This essay by Cliff Bostock that originally appeared as a blog post in Atlanta’s Creative Loafing “Omnivore” blog, and the response to it by Brown’s Guides editor Fred Brown expresses the approach the Brown’s Guides website is taking to Georgia restaurants and where its Georgia Restaurants section is headed in the future.

Remembering Bill Cutler and Brown’s Guide

By CLIFF BOSTOCK

I noticed that Fred Brown left a comment on a post here a couple of days ago. For those of you who don’t know, Fred is the longtime publisher of Brown’s Guide to Georgia, an engaging monthly that began publication in the early ’70s and, as I recall, underwent several deaths and resurrections, the latest being as an internet resource.

Among the magazine’s highlights was its employment of Bill Cutler, who was in most people’s judgment the first serious dining critic in our city. Bill, who founded Knife and Fork with Christiane Lauterbach before his death in the ’80s, brought a strong voice and narrative style to reviewing.

The reviewing spun out of his other passion: bicycling. Bill wrote incredibly engaging accounts of his bicycle tours of rural Georgia and these included stories of his meals, interwoven with his descriptions of a world in extreme transition. I became a fan very early on because Brown’s Guide began publication when I was working for newspapers in rural Georgia myself. I felt, those years, like I was living in a Flannery O’Connor short story whose characters were being forced into modernity.

Bill also wrote occasional pieces for the Atlanta Gazette, Creative Loafing’s competitor, when I was editor there, although these were not about food. More often, he wrote about race, politics and the changing South.

He was also a friend (and inspiration) of Elliott Mackle, who wrote the original Grazing column for Creative Loafing (while I was editor here) and later became dining critic at the AJC.

It is hard to overstate how important Bill was in moving dining criticism out of the dark ages in our city. Fred Brown cultivated the same kind of critical eye and narrative style in other writers he employed (like Tom Patterson). While the Internet doesn’t accommodate the luxurious narrative of storytelling that characterized the original magazine’s feature stories, it is a good fit for the (colorfully written) listings that also filled its pages.

Indeed, I enjoyed this first sentence from the magazine’s listing of Omnivore:
OMNIVORE ATLANTA is the food blog of the weekly, free, at-one-time alternative newspaper, Creative Loafing.

Can you spot the snark?

Bill Cutler’s Legacy
A Response to Cliff Bostock’s Essay on Remembering Bill Cutler and Brown’s Guide

By FRED BROWN

Cliff Bostock, co-author of Creative Loafing’s “Omnivore” food blog, published a post last week recalling the groundbreaking restaurant criticism that Bill Cutler did for Brown’s Guide Magazine back in the 70s and 80s. Cliff pointed out that in the judgment of most food professionals who have been around long enough to remember, Bill was the first serious dining critic in Atlanta. He said, “It is hard to overstate how important he was to moving dining criticism out of the dark ages in our City.” I would add that the same comment holds true for all of Georgia.

Cutler was to dining out in Georgia what Rush Limbaugh is to American politics. No one was neutral about what he had to say. I remember walking into a St. Simons Island restaurant three years after an unfavorable Bill Cutler review. The still-angry owner met me at the door quoting the review verbatim. He refused to serve me and was not all that interested in buying advertising. Cutler was regarded as a one-man, bomb-throwing terrorist organization by the Brown’s Guide advertising department. A restaurant owner once wrote me, ” We have been avid subscribers to Brown’s Guide since its inception, and we think your Restaurant Guide must be hurting your advertising department.” Nothing made Bill happier, with the possible exception of sweetbreads.

It’s a different world on the Internet. “Restaurant Finders” are everywhere and restaurant bloggers abound, reviewing and commenting on restaurants. Indeed, I have 21 “Restaurant Finders” bookmarked, and there are 13 Atlanta and Georgia food bloggers included in the blogroll of this food blog. Restaurant patrons write their own comments. Opinions are less influenced by reviews than by a restaurant’s website and recommendations on Facebook and Twitter.

The approach we are taking here at BG is to include EVERY Georgia restaurant in the Georgia Restaurants category, including chains and franchises, and make sure they are “searchable” by type of food, travel region, county and city. There are already over 900 restaurants on the site (as contrasted to 150 or so in a typical issue of the magazine), and we are adding more every week. Each restaurant has a brief introduction, usually taken from its website, contact information, and a link to its website, when it has one - and most do. Every Georgia restaurant can expand its profile free. You can learn a LOT about a restaurant by carefully studying its website to find out what it says about itself.

The next step is to add a readers’ comments section to each restaurant, so patrons can put in their own reviews and experiences. And, then, we’ll see where it goes from there.

Is there another Bill Cutler out there educating his pallet and honing his blogging skills, just waiting to move Georgia restaurant reviewing and criticism into new territory like Bill did in the 70s? Let’s hope so.