Eater Is Firing Great Journalists, Again!
Plus, Eleven Madison Park's return to meat, Tejal Rao's review of Taqueria Frontera, and Hugh Merwin on the disappearing fruteros of Los Angeles
On Saturday, I’ll have a column about crispy summertime snacks. But today, here are some thoughts about the layoffs at Eater. You can contribute to the GoFundMe for those out-of-work colleagues right here.
But first…
Eleven Madison Park, which announced in 2021 that it would stop serving meat, and which garnered all sorts of wildly gushy press about not serving meat, until Pete Wells discovered that it was sometimes serving meat, after which it definitely didn’t serve meat, especially as it magically surpassed every other meat-free restaurant in the world to become the first vegan restaurant to earn three Michelin stars, will soon start serving meat again in our Red Meat City. Shout out to Kim Severson of the New York Times for reporting the news.
Why you should be deeply angry about the Eater layoffs
Someone once said to me, half jokingly, that a certain financial news organization had a reputation of being where young journalists go to retire. My friend was referring to the supposedly generous pay packages there; and indeed, I thought of that comment while contemplating last week’s layoffs at Eater.
It led me to a slightly different observation:
Jim Bankoff’s Vox Media is strengthening its reputation as a place where some of the best food journalists go to get fired. Or to resign. Or to survive the layoff lottery before it comes back with a vengeance months later. Or to go to work knowing that if you’re not canned, your colleagues and friends will be.
Yeah.
As Eater celebrates its 20th anniversary — with events and collaborations scheduled through September — Vox took another axe to the site and laid off 15 staff members last week, including employees at Punch and Thrillist.
Jaya Saxena, who’s series editor for “Best American Food Writing,” and who received a prestigious James Beard MFK Fisher nomination for her seminal “The Food that Makes You Gay” column, was one of the casualties. She wrote on Instagram that the job she signed up to do nearly seven years ago was eliminated.
Amy McCarthy, who often wrote smart columns about food TV, and who previously served as the Eater Houston and Dallas editor, announced her departure on Instagram as well. She was the author of the brilliantly sharp: “You’re Morally Obligated to Call Out Your Racist Relatives at Thanksgiving.”
Also leaving is editor Jesse Sparks, the “One Recipe” podcast host whose work touched just about all aspects of Eater, and who was a big cheerleader for so many coworkers. Social media manager Irina Groushevaia has left the company as well (read their column on dishwashing), alongside reporter Emma Orlow (check out her excellent work on cocktail bar unionization).
And there are others who still haven’t made the news public.
“The timing of the cuts comes when morale is at an all-time low with our colleagues pulled in several directions in new roles, leaving little confidence in leadership’s vision,” the Vox Media Union wrote on its fundraiser page, adding that the “confusion has led to a mangled product that strays from the values that made Eater one of the most trusted sources for dining news.”
This was Eater’s second restructuring in 10 months.
My job as an Eater critic was eliminated in January of 2023, a development that coincided with cuts to about 7 percent of the company’s workforce. Fellow reviewer Robert Sietsema lost his own job in late 2024. Together, those moves meant that one of the country’s leading restaurant sites no longer employed any full-time restaurant critics. That’s bad.
Now here’s the thing: Perhaps the most jolting development at Vox is how multiple rounds of restructuring have decimated Eater’s cities network.
Eater might’ve had a brash, bloggy voice at times, especially in the early days, but the heart of Eater’s credibility over the past decade was its collection of awesome city sites.
It’s hard to think of anything else like it in food journalism (content is a different story).
If there’s a small restaurant preparing to open, there’s probably an Eater staffer walking by to knock on the door. If there’s a domestic abuse or labor story, there’s probably someone in that city to look into the news and figure it all out. And if there aren’t enough resources to break a given story at a smaller Eater site, the editor might reblog the news when a local reporter gets to it, a nice little hat tip that often sends a few extra eyeballs to a regional publication.
And if there’s a hot new (or old) spot worth checking out, the local editors have union-guaranteed dining budgets — we fought hard for those — so they can decide for themselves whether the venue is worth recommending. No need for them to solicit free meals like an influencer as part of a pay-for-play scenario.
Alas, so many of those Eater city journalists have been fired or reassigned.
This has not gone unnoticed by local media.
