For the past few years, I’ve celebrated my birthdays with my Parisian friend Jeanne, whose annual work conference brings her to town every March. The festivities typically involve an ambitious, multi-restaurant tour of the city, but because she didn’t have much free time this year, we kept the party close to her Grand Central–adjacent hotel and went to Giulietta, a new 275-seat spritzes-and-spaghetti-style Italian restaurant at the base of the Met Life Building. We were seated in a smaller dining room — away from the lemon tree that dominates the main room — between a table of two women and a group of six.
“I ordered garlic bread while you were in the bathroom,” Jeanne told me as a $17 plate of “grilled focaccia, mozzarella, and lemon butter” landed on our table. “That’s literally beurre blanc,” I said, laughing at bread that had been sauced like a catch of the day. I started taking photos, as much for my own records as anything else, just as I have for nearly all the meals I’ve eaten in the name of professional research. Figuring I’d get a cheese pull, I switched my camera to video when Jeanne started to cut at a piece of bread with the provided sauce spoon. “You didn’t ask if you could do that,” I teased her as she halted her progress. “I know, I know!” she said, well aware that the cost of a free meal with a food writer is waiting for content to be gathered. “It’s fine, keep going, it’s all staying in,” I said. “I dare not touch it,” she replied, hand clutched to her chest.
The rest of the meal was largely forgettable, but we did have a delicious bottle of wine before heading to an Irish pub to toast my actual birthday at midnight. From bed, I posted a 22-second clip of our garlic bread exchange to TikTok with the caption, “I leave for 3 minutes and she ordered the garlic bread beurre blanc”; went to sleep; and mostly forgot about it for the rest of the weekend, which involved more birthday dinners at LaRina and Sawa. When I opened the app again on Monday morning, I noticed the red notification bubble at “99+,” saw the clip had surpassed 100,000 views, and realized something had gone wrong.
“She ordered it and that’s how you’re speaking to her? Wow that’s rude,” reads the first of more than 1,700 confused, angry comments. “I’m sorry but did you just yell at her for cutting into food she ordered herself?” reads another, with 23.2 thousand likes. Still one more chimed in, echoing many hundreds of others, “I would have been so done. And she posted it, which means she talks to everyone like this and thinks it’s normal.”
Comment after comment was more of the same: “I’m literally appalled at your rudeness.” “This was EXHAUSTING.” “U went viral for the wrong reasons honey.” “I am mad at you and I wasn’t even there😳Yikes.”
I hadn’t intended to offend anyone, but the B-roll I posted to an account with a scant 100 followers was evidently being promoted as rage bait for the masses — and still is. For her part, Jeanne, a militant feminist whose job entails working with various governments to legalize abortion, was appalled by the video’s reach and users’ reactions. “I know you think this is normal, but it’s deranged,” she texted from France.
Within 23 days of posting, the video surpassed a million views. (Before this, my most popular post was an ASMR-friendly clip from the baguette-making class I took last December, which peaked at a few thousand.) As my video took off, I looked at TikTok’s viewer analytics to see if I could figure out who all these people are. It was predominantly females between the ages of 25 and 44 from (in order) Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and San Antonio. Ninety-six percent of the American viewership’s location was lumped under “other” — aside from being unified in their distaste for me, I can only assume the population of Other, USA, includes no food writers or French people.
“There could be bots involved,” suggested my colleague, our tech columnist, John Herrman, when I told him what had happened. “But the main bot involved here is TikTok.” He explained that in the era of algorithmic recommendations, “pile-ons are sort of invisibly orchestrated by platforms identifying audience clusters and going, ‘They should see this.’” In a way, he added, “every post is a targeted ad, and maybe this got shoved into empty-headed cheese-pull TikTok, which turns out to be quite racist.”
Whatever machine learning was needed to push this onto the FYP of so many people, it seems to have worked as designed. Everyone I showed the video to in my real life couldn’t understand the controversy. But everyone leaving comments seemed willing to ignore any reasonable context to insist I must be a horrible person. “You must be fun at parties,” commented LucyInTheSky. Lucy, I am fun at parties.
Some friends, understandably, suggested I just delete it. While that might seem like a quick escape from nuisance behavior, it doesn’t change the threat of this happening again. In order to speak freely on the internet, you have to take the haters for granted. Washington Post restaurant critic Elazar Sontag has detractors, too, mostly showing up in the feedback he sees on posted videos. “In an unironic way, I love them,” he tells me. “They are my most loyal readers.” Not everyone is so rosy about it. One prominent food personality told me about the YouTube commenters who target their videos repeatedly, but none of their colleagues’: “The way these people think,” the person said, “is so removed from how my brain works.”
I’ve been mostly able to treat this extended session of online abuse as a sociological study — why do I care about strangers who couldn’t tell me apart from Ayanna? — it speaks to the very real contingent of people who are all too happy to heap venom onto someone they don’t know. Satisfying this tribunal by responding as though I did anything that requires an explanation in the first place will only embolden the mob. The video is still up, and I don’t have plans to take it down. If anything, what I should apologize for is introducing thousands of the most annoying people in America to the concept of garlic bread beurre blanc, a dish that should not have been promoted at all. If someone shows up to your next dinner party with a platter of wet, greasy bread, I’m sorry.
