Lovin Dublin Food Blog

there's a popular blog that uses stick figures and a lot of swearing to make "man food", he's probably emulating something like that.

either that or it's my mother in law, she curses like a sailor! :pac:

OldBean wrote: »

It's the Daily Mail equiv. to a food blog.

Couldn't agree more.

There are some really fantastic food blogs out there that don't need to rely on cursing to get attention/be cool/whatever.

The lad is a great food photographer, he should hone in on that instead of trying to work out how many times he can fit the words f**k and sh*t into a sentence about poached eggs.

the reality is that this guy is making a decent living out of writing this juvenile nonsense. How that happens I don't know or care but this is not quite the amateur blogger we've been used to.

The Hill Billy wrote: »

Ha! I just read through the whole recipe & the mind boggles...

"Pretty ****ing simple so far you'd have to say!"
"Chop the **** out of the coriander."
"Slice up a few good thick slices of the bread and **** it into the toaster."
"The egg will three minutes so you need to move your ****ing ass and get the avocado prepped."

Aye, it seems a bit OTT to me. Maybe the blogger is trying for an "image". Nigella being the "Sultry Seductress with Spaghetti", Jamie as the "Pukka-pizza Essex Boy" & this person being the "Effing-'n'-blinding like a Docker Blogger".

I've never looked at that blog before, but it comes across as written by a schoolkid who is trying to look big in front of his mates by swearing at every opportunity.

I know and agree. Funny thing is I'm pretty sure it is written by Niall Harbison. He worked for years as a personal chef to lots of Hollywood a-listers, cooked dinner for presidents, all that jazz. Then went into some FoodTV venture, not sure how that worked out but last year he sold his share of the digital media agency he founded called Simply Zesty for up to £5m (performance related) to UTV.

So despite all the cussin and hollering this schmuck ain't no schoolboy, he's a godamm multi millionaire who loves ranting on about food while cussing and blindin'!

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/03/06/utv-media-acquires-british-social-media-agency-simply-zesty-for-up-to-5-million/

He's selling his Ranelagh pad too at the moment if you want a nose
http://www.broadsheet.ie/tag/niall-harbison/

I think it's great that there's a site that focuses on food in Dublin, and I love reading about that sort of thing. The problem with Lovin Dublin is that because a lot (most?) of the content is written by Niall, the readers are getting the opinion of someone who has very stereotypical views about certain parts of Dublin, and who comes across as a massive snob. This will of course appeal to many people who share his opinions, but he seems to be forgetting that there are a hell of a lot of people who live in the areas that he mocks who he is alienating with his comments. The best thing he could do to help the site grow would be to hire someone unbiased, someone who doesn't care where the restaurant is as long as the food is good. Maybe they can't afford to employ someone else until the site grows a bit more, and that's fair enough, but if they're losing readers because people don't like the writer then the site can't grow.

I prefer the vastly superior Stitch and Bear. Obviously it doesn't have the same amount of content because it's not a full time blog like Lovin Dublin is, but the reviews are always well constructed and trustworthy.

Jawgap wrote: »

More profit in the corporate sector - easier to drop 12 boxes to 1 location than 1 box to 12.

Yeah for sure. But it just sounds like the type of idea more suited to serving their blog readers. Delivering mass sandwiches isn't breaking new ground at the end of the day. And the whole idea as artvandelay mentioned was to introduce people to food from new places around Dublin but they seem to have backtracked on that too and are now only using one supplier.

So what started out as a good idea quickly turned into a blog partnering with a cafe to supply sandwiches to the corporate market. Fair enough so

MissFlitworth wrote: »

That blog drives me up the ****ing walls. I can't even go into everything that bothers me about it because the post would break boards it would be so long but back when it was just the one guy writing it the *rubbish* he came out with about northside Dublin gave me a facial tic. He headed to Brother Hubbard (which, if you aren't from Dublin, is both gorgeous and on a street that is only in the last few years transitioning from being somewhere you could buy a) power tools b) "adult" magazines and c) the kind of couch you'd put in a bedsit on to a place with really nice cafés and bars) and wrote a post about how he'd never had food somewhere knowing there were people browsing porn dvds over the other side of the wall. Firstly - Brother Hubbard isn't beside a porn shop and secondly on the 'posher' side of the city on South William street, around the kind of area Lovindublin writes lots of crawling reviews about, there are lots of (god forgive me for typing this) hipster restaurants & also at least 3 adult shops.



Yes, definitely. They're trying to build the 'Lovindublin' brand and I think the sweary persona is part of that.

Agree he really does come across someone who is trying way to hard and as a bit of a "look at me" type tool

If I was to have a stab at where it might have gone wrong for personal customers I'd guess the logistics part was a big headache, it certainly sounds like one if you still had to go walk somewhere to collect your sandwich. I'm not being lazy or anything but if I'm paying €9 or €10 for a sandwich I'd want it delivered to the door at that price. I think rather than going down the road of forcing people to pick it up from a location what they needed to do was use the same model the pizza companies do. If you have a small group of teenagers who know the city they can easily drop to 10 locations an hour, pay them €1 per sandwich dropped to keep them moving fast. At some locations they'll drop 5 or 6 sandwiches and make a quick €5 or €6, at others it'll be only €1 but either way they're incentivised to move quickly. Once the sandwiches are refrigerated and delivered using a cold box/bag it should be feasible to cover Dublin 1, 2, 4 & 6 by bicycle where you'd probably have in excess of 100,000 office workers on any given day.

Which brings me to another point, perhaps when the blog owners conceived the idea for personal customers they had thought what would happen was groups of four or five or even six workmates who get lunch together would all order together through word of mouth; thus the blog readers become sellers of the idea to their work colleagues. Perhaps they were hoping it would turn out that way, a "buzz" would be created about the idea and people would make it a regular weekly ritual in the workplace. It doesn't seem to have worked out that way and my guess is that making customers pick it up rather than adding value and delivering it to time strapped workers was the downfall in the idea. Nonetheless I say fair play to them too for trying something new and innovative. It wouldn't really be for me I don't think apart from maybe once for novelty purposes but the idea in itself had merit. They've obviously realised quick enough it wasn't working so adapted to what they know does work.