10 ms·

Did a Rave Review Really Shut Down Portland Burger Bar Stanich’s?

55 points by moonka 8y ago

danso 8y ago
The essay being referenced was on HN's front a couple weeks ago (610 upvotes, 391 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469658 Backgrounding -- and finding something problematic on someone who you've profiled and liked is definitely one of the least fun things I've done as a reporter. Regardless of the merit of the person's claims/denials, it must genuinely suck to have talked to a reporter for what was initially intended to be a positive recognition (e.g. "proud local owner of 'Best Burger Bar in America'". Only to find out that your previously private legal problems -- i.e. known only to your personal network -- are going to be mentioned in the mass media. Even if the mention is minimal -- i.e. doesn't change the main focus of the story -- the subject of the story might wish they had never been picked as a story idea. That said, when you fail to mention a glaring problem at all -- well, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. I would've understood if the original author had found out about the legal problems and decided not to write a followup at all. I can believe that he wasn't truly aware of how serious the burger bar owner's legal history is, and didn't want to pry if it was the kind of crime that didn't make normal headlines. But when you write a self-indulgent graf like this -- > And that fact is the thing I can’t quite get past. That a decision I made for a list I put on the internet has impacted a family business and forever altered its future. That I have changed family dynamics and relationships. And it could very easily happen again. -- you owe it to your readers to make sure that you've done a thorough vetting. It's true that owner that owners of well-reviewed establishments are thrown into a world of stress -- this has been true since the "golden age " of newspapers and print critics. But for someone to have suddenly and inexplicably shut down, it's also possible there's more to the story than what the owner would like to publicly claim.
- AznHisoka 8y ago
  When i read the story originally, I just couldn’t believe he was telling us everything. The whole premise sounded absurd. If the burger place got too busy, he could’ve hired more. Or tell people he had a seating limit. Or spray some fart odor around the place to detract more visitors... lots and lots of things. Either the owner was lazy or something else was going on. Also the story sounded like a humble brag of sorts. “Oh my publicity made tons of people go there and shut it down!!” (please.. unless you’re Trump or Elon, I highly doubt your words were that influential)
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Yeah...you just make people wait in line...and often times that just increases demand. There's a BBQ joint in Austin with that situation. Franklin's always has a wait. But I hear it's damn good BBQ.
  - Mikeb85 8y ago
    While it may sound absurd, I do think there's merit to what he's saying. Expectations can be hard to deal with, especially when you're selling cheap, humble food. How do you balance trying to sell a $10 meal with the expectations of a foodie waiting hours to get in? And then how do you cook for volumes significantly higher than what you designed your restaurant for? It's easy to say hire more people, but sometimes the secret sauce is simply a cook who cares, and you can't always hire that (especially at a low price point).
- mewse-hn 8y ago
  The previous article seemed to be as objective as the reporter could make it, describing his personal sense of guilt but also the people around him who tried to convince him it wasn't entirely his fault. He did allude to the family problems that the restaurant owner was going through, and that they contributed to the failure of the restaurant. He probably felt that airing those problems publicly would merely do more damage to the business he felt responsible for damaging in the first place. This new article says the original author didn't know about the legal entanglement so that could have used vetting. This all seems to be related but separate to the main question from the original article: how responsible are food critics to the businesses they write about? Even if the business would eventually fail on its own, is accelerating the downfall an ethical wrong? This is the interesting part of the conversation that should be examined with these articles
  - danso 8y ago
    It definitely was a set of unfortunate circumstances for the author. If he was told about the messy divorce, it would have been standard procedure to get the ex-wife's side of things, especially since she had been a manager at the bar for nearly 2 decades. But I'm assuming she's dead, if she had stage 4 breast cancer in 2014. And that might have led the author understandably to think that "messy divorce", and drinking problems, was as problematic as it got. I completely agree with you that the author still had a good point. I think his article is particularly resonant today, with the growing fear and resentment of social media oversharing, online harassment and doxxing, and even data retention (e.g. "Right to be forgotten").
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- c3534l 8y ago
  > you owe it to your readers to make sure that you've done a thorough vetting On a hamburger review? I'm all for holding the media accountable, but it's just a guy saying he like the hamburgers he ate there. The owner's personal life is his own business, and the reviewer has essentially no obligation here.
55555 8y ago
> Stanich and his wife divorced, citing "irreconcilable differences," in 2016. He agreed to give her a family home in Tempe, Ariz., $400,000 in a lump sum and $8,000 a month in support payments—and custody of the family dog, Rambo. a house, 400k, 8k every month, and the dog. Jesus.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  Sounds like he's got quite a decent income. I'd feel worse if half his money was $0 and the family dog. Edit: and considering he choked his wife on their lawn, (allegedly), divorce sounds reasonable to me.
  - x0x0 8y ago
    re: assaulting his ex-wife: no allegedly. He pleaded no contest for that. Also, and it's quite minor given the other stuff discussed here, it seems like he expected not to pay his staff for a couple weeks and have them hang out and wait for him. Or maybe the employees liked their manager / his ex-wife.
- andyv 8y ago
  Advice given to me once upon a time: "If you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, find a girl you don't like and give her a house".
  - cm2012 8y ago
    As a college graduate + white collar developer who's never been married before, your actuarial chances of divorce are around 20%.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
