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Goodbye to Chowhound, the Internet’s First Food Hub
This 25-year-old corner of the culinary internet is sadly shuttering.
Sometime in the mid-2000s, a man invited me to kill his ducks. He had a few males from his latest batch of babies, and they couldn’t live in the middle of the city with his laying females. If I came and helped slaughter, he would split the meat with me. I agreed. But driving home with a lap full of duck, I needed to figure out how to cook and preserve the meat and the innards, so I turned to the only place on the internet at the time that would have just the kind of weird, wonderful recipes I needed: Chowhound. There, people pointed me toward five-hour roast duck, and to someone else with a similar problem wondering what to do with way too many pounds of duck liver.
Before there was Food52, before there was Serious Eats, before any food websites fully embraced that people wanted to know more about food than what newspaper recipes and reviews had been doing for years, there was Chowhound. Since before Y2K, its simple message board interface gathered food nerds and connected them to others in their area and around the world—helping them find a place to buy Burmese tea leaves in Seattle or eat soup dumplings in Cincinnati; guiding them through recipes for duck prosciutto or Uruguayan provoleta.
This week, Chowhound announced an end to its quarter-century of eclectic edibles on the internet. After March 21st, the site will go dark, taking with it the collected ramblings, obsessive genius, and obscure information. Around the country, food fanatics and professionals give a wistful look, trying to remember only the best parts of the site: the friendships forged, the restaurants highlighted, and the recipes posted. When so much of the food world focused on celebrity chefs, Chowhound often turned obscure or under-the-radar spots into stars of their own orbit.
Cooks who needed more intense or more arcane recipes than they could find in their cookbook library would turn to Chowhound. People could gather for an in-depth discussion about squirrel fish, to discuss what “Chicago-fried” chow mein was, and to troubleshoot canelés with other people before there was anywhere else to do it.
But like any niche corner of the internet, the site was not without its issues. Founder Jim Leff came in as an enthusiast, which meant that neither community management nor computer science were his areas of expertise. And as the site got infinitely more popular, the problems magnified. In 2006, he and his cofounder sold the site, and it has since been sold a few more times.
"Chowhound was badly mismanaged by a succession of companies who tossed it around between themselves like a hot potato,” Leff said in a farewell blogpost.
And that fact became increasingly evident from the outside. As time went on, the user interface got harder to navigate, the content less organic from a group of zealots and more strategic and editorial. If you look at the site’s own duck recipes from recent times, it’s all seared duck breasts and fruit sauces. People posted fewer of their mom’s homemade Vietnamese clam recipes and personal wonton fillings; they also took their fervent ramblings on eating every soup dumpling in Queens to their own blogs, Twitter, or Facebook.
It seems that very few of Chowhound's original users stuck around past 2010 or thereabouts. And yet, when the site slips away into the abandoned corner of the internet archives, the world woefully loses one of its greatest collections: of random culinary rants, a ton of (sometimes misguided) cooking advice, and the electronic trail of forgotten tiny restaurants all over the world.
Written by: Naomi Tomky
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25 Comments
Chowhound was a great resource for recommendations, suggestions, help and recipes. Even in it's latest iterations. I got some favorite recipes from people there that will continue to be reprised. At least there is that.
I guess I'd better get started copying those saved recipes.
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