. The idea was that all the other blogs just posted crappy photos of food, whereas Eater moved beyond food and focused on the minutiae and overall culture of dining out. To this day, we try to approach restaurants as a universe where individual restaurants don’t just stand alone, but add to a bigger narrative about the city and what it means to be eating out today. But I’d say since starting as a reporter a few years ago, Eater New York has become more and more general interest. Eater’s audience has always been dining obsessives, but now, that phrase encompasses a far broader group of people and we’ve had to adjust as such.

What were your goals when you became editor at Eater New York?

My main goals were pretty simple: to break news and to contextualize everything more. Like I mentioned earlier, Eater’s core is restaurant openings and closings, and the biggest thing I wanted to instill in my team was that we need to “placemake” everything. Who are these people opening it? What’s their goal? What’s their backstory? How do they fit into our dining universe? What impact does it have on the surrounding neighborhood? Is it part of a trend? And why should we care? It sounds basic, but we go at a very fast pace and it can be easy to lose track of what we are trying to do. The logic was that this also helps broaden our audience because we’re doing our best to assume that not everyone knows the ins and outs the way that we do. In doing so, we hopefully are convincing more people that they should care about what we care about. It’s hard to tell if this exact strategy has worked, but traffic has definitely significantly gone up.

I never could have predicted the ripple effect of the #MeToo movement and how we could play a part in it, though. That’s been fucking wild and intense, and I think it’s helped us grow tremendously. Not only has it brought in people who perhaps had never heard of Eater, but it has raised the standards within our team on the kind of work we expect from ourselves.

You were featured on an episode of David Chang’s Netflix show “Ugly Delicious,” which is awesome — how was being on the show? How did that come about?

It was really fun, and kind of surreal! I never imagined that Netflix would be flying me to my hometown to talk about Chinese food, or that I’d be at a table talking about how the perception of Chinese food ties so closely to how people perceive Chinese people for such a wide audience. My understanding is that producers invited me on because Dave liked an opinion piece I wrote about a racist review of a Chinese restaurant. I think the way we cover restaurants reflects on the people who cook the food, and it’s something I think about constantly. I’m grateful that that’s something that could be discussed on such a huge platform.

Finally, because the audience of our newsletter is largely freelance writers — what do you look for in a pitch?

My site only runs New York stories, so for one: It’s gotta be relevant to a New York City reader. (Eater has sites across the country and a national site, all of which take pitches for other places, though.) The basis of what we do is openings and closings, which means that our staff writers usually take care of day-to-day stuff, and we’re less likely to take a pitch on an opening. We also have two critics, and do not take freelance restaurant reviews. That said, we’ve taken pitches on coming attractions, openings, and closings if it’s a scoop and the writer can provide access that we don’t have.

In general, I’m looking for stories that our staff doesn’t have time to cover, so this often means mid-length reported stories that answer a question about the dining scene, like a minimum four source newspaper style feature. I’m keen on business and real estate angles related to food in particular.

Since most high profile restaurants open south of Central Park in Manhattan, there tends to be geographic gaps in our coverage, like Queens and upper Manhattan, including UWS, UES, and Harlem. I’m always on the lookout for interesting stories about restaurants there. I also think Flushing is wildly under covered, news wise — I’ve been looking for someone willing to do news, as well as trend and business features, out of the neighborhood and am all ears for pitches there.

A best practice is to think of the headline first when pitching to us. Here’s a rundown of our overall guidelines, which can be applied to pitches to Eater New York and Eater National, that’s super helpful too.

And what are some things you appreciate when working with a writer?

People who meet deadlines! And also being receptive of edits and willing to have a conversation about the best way to do a story.

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