“San Diego Magazine and I are now your enemy.” A decade ago, one of San Diego’s most prominent food personalities issued that warning to a tiny independent publication over photographs of a celebrity chef’s restaurant. What followed was a crash course in how the city’s restaurant publicity machine really operates. Now, we're pulling back the curtain on the tangled relationships between celebrity chefs, influential food critics, magazine ownership, restaurant rankings, lucrative food festivals, corporate investors and public tourism money.
From a decades-old festival whose playbook was seemingly hijacked to restaurants providing food and labor for events promoted by the very people reviewing them, the conflicts raise some uncomfortable questions about who controls San Diego’s culinary narrative - and who profits from it. We have the messages, the history and the paper trail. Our story is available exclusively to SanDiegoVille Patreon subscribers.