      I buy homeowner's insurance for a far less chance at losing one of my most valuable assets.
      - 8y ago
awakeasleep 8y ago
Pretty gross to be airing this dirty laundry in a public article.
- danso 8y ago
  We'll have to hear more from the restaurant critic about what he asked/didn't ask, and what the owner, Stanich, told or didn't tell him. But if it's the case that Stanich agreed to be profiled for an article about his shut-down burger bar, and he presented a whitewashed version of events, then it's not fair to his wife, who was a long time manager, whom he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor harassment and strangulation. The "dirty laundry" here is him beating his wife in front of their son, not something like him being an adulterer.
- magic_beans 8y ago
  That dirty laundry is public record, unfortunately.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    A further reminder that just because something is technically public does not make it necessarily okay to broadcast it. We have a real problem in our modern world dealing with all the data out there and how it should be protected, or not. Used to be it didn't matter much because you'd have to go down to the courthouse to get detailed information. Now it's being data mined, collected, aggregated with 100s of other sources, and sold. Yuck.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      Maybe there's a very good reason why crimes and our court systems are public? Such as, so that people who choke their wife who is dying from cancer can be avoided and shunned by moral, law abiding persons.
  - Konnstann 8y ago
    It may be public record, but significantly fewer people would have ever stumbled upon it had this article not been written.
j_m_b 8y ago
The Probation / Parole system, and the "correctional" institution in the US is a national disaster. The idea to prevent an adult, an elderly adult at that, from engaging in lawful activities like drinking alcohol as terms of probation is ludicrous. This man's life spiraled out of control for one reason.. the punitive nature of law enforcement and correctional institutions. What should be regarded as a health condition and treated as such (alcoholism) is instead used as a tool to further humiliate and demoralize this individual. It's not even safe to cold-turkey quit alcohol for an alcoholic because of the possibility of Grand Mal Seizures.
- danso 8y ago
  His charge of reckless driving was in 2017. In 2014, he received probation after pleading no contest to choking his terminally ill wife, whom in 2016 he divorced. And then got a contempt-of-court charge for not meeting the terms of the divorce settlement. What does the probation/parole system have to do with his particular issues?
  - rodgerd 8y ago
    The desperate need of a subset of HN to find excuses for shitty men.
- cat199 8y ago
  sorry to disagree, but i'm preety sure you can get help for alcoholism without needing to strangle your wife and end up in jail first..
- pmarreck 8y ago
  Where did you see that he was certifiably an alcoholic? I would agree that the humanity here is lost in the weeds of bureaucracy... but if alcohol was at all a factor in the physical altercation with his ex wife, then I can't see it being that unreasonable a request. This is of course problematic since he's 70 and lots of his friends and family are probably starting to pass away and who can really blame someone for having a few drinks too many at one too many wakes? There is also the problem of unmarried older single men without a source of human affection having a much higher mortality and crime risk, which was brought into the equation. This man probably has almost no emotional support system at this point, which just exacerbates the overdrinking risk. The impending stress of work if he reopens can't be making that any easier, either. EDIT: Before someone accuses me of sympathizing with a felon, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(criminology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin... ; the antiquated idea that a person's behavior is due in some significant part to their intrinsic nature in some fashion instead of their circumstances/environment is not only the well-studied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error , it should be put to rest ASAP. We need to get to work fixing situations AS WELL AS the people inhabiting them.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Gotta love "feminism" when it represents equal rights. But yet when the very idea of alimony is "I'm a lesser woman because I married", puts to rest any idea about it being equal rights. Say.. How many men get alimony?
- jvp 8y ago
  Kevin Federline
- danso 8y ago
  There are likely feminists who would be OK with the alimony pendulum swinging the other way as a result of gender parity in salaries and careers.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > But yet when the very idea of alimony is "I'm a lesser woman because I married", That's not the idea of alimony. The idea of alimony is closer to “I sacrificed my future income for my husband's by the division of domestic vs. external work in marriage”. > Say.. How many men get alimony? A small but growing number, largely because of slow erosion of persistent patriarchal gender roles which manifest in a number of ways. (1) Men are still more likely to support their wives and have their career advancement and future income potential dominate in marriage than vice versa, making them less likely to be eligible for alimony, (2) Men are less likely to seek alimony when they are eligible, (3) Men are less likely to resist alimony demands in divorce, (4) There's bias in judging where judges are more likely to view men as capable of independent self-support and less deserving of alimony in objectively similar conditions.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    > The idea of alimony is closer to “I sacrificed my future income for my husband's by the division of domestic vs. external work in marriage”. I'd argue that's even worse, as it encourages economic classes to 'marry amongst oneselves; don't relate with lesser people's And that very statement also packs in the idea the woman is some married domestic servant. And increasingly that is not true. My wife and I share the work. Equally. We both work. Right now I make more, but before this job, she made more. And now, on my extra salary, she's attending Harvard. Soon enough, she'll make more than I. And the sooner these gender roles are busted thoroughly for both men and women, the better we all will do.
GJR 8y ago
Clear case of Betteridge's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

