Last month at Chinatown’s “Little” Three Happiness on Cermak a table of eight sat dining on salt-and-pepper shrimp, blue crabs, black-pepper beef ribs, crispy chicken skin, water spinach with fermented tofu, and panfried rice noodles with duck and barbecued pork. As they dug in Gary Wiviott, a large, gregarious man in black, put down his chopsticks and stood up. With a bit of pomp, he presented Three Happiness’s owners, Raymond and Betty Yau, with a white laminated card proclaiming the nine-table Cantonese eatery “one of Chicago’s Great Neighborhood Restaurants.”
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LTHForum’s eight moderators and many of its members found their “tribe,” as they put it, on Chowhound.com, the national food message board started by New York writer and jazz musician Jim Leff. Popularized by a 2001 Calvin Trillin piece in the New Yorker, Chowhound is a huge virtual community of people who love to eat food as much as they like to talk about it. On the Chicago board in particular one could spend hours plumbing the depths of threads gone by, debating the provenance of fresh green almonds on Kedzie or writing poetry to the pork neck larb at Spoon on Western.
Inevitably many regulars on the Chicago Chowhound boards began to form relationships in the real world, meeting for meals and elaborately orchestrated events such as 2002’s 24 Hours of Chow, a Homeric eat-a-thon that traveled all over the city. A cohesive social group evolved out of the virtual one, a development that began to conflict with Leff’s management of the site.
Gebert and the others say they’re following a policy of “moderation in moderation” and allow a much broader range of discussion in spite of LTHForum’s mostly local focus. So far they’ve had to deal with little of the nastiness and shilling that sometimes flare up on Chowhound and most other public boards. That’s a consequence, they say, of the site’s face-to-face social component, and the fact that users are required to register. “It’s harder to be an asshole when people know who you are,” says moderator David Hammond.
