Wine Spectator: No Restaurant? No Problem!
How’s this for a successful restaurant website: Robin Goldstein, author and wine critic, developed a website, bogus menu and wine list for a fictitious Milan restaurant called Osteria L’Intrepido. He then submitted the restaurant with its accompanying information and $250 entry fee to Wine Spectator’s excellence awards. Goldstein’s “restaurant”, it turns out, was awarded a Wine Spectator excellence award, which when bestowed upon an actual restaurant, gives it great publicity and a nice bump in revenue. In this case, the incident has left Wine Spectator scrambling to defend the standards of their awards. Was Goldstein’s gesture a publicity-seeking hoax or brilliant statement attempting to undermine the credibility of food and wine awards?