55 points by moonka 8y ago

The essay being referenced was on HN's front a couple weeks ago (610 upvotes, 391 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469658 Backgrounding -- and finding something problematic on someone who you've profiled and liked is definitely one of the least fun things I've done as a reporter. Regardless of the merit of the person's claims/denials, it must genuinely suck to have talked to a reporter for what was initially intended to be a positive recognition (e.g. "proud local owner of 'Best Burger Bar in America'". Only to find out that your previously private legal problems -- i.e. known only to your personal network -- are going to be mentioned in the mass media. Even if the mention is minimal -- i.e. doesn't change the main focus of the story -- the subject of the story might wish they had never been picked as a story idea. That said, when you fail to mention a glaring problem at all -- well, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. I would've understood if the original author had found out about the legal problems and decided not to write a followup at all. I can believe that he wasn't truly aware of how serious the burger bar owner's legal history is, and didn't want to pry if it was the kind of crime that didn't make normal headlines. But when you write a self-indulgent graf like this -- > And that fact is the thing I can’t quite get past. That a decision I made for a list I put on the internet has impacted a family business and forever altered its future. That I have changed family dynamics and relationships. And it could very easily happen again. -- you owe it to your readers to make sure that you've done a thorough vetting. It's true that owner that owners of well-reviewed establishments are thrown into a world of stress -- this has been true since the "golden age " of newspapers and print critics. But for someone to have suddenly and inexplicably shut down, it's also possible there's more to the story than what the owner would like to publicly claim.

