la.foodblogging

Rather, we go to West tonight…

I get emails here and there from PR folks who would like to promote their client’s event or restaurant. For the most part, I skip over them, especially if it is obvious that I am just on some mass list. I do appreciate it when the PR rep adds a personal note and on a few occasions we have promoted an event or restaurant by giving away something from them.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from someone representing the newly opened West Restaurant, which is perched atop the Hotel Angeleno. The hotel has taken over the old Holiday Inn location at the corner of Sunset Blvd and the 405 Freeway. The email was an invitation to try out West sometime. While it was not explicitly stated, I am assuming that the idea is that I try West, write about it here and they get a little publicity out of it.

We emailed back and forth a bit, settled on tonight, verified that I could take pictures and that dinner is on the house. I assume that I will still be leaving a tip, that there might be some parking charges, but other than that the meal is comped. Which brings me to my next thought. Can I accurately evaluate a restaurant if I’m not paying? None of the writers here are paid (including myself, who in addition to paying for meals also pays for hosting and puts in the time to maintain the site), so everything else that gets written here incorporates that part of the equation (i.e. ‘it was good, but not quite worth the $$$’).

Another thing about my reviews, is that if I go to a place and have a bad experience, a lot of times I just don’t write about it. I figure that there are plenty of other places to recommend, and it just might be that I caught the place on a bad night. Rather than tarnish a restaurant’s reputation, I would rather just move on to the next place. But here’s a case where I plan to write about the restaurant either way.

So there you go, full disclosure. I’m getting a “free” dinner for my wife and I at a presumably nice steakhouse in the sky. More details to come on how the evening goes.

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.