Chowhound, the website that began 25 years ago as a digital gathering place for obsessive food lovers, will close down on March 21, the site announced on Monday.
“This incredibly difficult decision is due to limitations in the capabilities and resources required to maintain the site on an ongoing basis,” its moderators said. Red Ventures, the media corporation that owns Chowhound, declined to comment further.
Chowhound was founded in 1997 by Jim Leff, a jazz trombonist and writer whose day jobs financed his fervid quest for deliciousness, along with a rather more silent partner, Bob Okumura.
In its heady early days it was a space to find recommendations for the best barbecue, arepas or Albanian bureks in New York, alongside passionate rants and relentless arguments over kimchi, lengua tacos and lahmacun.
“Chowhound wasn’t just food chat, it was by and for extremist people who’ve tried every quesadilla in Sunset Park,” Mr. Leff said Wednesday.
The ’90s were thrilling for food-loving New Yorkers. A small pack of appetite-driven writers was prowling the back alleys of all five boroughs, applying to restaurants of every sort the lessons learned from national writers like Calvin Trillin and Jane and Michael Stern, whose mouthwatering odes to burgoo, chess pie and brain sandwiches (a St. Louis specialty) revived interest in regional American cooking.
Among them were Robert Sietsema, who wrote a newsletter, “Down the Hatch,” before joining The Village Voice and eventually Eater New York; and Sylvia Carter, who wrote an excellent column for New York Newsday before it shut down in 1995. I joined this group in early 1992, initiating the $25 and Under column for The New York Times.
Perhaps the most obsessive of all was Mr. Leff, who, when I first met him in 1993, was writing a restaurant column for New York Press, an alternative newspaper full of interesting writing.
Mr. Leff, it seemed, was always finding the greatest imaginable Fujianese noodle dish in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, cooked by a woman who appeared on a street corner, but only on Thursdays, unless it was raining, in which case she’d come on Tuesdays between noon and 1 p.m.
These were also the early days of the internet, when plodding telephone modems could short-circuit brains with their connecting screeches. Chowhound was the merger of these two worlds, a neighborhood hangout for food adventurers — chowhounds, Mr. Leff called them, distinguishing them from dilettantish foodies — to indulge their opinionated obsessions among a like-minded community.
The site, while giving Mr. Leff a large, immediate forum, was plain and unadorned, done on the cheap, like the duct-taped Naugahyde seats in Mr. Leff’s favorite sort of restaurants. But for those of us who cared, it was an oasis where the city’s multitude of cultures — the Gorgeous Mosaic, in the former Mayor David N. Dinkins’s memorable phrase — appeared in delectable detail.
The discussions inspired the imagination and an insatiable appetite. I was not an avid participant. I qualified more as a lurker. For those of us on the restaurant prowl, Chowhound was like a daily tip service. A barbecue joint without a phone near Kennedy International Airport? A jerk shop on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx? Noodles in Flushing? I’m on my way.
Chowhound soon expanded beyond New York to other cities. Combative humans being what they are, animosities and rivalries blossomed and splinter sites formed, like egullet and mouthfulsfood. None quite captured the ornery compulsion that animated Chowhound in its prime years.
Weary of running the site on a shoestring, in 2006 Mr. Leff and Mr. Okumura sold Chowhound to CNET, which was acquired by Red Ventures in 2020. By then, the internet and the food world had changed. First blogs and then social media had given anybody the means to bypass village gathering spots like Chowhound.
I began writing full-time about wine in 2004 and lost the thread of Chowhound. But others did not. In the last couple of days, Twitter was full of reminiscences about inspirations, arguments and friendships birthed on that remarkable site.
I asked Mr. Leff whether a site like Chowhound was needed any longer.
“These days there are myriad places to chat about food, and everyone’s got an opinion, but it will never be economically feasible to constrain ambition and aim for a limited, expert crowd,” he said. “But one day some other true believer may give it a shot, not for glory or profit, but just the sheer usefulness of it.”
Website or not, Mr. Leff is still doing what he’s always done.
“Before I wrote about food, I was making finds and no one cared,” he said. “Then I became a writer, and people cared. Then Chowhound, and they cared a lot. Now I continue to make great finds and nobody cares. From my perspective, it’s all been a comfortable straight line. I’m a chowhound to my core.”
Correction: March, 10, 2022
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this story misstated that the website egullet had closed. It is still in operation.
