Business

Curbed Media Launches Eater Detroit, A Restaurant News Site

June 27, 2013, 10:32 AM by  Bill McGraw

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported Eater Detroit is part of Gawker Media.

Curbed Media, the New York-based online empire, has bestowed another website on southeast Michigan – Eater Detroit, which launched Thursday, joining the crowded field of local restaurant reporting.

ED’s man about town will be Nick Andersen, 23, a well-traveled and thoughtful graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who lives with his parents in Milford and is looking for a place in Detroit.

Detroit is the 25th community to get an Eater site -- Charleston, Louisville and Maine got one before the Motor City --  and Eater joins Curbed Detroit, which covers real estate, as Curbed Media properties here.

Eater sites report on restaurants, bars and nightlife with the intensity the New York Times devotes to international diplomacy, with an emphasis on what’s hot, who’s on top and what’s to come.

Some of the sites also have a tone that can range from snide to snarky, but Andersen said that’s not necessarily his style.

“I can be sarcastic,” he said. “But I’m really interested in telling stories and knowing restaurant owners and bar owners.”

He added: “If a restaurant is bad, if it makes a terrible choice, yes, I will write about it.”

Curbed Media's reach will give Eater Detroit an immediate cache. Eater also will give city restaurants national exposure, as Andersen concentrates on the scene south of 8 Mile.

But Andersen has a lot of local competition: Among the outlets that cover restaurants are Detroit’s two daily newspapers, the Metro Times, Hour Detroit, Crain’s Detroit Business, Real Detroit Weekly, Eat It Detroit and The Hungry Dudes, not to mention the DIY criticism Yelp.

Asked if Detroit needs more restaurant coverage, longtime reviewer Molly Abraham replied in an email: “NO!”

Nicole Rupersburg, founder of Eat It Detroit, said reporting on restaurants has grown rapidly in the past several years and continues to expand, filling the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for it.

“Eater is merely capitalizing on what is obviously a very hot commodity right now, and that is, quite simply, Detroit,” Rupersburg said.

Sarah F. Cox, the editorial director of Curbed who launched Curbed Detroit, said: “People become obsessed with every detail that leads up to a new restaurant opening, and Eater Detroit will chronicle all the wonderful minutia that happens along the way. Our restaurant scene may not be one driven by elegant operations and celebrity chefs, but the scrappiness should make for great story lines."

Andersen said the more the merrier. His role at Eater Detroit will be to chronicle the life and death of restaurants rather than to critique the sauces.

“Essentially it’s a beat reporting job,” he said. “It’s to our benefit if other people are writing about food.”

Andersen graduated from UNC in 2012, but despite his youth he has managed to get around.

In addition to North Carolina, he has lived in San Francisco, Arizona, Washington D.C., New York and Paris. He speak French fluently and does social media for La Jeune Politique, a website that covers French politics for a young, English-speaking audience.

He recently finished an internship at National Public Radio headquarters and has spent time investigating allegations of election fraud for a voters’ rights project that found virtually no actual fraudulent activity in the several states that were examined.

He said he was proud to be a Detroiter when he heard young people outside of Michigan talking about the opportunity in Detroit these days. He is quick to say he does not look at the city as some sort of “abstract art project,” and believes there is a middle ground between the dystopia described by Charlie LeDuff in his “American Autopsy” and the “urban playground” discussed often by Phil Cooley, the owner of Slow’s.

“I would really feel good about Eater if we hit the middle,” Andersen said. 



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