AznHisoka 8y ago
When i read the story originally, I just couldn’t believe he was telling us everything. The whole premise sounded absurd. If the burger place got too busy, he could’ve hired more. Or tell people he had a seating limit. Or spray some fart odor around the place to detract more visitors... lots and lots of things. Either the owner was lazy or something else was going on. Also the story sounded like a humble brag of sorts. “Oh my publicity made tons of people go there and shut it down!!” (please.. unless you’re Trump or Elon, I highly doubt your words were that influential)
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Yeah...you just make people wait in line...and often times that just increases demand. There's a BBQ joint in Austin with that situation. Franklin's always has a wait. But I hear it's damn good BBQ.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  While it may sound absurd, I do think there's merit to what he's saying. Expectations can be hard to deal with, especially when you're selling cheap, humble food. How do you balance trying to sell a $10 meal with the expectations of a foodie waiting hours to get in? And then how do you cook for volumes significantly higher than what you designed your restaurant for? It's easy to say hire more people, but sometimes the secret sauce is simply a cook who cares, and you can't always hire that (especially at a low price point).
mewse-hn 8y ago
The previous article seemed to be as objective as the reporter could make it, describing his personal sense of guilt but also the people around him who tried to convince him it wasn't entirely his fault. He did allude to the family problems that the restaurant owner was going through, and that they contributed to the failure of the restaurant. He probably felt that airing those problems publicly would merely do more damage to the business he felt responsible for damaging in the first place. This new article says the original author didn't know about the legal entanglement so that could have used vetting. This all seems to be related but separate to the main question from the original article: how responsible are food critics to the businesses they write about? Even if the business would eventually fail on its own, is accelerating the downfall an ethical wrong? This is the interesting part of the conversation that should be examined with these articles
- danso 8y ago
  It definitely was a set of unfortunate circumstances for the author. If he was told about the messy divorce, it would have been standard procedure to get the ex-wife's side of things, especially since she had been a manager at the bar for nearly 2 decades. But I'm assuming she's dead, if she had stage 4 breast cancer in 2014. And that might have led the author understandably to think that "messy divorce", and drinking problems, was as problematic as it got. I completely agree with you that the author still had a good point. I think his article is particularly resonant today, with the growing fear and resentment of social media oversharing, online harassment and doxxing, and even data retention (e.g. "Right to be forgotten").
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
c3534l 8y ago
> you owe it to your readers to make sure that you've done a thorough vetting On a hamburger review? I'm all for holding the media accountable, but it's just a guy saying he like the hamburgers he ate there. The owner's personal life is his own business, and the reviewer has essentially no obligation here.

55555 8y ago

> Stanich and his wife divorced, citing "irreconcilable differences," in 2016. He agreed to give her a family home in Tempe, Ariz., $400,000 in a lump sum and $8,000 a month in support payments—and custody of the family dog, Rambo. a house, 400k, 8k every month, and the dog. Jesus.

ggggtez 8y ago
Sounds like he's got quite a decent income. I'd feel worse if half his money was $0 and the family dog. Edit: and considering he choked his wife on their lawn, (allegedly), divorce sounds reasonable to me.
- x0x0 8y ago
  re: assaulting his ex-wife: no allegedly. He pleaded no contest for that. Also, and it's quite minor given the other stuff discussed here, it seems like he expected not to pay his staff for a couple weeks and have them hang out and wait for him. Or maybe the employees liked their manager / his ex-wife.
andyv 8y ago
Advice given to me once upon a time: "If you want to save yourself a lot of trouble, find a girl you don't like and give her a house".
- cm2012 8y ago
  As a college graduate + white collar developer who's never been married before, your actuarial chances of divorce are around 20%.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
    I buy homeowner's insurance for a far less chance at losing one of my most valuable assets.
    - 8y ago

awakeasleep 8y ago

Pretty gross to be airing this dirty laundry in a public article.

danso 8y ago
We'll have to hear more from the restaurant critic about what he asked/didn't ask, and what the owner, Stanich, told or didn't tell him. But if it's the case that Stanich agreed to be profiled for an article about his shut-down burger bar, and he presented a whitewashed version of events, then it's not fair to his wife, who was a long time manager, whom he pleaded no contest to misdemeanor harassment and strangulation. The "dirty laundry" here is him beating his wife in front of their son, not something like him being an adulterer.
magic_beans 8y ago
That dirty laundry is public record, unfortunately.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  A further reminder that just because something is technically public does not make it necessarily okay to broadcast it. We have a real problem in our modern world dealing with all the data out there and how it should be protected, or not. Used to be it didn't matter much because you'd have to go down to the courthouse to get detailed information. Now it's being data mined, collected, aggregated with 100s of other sources, and sold. Yuck.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Maybe there's a very good reason why crimes and our court systems are public? Such as, so that people who choke their wife who is dying from cancer can be avoided and shunned by moral, law abiding persons.
- Konnstann 8y ago
  It may be public record, but significantly fewer people would have ever stumbled upon it had this article not been written.

