Pioneer Press Aims at Foot, Fires
On May 8 Diversions carried a Rayes-Ichkhan review of Flatlander’s Restaurant & Brewery in Lincolnshire. Leonard had given it a friendly review a few years earlier. Rayes-Ichkhan could not. “I tried, yes, I tried” to be kind, she says, but her lack of enthusiasm shone through. The steak soba “was a busy mix that lacked eye appeal.” The baby back ribs “tasted more fatty than meaty.” Though the buffalo carpaccio was a “standout,” the raw oysters were “well presented,” and the portions were “sizable,” Rayes-Ichkhan allowed that “many of the dishes are rather run-of-the-mill.”
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The review anguished Flatlander’s president, Brian Margulis, who also happens to be president of the Lake County chapter of the Illinois Restaurant Association. But he’s even more anguished, he says, by recent accounts of Gerst’s resignation that sketch him as a vengeful businessman who pressured a publisher to knuckle under. Margulis says he’d stopped advertising in Pioneer Press weeklies in March–a decision costing the chain close to $30,000 in annual revenue. He was a little surprised in May when someone at Diversions called to say the section was running a review and wanted to send a photographer out to take pictures. “I said, ‘Photo! It must be good,’” says Margulis. “They said, ‘We only run good reviews.’ The photographer who came out confirmed this. If they go and have a bad experience they just don’t write anything. Two or three weeks later I read the review. I said, ‘God!’” Then “I shrugged my shoulders and didn’t say a word.”
He was on vacation in Florida with his family in June when a call came from Larry Green, publisher of Pioneer Press. Margulis says Green wanted to apologize. “He told me it wasn’t right. There was a substitute person who did the review. He said, ‘Whether you advertise with us or not in the future, we will come in and re-review you.’
“I knew they weren’t going to back down,” she says. So that night she wrote a letter of resignation. She was running off a copy the next morning when Leonard approached her. They’d been friends for years. “Are you mad at me?” he asked. “You cost me my job,” she told him. She put the letter on Blaser’s desk and waited.
“I said, ‘When is it going to run?’ He said, ‘It’ll be in the next issue. You no longer work here. You must leave the building.’” Gerst says she replied, “‘Randy, I live downtown! I wasn’t fired. I resigned. Please let me clean my desk out now. It’ll take ten minutes.’ And he said, ‘No, come back after five. You can’t be here during business hours, because you don’t work here anymore.’”
In 1999 Radler had shifted Green from executive editor of the Sun-Times to vice president for advertising. “I’m usually calm, but I have my moments,” Green wrote in a memo to his new staff. “You will probably hear other things about me from the Guild and that does not surprise me. They do not like me. I have not let them intimidate me. I have gone public with things they would rather have kept secret.” He told the ad staff it was time “to have fun again.”
