Rolling Boil

Dominick Purnomo grew up around the work, stress, and pain that comes with carrying the weight of a restaurant. His parents, Chef Yono & Donna Purnomo are local legends in the food world, so he saw the business at its best too, with all of its triumph and joy. It’s a tough game. Restaurants are a place of great successes and epic failures. 

Dominick’s parents may have tried to steer him away, but he jumped in with both feet.

On Thursday, he tweeted a copy of a letter he was sending the Times Union, setting off a skirmish on social media where food and journalism collided.

You can read Susie Davidson Powell’s review here. To say she hated Boil Shack is understating things, for her review wasn’t just negative, it was gleefully nasty.

It’s fair to say that some people find Powell’s reviews annoying. When she started at the Times Union, her pieces were thick with Britishisms, so full of pip-pip-cheerio nonsense that they sounded like parody. Not so much now. Thank God for editors.

The president has taught us that Twitter is a great place to show how thin skinned you are, so Purnomo’s post drew a tart response from several prominent TU folks, like managing editor Casey Seiler.

Maybe Purnomo will get a polite and reasonable response to his letter from a senior manager at the paper, but that time isn’t now.

I don’t completely agree with Dominick Purnomo on this. A restaurant can have a bad night and fix it the next day, but your bad night may have ruined somebody’s special occasion. Or maybe you took the $100 bucks they put away for a nice dinner and you didn’t deliver. There’s no taking that back. 

As for Susie Davidson Powell,  her schtick is unfair and unprofessional. She may have been right, but she was not just.

8 thoughts on “Rolling Boil

    1. I think that a customer, and all of his readers are customers, is entitled to a response that’s not pissy — but that seems to be the approach over there.

  1. I think critics can say “don’t go”, but I agree that he “schtick” here is a problem. Yes, it is unprofessional. A sampling of SDP adjectives to describe food: “used diaper”, “scat”, “creosote”, and “betadine paint”. But the larger concern should be around relative accuracy and competence, I dined at one of the places she savaged prior to the printed review and wondered if she was talking about the same place.

    1. Yes, agreed. Her reviews are more about her than the restaurants. I need to check and see if I’ve eaten at any she’s reviewed. And another thing, I don’t really blame her. Editors are supposed to keep this stuff under control.

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