j_m_b 8y ago

The Probation / Parole system, and the "correctional" institution in the US is a national disaster. The idea to prevent an adult, an elderly adult at that, from engaging in lawful activities like drinking alcohol as terms of probation is ludicrous. This man's life spiraled out of control for one reason.. the punitive nature of law enforcement and correctional institutions. What should be regarded as a health condition and treated as such (alcoholism) is instead used as a tool to further humiliate and demoralize this individual. It's not even safe to cold-turkey quit alcohol for an alcoholic because of the possibility of Grand Mal Seizures.

danso 8y ago
His charge of reckless driving was in 2017. In 2014, he received probation after pleading no contest to choking his terminally ill wife, whom in 2016 he divorced. And then got a contempt-of-court charge for not meeting the terms of the divorce settlement. What does the probation/parole system have to do with his particular issues?
- rodgerd 8y ago
  The desperate need of a subset of HN to find excuses for shitty men.
cat199 8y ago
sorry to disagree, but i'm preety sure you can get help for alcoholism without needing to strangle your wife and end up in jail first..
pmarreck 8y ago
Where did you see that he was certifiably an alcoholic? I would agree that the humanity here is lost in the weeds of bureaucracy... but if alcohol was at all a factor in the physical altercation with his ex wife, then I can't see it being that unreasonable a request. This is of course problematic since he's 70 and lots of his friends and family are probably starting to pass away and who can really blame someone for having a few drinks too many at one too many wakes? There is also the problem of unmarried older single men without a source of human affection having a much higher mortality and crime risk, which was brought into the equation. This man probably has almost no emotional support system at this point, which just exacerbates the overdrinking risk. The impending stress of work if he reopens can't be making that any easier, either. EDIT: Before someone accuses me of sympathizing with a felon, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(criminology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin... ; the antiquated idea that a person's behavior is due in some significant part to their intrinsic nature in some fashion instead of their circumstances/environment is not only the well-studied https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error , it should be put to rest ASAP. We need to get to work fixing situations AS WELL AS the people inhabiting them.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago

Gotta love "feminism" when it represents equal rights. But yet when the very idea of alimony is "I'm a lesser woman because I married", puts to rest any idea about it being equal rights. Say.. How many men get alimony?

jvp 8y ago
Kevin Federline
danso 8y ago
There are likely feminists who would be OK with the alimony pendulum swinging the other way as a result of gender parity in salaries and careers.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> But yet when the very idea of alimony is "I'm a lesser woman because I married", That's not the idea of alimony. The idea of alimony is closer to “I sacrificed my future income for my husband's by the division of domestic vs. external work in marriage”. > Say.. How many men get alimony? A small but growing number, largely because of slow erosion of persistent patriarchal gender roles which manifest in a number of ways. (1) Men are still more likely to support their wives and have their career advancement and future income potential dominate in marriage than vice versa, making them less likely to be eligible for alimony, (2) Men are less likely to seek alimony when they are eligible, (3) Men are less likely to resist alimony demands in divorce, (4) There's bias in judging where judges are more likely to view men as capable of independent self-support and less deserving of alimony in objectively similar conditions.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  > The idea of alimony is closer to “I sacrificed my future income for my husband's by the division of domestic vs. external work in marriage”. I'd argue that's even worse, as it encourages economic classes to 'marry amongst oneselves; don't relate with lesser people's And that very statement also packs in the idea the woman is some married domestic servant. And increasingly that is not true. My wife and I share the work. Equally. We both work. Right now I make more, but before this job, she made more. And now, on my extra salary, she's attending Harvard. Soon enough, she'll make more than I. And the sooner these gender roles are busted thoroughly for both men and women, the better we all will do.

GJR 8y ago

Clear case of Betteridge's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...