Anisette Brasserie
Guilty as charged.
Jenny was taking a picture from above the open staircase at Anisette when chef/owner Alain Giraud raced up to her to ask if she was a blogger. We had popped in for breakfast over the weekend after noticing significant buzz in the blogosphere about Giraud’s new establishment in Santa Monica. Apparently Giraud, former chef at Bastide, had been monitoring the same sites.
Perhaps Jenny’s acknowledgement to Giraud that we are bloggers paid off. We received our food before the couple next to us even though they had arrived and ordered first. Maybe this was a perk due to our blogger status. Or maybe this was just one of those wrinkles that needs to be smoothed during this semi-opening process. Giraud and friends just opened for breakfast last week and are scheduled to expand to lunch and dinner hours this week. They also plan to be open late, a welcome development in L.A.
Jenny went for the Anisette omelette featuring goat cheese feta, red peppers, 
wild argula and mushrooms. As an unadvertised bonus, it also arrived with extra veggies including fresh asparagus and onions. I had the savory croissant with turkey that came with Gruyere, scrambled eggs, sauteed spinach and slices of vine-ripe tomatoes. We both classified our orders under the category of “very good but not mind-blowing.”
Perhaps a bit soured by the delay, the couple next to us didn’t necessarily grumble about the food but they weren’t heaping praise either. But they also said they were big fans of Giraud at Bastide and would definitely give Anisette another try, knowing these are the kinds of snags you encounter the opening week before the kinks are ironed out.
The party of three on our other side also ran into a production problem. Two received their orders while the third looked on enviously for several minutes before her food arrived.
The décor was old-fashioned with flair and grandeur: tall ceiling, red leather booths, tile floors, antique-looking mirrors and an entire wall of bottles behind the bar. Clearly they put in a lot of work into the look, but frankly I was more impressed by the fresh-squeezed orange juice. Sweet. –Victor.
Anisette, 225 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica 90401. 310-395-3200.
Conflict of interest! This is why restaurant reviewers don’t reveal their status when conducting reviews, and return after the fact to take pictures et al. Kudos, however, for disclosing your encounter and revealing the less-than-stellar service received by those not ID’ed as bloggers.
I second that conflict of interest! This food, movie, music blogging nonsense is gotten way out of hand
“Perhaps Jenny’s acknowledgement to Giraud that we are bloggers paid off”.
“That’s because restaurants might treat food writers better than the average customer, and we want our recommendations to reflect the real experience.”
When I was at Anisette this past weekend another snap happy “Blogger”, while documenting his culinary safari was approached by the Chef and asked that very same question. He gleefully responded in the same manner as Jenny did.
It’s clear that simply because one has 15 years of journalism experience, doesn’t necessarily qualify them as journalists, As well, I’d like to know what your backgrounds and or pedigrees in the culinary arts are, other than simply having more than just 15 years of eating.
.
Breakfast Sat AM was being part of the feeling out process. Inconsistent service 1 meal well ahead of the other, coffe and tea way later. Food English breakfast very good, Black Pudding something I have never had, tasty. It was great to see the principles actually interested in what was going on.
I agree, food was good but not smashing. We will return.
Wow, you guys should chill out. Most bloggers don’t claim to be journalists. Several times I’ve been in restaurants in LA with food journalists like Jonathan Gold and guess what? The staff is well aware who they are without them saying a word or taking a picture. It’s naive to think that your beloved journalists are never given preferential treatment. On the other had, I have seen some incredibly obnoxious food bloggers who let all and everyone know who they are and you can tell are arrogant.
Hi Ricardo. Sorry we gave you the wrong impression, but there was nothing gleeful about Jenny’s encounter with the owner. She was surprised and disappointed to be discovered. (We’re professional writers, not professional photographers so it is tough for us to take stealth photos that turn out respectably). But she also answered truthfully when he asked the question. When we wrote about the revelation, it was not to be celebratory. It was just being honest. We don’t enter restaurants with a check-us-out-we’re-bloggers routine. If we really wanted to go that route, we’d post pictures of ourselves on the blog. We don’t. Because the owner learned that we were bloggers, we made a point of interviewing our neighbors to get feedback from those who might not have received special attention. We never claimed to be food experts, and that goes right to our motto at the top of the page: Chow, fun. Nobody’s trying to cure cancer here.
Dear Grub Trotters,
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment, but you did not give me the wrong impression. READ YOUR WORDS.
“Perhaps Jenny’s acknowledgment to Giraud that we were bloggers paid off.” It doesn’t sound like she was too disappointed.
If I may continue to quote you, “Jenny’s identity was not DISCOVERED by the owner”, she TOLD him that she was a food blogger. “The owner didn’t LEARN that you were food bloggers”, Jenny TOLD him that you were in fact food bloggers”. She very easily could have said she was a tourist from Nebraska or a fan of architecture or what ever, but she chose not too. She chose to be “truthfull”.
