Midtown Lunch

This comment by “challahbackgirl” (cute!) was posted to yesterday’s news about the brand new Frites N Meats Truck (which uses meat from well known butcher DeBragga & Spitler).  Notice anything odd about this supposedly unbiased comment from a totally random user?

Here’s a tip to all you businesses out there who think “guerilla marketing” should involve pretending to be a regular commenter on food blogs… if you’re going to insult the competition, you might not want to do it from a company computer.  Especially if your company mail server has the company name in the URL. (It’s kind of a dead giveaway.)  For those who aren’t technically inclined, here’s a layman’s explanation: I love your meat DeBragga, but you’re busted.

UPDATE: Somebody posted an interesting comment that I’d like to respond to…

From Lunch’er “Beast”:

“Zach, I expected better from you. This isn’t a “shill”, but you’ve spun it that way. Either that or you have very poor reading comprehension skills. She’s only lamenting that everyone in the five boroughs and beyond has been on their knees in front of Pat LaFreida lately. She didn’t “shill” for Debragga (never even mentions them) and she doesn’t even say the frites burgers are good. She only “bets” that they are better than Bill’s. I hardly think this is a shill, despite her place of employment.”

My response is after the jump…

Read more »

I’m pretty open about commenting on the site, but can’t stand when people try to praise their own business, or talk smack about a competitor- without being honest about who they are. It’s pretty obvious when this is the case, and I try to expose these comments as best I can, in true Eater fashion. Today I got perhaps the weirdest two comments ever, both from the same IP address (i.e. same computer), within 2 minutes of each other, on a post about the famous halal guys on 53rd & 6th:

WTF?  Possible explanations are welcome in the comments…

It’s no surprise when sucky restaurants shill, after all- if you won’t say good things about your crappy establishment, than who will?  But it *is* surprising when beloved, popular places post fake comments… which is what seems to be the case with the Quick Delight cart (on 3rd Ave. and 45th), the brand new offshoot from the owners of the famous Kwik Meal cart on 45th & 6th. These three comments were posted last night from the same computer within minutes of each other (under different names):

“It’’s been about one month since the grand opening of the quick delight, and although the “famous” lamb pita has been degraded, I have tried the same very lamb better at the 6th ave cart and witnessed it’s glory and wondered why commentors felt this way. It turns out that very week the person that supples the lamb was giving bad quality meat and this is why he was fired. Ever since then Quick delight have a new source of lamb meat and is once again tender and soft and NOT chewy. In fact I’v tried the lamb recently and it was mouth-watering. I hope that all of you can give it a second chance and try once more I’m sure you will have a change of heart.”

“The lamb just gets better. Yumm-o! It was mouth watering and not chewy at all. And the chicken shawarma was amazing as well.”

Read more »

This comment popped up on our post about the new location of FreeFoods NYC, and as hard as this is going to be to believe, I don’t think it’s a shill:

“I went there yesterday.  I was so busy that I didn’t have time to post.  The food was FANTASTIC!!  Everything was fresh and delicious.  They really know how to use flavors.  I picked from the by-the-pound section.  I had duck breast with some tasty sides, shrimp wrapped in bacon, some brown rice type thing with mushrooms, and filet mignon over some humus type sauce on toast.  I cannot begin to tell you how delicious all of these were besides the shrimp.  The shrimp was average.  The Filet and the rice were absolutely spectacular!”

Then things get ridiculous…

Read more »

Clearly the shilling from the newly opened Empanada Joe’s (on 8th Ave. btw. 43+44th) knows no boundaries. I got the comment you see above on one of my flickr photos over the weekend. The shilling that happens in the comments of this site is well documented, and Eater makes a point of calling out all shillers on message boards, blogs, and listings websites… but this may be the first time I’ve seen it done in Flickr. Come on Joe. Give it a rest!