WhiteTrashBBQ: Who Do You Trust? - AOL/City Search Names New York City's Best Barbecue

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Who Do You Trust? - AOL/City Search Names New York City's Best Barbecue

This came into my email today....

City's Best Winners - Barbecue - Restaurants and Nightlife ...
Spanky's BBQ, 6th. Pig'n Out Barbeque, 7th. Bone Lick Park, 8th. Pies-N-Thighs, 9th. Sawa BBQ, 10th. 617 9th Ave,New York ... m.aol.com/citysbest/.../citysbestResults.do?...

OK - I'm always interested in what others think about the New York BBQ scene, but looking over this little email notification, something was clearly amiss. Spanky's came in at number 6? Spanky's has been closed since early 2009 as I reported back on January 28, 2009! Sawa is also closed - and I don't think they ever were a barbecue joint. Bar BQ is also long gone as is Pig'n Out.

WTF is going on here? I've always heard that the "leaders" in the review world could be bought. Is this evidence? Why would AOL/City Search list FOUR closed restaurants as part of the top ten and leave out NYC's current leaders like RUB, Wildwood, Hill Country, The Waterfront Ale House etc? I call shenanigans!

In case you're interested, here's AOL/City Search's top 10 BBQ joints of New York City - for what it's worth. And that ain't much.

PS - That rib picture that leads this post is from the incredible RUB! You need to check them out whenever you're in Manhattan.

Labels: AOL, barbecue, bbq, best bbq, blue smoke, bone lick park, City Search, daisy may's bbq, dinosaur, hill country, new york, pies and thighs, restaurant, RUB bbq, virgils, waterfront ale house, wildwood

3 Comments:

At 3:44 PM, patrick said...: I trust myself and only myself!!!
At 6:08 AM, Chris said...: Given AOL's current state of affairs, I'd suspect that rather than being bought off, this is more an issue of sloppy work. And by "work" I mean some intern given 20 minutes and told to Google search BBQ restaurants in NYC and make a list.
At 6:33 PM, Anonymous said...: I rarely post anonymously, but since I'm about to expose one of the sadder secrets about the online publishing world, I ought to protect my identity.

Here's the truth - authors who write articles like this from sources like AOL are not compensated well. And so what happens is that, instead of being a good, honest writer and going and trying the places and giving an unbiased review, they'll merely cobble together tidbits from online forums and similar articles that have already been published, and put together the top 10 without ever leaving their computer. It takes about 20 minutes to do, and makes that $15 they get actually worth it - as opposed to going out and spending hundreds of dollars and several hours at the restaurants.

So - if you're looking for good, honest reviews, make sure you're reading a publication that compensates its writers well. AOL has never been and will never be one of those sources.

Good day.