The Eater layoffs were the lead story yesterday on WBEZ Chicago, the city’s NPR affiliate. That column pointed out that Chicago editor Ashok Selvam — fresh off his win for the James Beard Jonathan Gold Award for local coverage — was among the cuts. To drive the point home, WBEZ led the story with a photo of Selvam accepting that prestigious accolade. Chicago was the country’s “third largest market,” according to the Vox Union.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, in turn, reported on the departure of editor Janna Karel, who wrote on Instagram that “Vegas Eater no longer has an Editor.” And the folks at D Magazine wrote that Eater’s layoffs depleted an “already weakened Dallas food media.” That magazine’s columnist seemed skeptical of Eater’s plan to continue reporting on Houston, Dallas, and Austin after the layoff of Texas editor Courtney Smith (there’s still a temporary editor assigned to the Lone Star capital).
Last week’s layoffs occurred shortly after Vox Media chief executive Jim Bankoff told Puck that he didn’t plan to implement imminent layoffs.
This should go without saying but: Eater continues to employ some of the best and smartest people I know, as editors, reporters, designers, producers, and videographers, a number of whom continue to enjoy lengthy careers there (my nine year tenure was a pretty good run!). I have no doubt those who remain will do their best to make great stuff. And I’ll continue to cover, quote, and link Eater when it publishes that great stuff, like I do already — probably more than for any other site.
Media is a tough business. Nearly 10,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the past three years, per Nieman Reports, and tweaks will always be necessary to any publication as The Search and Social Media Gods continue to demand tribute and pull their strings in fickle ways.
I’m still eternally grateful that the good Boss People at Eater kept so many of us employed during the depths of the pandemic; it was the honor of a lifetime to write through that dark era for hospitality. It would’ve been easy to fire a restaurant critic when there weren’t really any restaurants to review, and I believe in my heart that some amazing higher-ups (who took pay cuts) fought hard for me and for others behind closed doors during that time — just as we in the Vox Union fought hard to preserve all sorts of jobs during that same time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
But I worry that amid other crises — like the overlapping ones our country is facing now as we careen toward autocracy — Eater won’t be as equipped to keep telling these stories.
Eater is only as good as the people who work there. And so the story goes that a lot of those people — who believed in Eater, who poured their hearts and souls into the company because they thought that Vox was the one place they could truly express their voices — have lost their jobs, resigned, or found employment elsewhere.
Just the same, Eater will have a heck of a time attracting top talent if Vox Media continues with its infinite pivots and constant layoffs of celebrated, award-winning journalists.
Vox told WBEZ that the changes “while difficult,” are:
“…necessary to allow Eater to reallocate resources toward the areas where it has the biggest opportunity to grow and continue to serve its audience: the Eater app, social-first storytelling, tentpole brand moments, and trade coverage via its industry newsletter Pre Shift.”
Indeed, food journalism is at a crossroads. There’s the viral influencer drivel. The critically-thin, content-based review site owned by a giant bank. The infinite listicles, some of them quite good, many of them not. And there’s that valuable iPhone digital real estate that media companies are trying to occupy as artificial intelligence eats away at search and social traffic
It can be tempting to chase all this down, and in some cases, we should, if it means better lists and maps, and if it means finding a nationally renowned pizza person who isn’t David Portnoy.
But solving these larger journalism issues — or hopping on these traffic trains for a few months before firing more people — doesn’t negate the need for good journalists. That’s especially true right now, when journalism and democracy come under attack from a perfect storm of Trumpian populism, generative AI, and pathological levels of institutionalized stupidity pervading every aspect of society.
So…if you believe there are infinite stories to tell about restaurants — as immigration raids threaten the industry, as rising prices put the pinch on almost everyone, and as real estate woes push beloved restaurants to the brink — then you should be deeply sad about what’s happening to Eater.
While a site like Michelin expands across the country with its hollow star system and inane blurbs, Eater has fired its critics and dismantled its deep network of city editors, the people who are uniquely qualified to offer layered commentary about one of our country’s most economically and culturally vital industries.
A Vox rep told the Review-Journal that despite the “difficult decision,” to eliminate roles, the company is…
“committed to operating all current Eater sites and continuing its best-in-class restaurant recommendations, local dining news, national tastemaking, and trade coverage across all the places that audiences can currently find us: on the sites, on social platforms, via our newsletters, in the app, and more.”
