I've been stalking the forums on Pizzamaking.com for some time and I always thought that if there was one forum where users treated each with respect and avoided the common pitfalls that make the vast majority of forums useless rubbish full of angry people that sit behind keyboards all day it was this one. My reasoning was always that these forums were full of 'do'ers' as opposed to 'haters' if you will. However this thread takes the cake and prompted me to finally open an account here as I cannot believe the comments I continued to read.
First of all, I live in Austin. I don't know these guys personally, I did however eat their pizza last week. Whether it's 'authentic' (whatever that means, honestly outside of a VPN certification how would any of us know what is 'authentic' ??) or not is irrelevant to me and honestly outside of a few select people on this thread nobody else really cares either. What I do know is that they were busy and that my pizza was unlike anything I had ever had before in the other cities I called home. Detroit style pizza is killer and like TScarborough said above, I'll be back for more.
Secondly, after Ronzo posted that 'cooking' video I gave it a watch. I then promptly watched a bunch of Hilah's videos and did some research on her (she is all over the place and has a large following from what I can gather). Was it my cup of tea? Not really, however not everything is about me, or you, etc etc etc. Not everything is for me, or for you either, etc. Sometimes we are simply not the target audience for whatever is out there. These video's are annoying to me, but that's ok. That just means it's not for me. What is being lost in the noise here and not being considered is the audience to which Brandon was speaking to and the goal of her videos as a whole. With her 'act' she probably fills a niche market of slacker/hipster types that probably don't do a ton of cooking. Do you think that anybody going on her show talking overly technical about anything will attract the viewers she is targeting? Or do you think that by keeping it simple that she is able to hit her audience? Just because you and I and the rest of us pizza geeks get off on bakers %'s, hydration points, cold rises, starters, etc doesn't mean that everybody will be interested in that. I dug a little deeper and found that Brandon trained with Tony Gemignani (a simple Google search brought it up pretty quick), I'm guessing the Via 313 guys know their stuff and their audience at any particular moment. Scott I respect you based on your history of solid posts and insight but I think you are off point this time. Also, that reminds me of when Tony Gemignani did a series of web videos for Men's Health Magazine last year (they were 'dumbed' down as well as you can imagine), someone posted it over on Slice and the negative comments immediately began to fly because in the video Tony used a rolling pin. People lost it saying he wasn't true to the roots of Neapolitan pizza on and on and on. Just like the Hilah video, they too were not the target audience for that.
Finally, for god's sake their pizza is very good and earning positive reviews but instead of treating them like proud fellow forum members gone public and good, I see the opposite taking place here.
