What is a Caper?
a new food media company, a pickled flower bud, a ridiculous escapade
I try to write restaurant stories that I think are important but don’t have other outlets. I write about labor markets, social infrastructure, community, economic resilience. The gap between what restaurants actually are and what media covers about them is enormous. Most food media lives in listicles, reviews, SEO-optimized best-of guides and, of course, scandal. Most everything else goes largely untold.
That’s why I’m excited about Caper, a new media company founded by Max Tcheyan and Daniel Tsinis (formerly Puck, The Athletic, Roku) with Dana Brown, former Deputy Editor of Vanity Fair, as Editor in Chief. Caper’s mission is to cover the restaurant industry differently. As founding journalist Chris Crowley put it: restaurants are “a great lens into what’s happening”—in cities, in culture, in the economy. Yes, they are and it’s awesome to have new publication writing about them in this way.
Caper launched with three founding journalists—Crowley, Emma Orlow, and Annie Armstrong—each with equity and editorial freedom to pursue deeper, more ambitious reporting than the content treadmill typically allows. The food, as Tcheyan says, is the B-roll. The real stories are about the business and the people.
My first piece, Out of Office, I look forward to occasionally contributing!