I hope that’s true. But forgive me: I’m curious what type of Magic Genie Sorcery Vox is summoning to keep up the pace, especially when it comes to local dining news and informed restaurant recommendations, because institutions don’t get better at doing difficult things by getting rid of the people who are the best at doing those difficult things.
So many people — myself included — bought into Eater’s mission over the past 20 years. Now, the onus will be on Vox executives to convince any rational reader that the firings aren’t a full-scale gutting of what made that publication so special.
As the Vox Union fundraiser puts it: “Eater Isn’t Essential Without Journalism.”
Again, you can contribute to the Vox Media Union GoFundMe right here
Some notes from Bluesky on what’s happening at Eater and elsewhere:
Tejal Rao, on Tacos
The New York Times chief critic penned a two-star review of Taqueria Frontera in Los Angeles. Click through for all the tasty descriptions of succulent pork sliced off rotating spits. But midway through the column, readers will encounter precisely what they should encounter. A few words on immigration. And by a few words, I mean 348 words over seven paragraphs.
Rao writes about the raids. She writes about the masked agents targeting food vendors and others. And she writes about how Frontera didn’t feel right opening a second location amid the Trump immigration crackdown.
Late last year, while putting together my Pizza Guys essay, I worried about folks deeming immigrants worthy or unworthy because of their public contributions, culinary and otherwise, to society. “How I feel right now is that immigrants don’t owe us their labor or their food. Rather, it is we who owe them our protection,” I wrote.
I wasn’t the first person to meditate on that theme, and I surely won’t be the last. Here’s Rao with a few relevant words on this matter:
Everyone knows that immigrant labor powers restaurants across the country, but immigrants are more than their labor. And as the raids drag on, people across Los Angeles are doing the work of caring for each other in overlapping, unofficial networks — they deliver groceries and meals, they drive each other's children to school, they send alerts through group texts and on WhatsApp — so that day-to-day life can go on as much as possible.
Forgive me for driving this point home again, but there are lots of interchangeable restaurant reviews out there, written quickly and with notes on what to order and what to skip. But a review like this, where the reader unexpectedly gets a crash course in how a large part of society works, you don’t get that from publications that fire their critics and reporters. You don’t get that from sites that talk about reallocating those resources to...an app, to social first storytelling, and to tentpole brand moments.
Seriously, mate.
Square Diner Server Might Be Released From ICE Detainment
Eater’s Melissa McCart, building on a report by the Tribeca Citizen, has a detailed look at the case of Luis Fernandez, an Ecuadorian-born waiter at Square Diner. The staffer and green card holder, after checking in on his asylum application on Long Island, was arrested and eventually transferred to a detention facility in Texas. Fernandez was supposed to be released per a judge’s order, but ICE has appealed the ruling and stayed the judicial decision, according to McCart.
These are the types of vital missives we’ve come to expect from Eater NY over the years, and I hope they continue!
What Los Angeles Loses Without Its Fruteros
Hugh Merwin, writing for Grub Street, has a long and detailed column on how fruit vendors and other street vendors are coping amid ongoing ICE raids. Read the full column for smart insights by Bill Esparza (particularly on how fear has impacted Latino food culture), and for observations like these:
“It was surprising that this particular vendor was back at all. A few days earlier, an immigration raid led by teams of masked men with assault rifles had swept through the parking lot. “The day it happened, we weren’t here,” said the vendor. “As soon as ICE showed up, the other fruit vendors left. They left everything.”
Alright. That’s enough for today.
This was a tough one to write...didn’t get much sleep last night.
I’ll be back at it later this week, most likely on Saturday with something fun.
Ryan!!!
For a related Sutton Essay about the need for critics:
The Most-Read American Food Stories of 2024
Final hours of our holiday special! For one more day, we’re massively discounting yearly subscriptions, a savings of nearly $90 over the monthly rate. This is your last chance to save!
Solidarity for our former coworkers. And shame on Vox Media for failing at stewarding the successful publication we all built. 🌺
Powerful read, Ryan. What a deep loss for so many directly affected by the layoffs and the loyal readers and collaborators who rely on and adore the publication’s journalism.