In your response to my comment, you neglected to answer the sole question I posed. Again, I’d like to know what your backgrounds and or pedigrees in the culinary arts are? A professional restaurant reviewer visits an establishment a minimum of three times before writing their reviews. They don’t just pop in for breakfast, then run home and write an article. They’re acutely aware of the weight that their words carry. Most bloggers don’t adhere to and abide by the same journalistic standards.
I apologize for sounding abrupt and I certainly don’t intend to start a back and forth over this, but your Blog’s mission statement, and your critique of Anisette come off as sounding quite contrary. Perhaps in light of being outed by the owner, you might have considered passing on publishing your review of Anisette.
Oh, and whilst I’m on a tare, Lisa. Huh? Precisely which side of the fence are you on?
It’s all Chow Fun…’til someone gets hurt.
Ricardo in Venice too
Hi Ricardo, Jenny here. I’m late to this discussion because I’m currently in China. It’s nice to see such an impassioned discussion about journalistic ethics on our blog. As Victor mentioned in the post, I was taking a photo when the chef came up from behind me and asked, “Are you a blogger?” I stood in silence for a moment, but when he asked again, I acknowledged that I was. That, I believe, was the ethical thing to do. Of course, you are free to disagree.
I once went undercover in a sweatshop for an investigative story. I was tagging along with some workers right activists, and at one point, the owner confronted me and asked if I was a reporter. I admitted that I was. I think truth is probably the most important rule in journalism, and if I had lied to the chef, how would you know I wouldn’t lie to you next? I think it’s better to tell the truth and acknowledge the circumstances of the situation. I think readers are smart enough to take the information and decide for themselves what they think.
It’s true that some of the largest daily newspapers can afford to send their food critics to restaurants at least three times and then pay a photographer to go shoot the food. Victor and I have both written for many of those same daily newspapers. However, this a blog. It’s essentially a hobby for us. We don’t get paid for what we write here. We don’t have any advertising on our site. And we can’t afford to do that for every blog post.
As for our “pedigrees,” I have been writing about food (along with many other topics) for about a decade. I’m no chef, that’s for sure. I did not go to culinary school. I am not a professional food critic. I often interview chefs and write about food trends. I eat out most nights of the week. But we didn’t name this blog Foodsnobs.com. Pedigrees are for dogs. We represent the average diner who eats out often. That’s it.
We launched this blog to share our experiences and our enthusiasm for food with our friends and anyone else who chooses to read us. It’s probably best to view it as a single snapshot. Of course, you can also take this and all other food blogs with a grain of salt and wait for the review in the LA Times. Either way, I appreciate how insightful your comments are. Victor and I both teach journalism, and I can only hope the students in my ethics lab are as thoughtful as you are.
We ate a wonderful warm meal at Anisette and thought that the service was exceptionally warm. I don’t know of any restaurant that is in top form in it’s first days when everyone is just getting the routine down. A restaurant is more like a ballet than a typical business: it takes rehearsal.
A great restaurant is especially this way. The diner has to decide what his priority is going to be: to be the first, to visit over and over to experienc the development of the establishment and it’s cuisine, to simply enjoy a top drawer meal with fantastic service.
If you are genuinely interested in food, cuisine, cooking and dining then you will want to revisit a place. If you just want to review an establishment as though you were rating it for a guide or a newspaper review, then it’s best to wait. So it doesn’t really matter whether you are a blogger or a writer or a plain diner or an experienced chef. What matters is whether you know what your goal is when you put your opinion on a blog.
My opinion is that this restaurant is just getting its legs. As it comes up to speed, we will see it really take off and come into its own and that’s what makes restaurants so much fun. The reason I will keep going back is that the people who work there obviously love what they are doing and they want us to enjoy ourselves. And on top of it all, they serve a great Salade Nicoise, a really good Steak Tartar and they have hard boiled eggs on the bar…just like in France! Oh yeah, they knew what they were talking about when it came to wine. We like wine, not whine.
Miriam, I agree with much of what you said and can’t wait to revisit Anisette. We live nearby and hope to try it again once they have had more time to work out the kinks. It’s always fun to rush in and try a new place, but usually it pays to wait.
However, judging from the traffic this post has gotten–it’s our top post ever– I know there are lots of people who are interested in Anisette and curious to hear what it’s like in its first few weeks, even before the official review comes out in the LA Times.
They want to know just what we provided: Is the food and service up to par yet? Should we go now or wait? We told people what we felt they needed to know, that the restaurant just opened and the problems encountered are typical of restaurants just getting started. I would hope that readers don’t make a snap judgment and stay away from Anisette based on spotty service the first week.
We will post again after we return and will report on our experience at that point. But I don’t agree that an early report is meaningless and that we should hold our tongues. An early report can tell a diner to give it more time before dropping a dime.