🍽️ Navigating Food & Beverage Media’s Role in the Context of Gentrification & Business Coverage

Can Food and Beverage Media Impact Gentrification?

Food and beverage media’s coverage of hospitality businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods serves not only to drive interest and outside patronage to an establishment or area, but also to influence consumer expectations and behavior regarding how to engage with staff members and local residents. Thus, the messages crafted by food and beverage media about a business, community, and neighborhood have a real impact on local residents and how they may experience gentrification in the future.

To date, the reality of gentrification has not been a topic that is regularly investigated or evaluated as part of the process for determining media coverage of most restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and other hospitality businesses.

For example, in 2020, Los Angeles-based chef Jessica Koslow came under fire when her disparaging comments about the neighborhood surrounding her restaurant, Sqirl in Virgil Village, resurfaced alongside accusations of worker exploitation and poor food safety standards. Koslow was quoted describing her restaurant as being situated “on a street no one knew about, in a neighborhood no one cared about,” and the wider neighborhood as “the butt crack of Silver Lake,” in previous years, and admitted to the fact that Sqirl has indeed “perpetuated gentrification” in the area.

Despite this, however, Koslow’s approach to Sqirl has earned her everything from a James Beard Award nomination to Food & Wine and Eater awards for Best Chef.

<aside> ❓ This raises the question: what does it mean to be a media organization actively evaluating its coverage through the lens of community building and investment?

How should those factors be considered alongside aspects like the price and quality of the food? And how do the background and experiences of the reporter also affect the “appeal” of certain establishments when aesthetics are such a contentious issue when it comes to gentrification?

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📝 Our Findings

From our focus groups and 1:1 interviews with food and beverage media professionals, we’ve learned that these are questions more and more media and award organizations are grappling with.

In recent years, more writers are using historical context to situate their coverage — like this review of Courage Bagels from The Infatuation — and full features are being dedicated to what it means to address gentrification as a hospitality business.

<aside> 💡 We also partnered with L.A. Taco to cover how gentrification is affecting the neighborhood of Highland Park:

In Highland Park, Restaurants Deal with How They Are Contributing to the Neighborhood's Gentrification

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There is still a lot more to do. When we asked about due diligence (the vetting process) and accountability, we were confronted with mostly silence:

While considering an establishment for coverage, what has been the due diligence process(es) you’ve been a part of to confirm this business is following through with its claims? In particular, what are some ways to support and consider the perspectives of those not in leadership roles in the business?
How do you define and measure the long-term community impact of a hospitality business? In particular, one of the business owners in our focus group asked, “How do you evaluate how the business(es)' presence has or will contribute to the community culturally and economically?”

We used our industry-wide town hall as an opportunity to address what appeared to be a clear gap in how media organizations incorporated gentrification within their reporting process. We gathered a group of professionals from across the food, beverage, and hospitality space and asked them a similar set of questions as our media representatives.

Below are two sets of recommendations we compiled from the resulting responses, delineated between organization and individual. We also organized this into a handy checklist, which can be downloaded as part of the PDF below.