Chowhound shutting down on March 21, 2022

A Final Goodbye for Chowhound

Dear members of the Chowhound family,

After 25 incredible years of sharing culinary insights and mouth-watering recipes, we are saddened to inform you that Chowhound will be closing down on Monday, March 21, 2022.

This incredibly difficult decision is due to limitations in the capabilities and resources required to maintain the site on an ongoing basis. Rather than allowing the site experience to degrade, we have opted to close down the site.

We would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to our users for making Chowhound a vibrant and passionate community of food trailblazers for more than two decades. We couldn’t have done this without you and wish you all the best on your future culinary endeavors.

Sincerely,

The Chowhound Team

We welcome a healthy discussion here, but continue to keep our posting guidelines in mind: https://www.chowhound.com/guidelines

If you'd like to reach us privately with questions or concerns, please email moderators@chowhound.com.

Wow. Comments are interesting. Long live LTH Forum.

Longtime LTH members may be nostalgic, but will not miss the site. Short time members may not even know what is being talked about.

lougord99 wrote:Longtime LTH members may be nostalgic, but will not miss the site. Short time members may not even know what is being talked about.

The site was shut down some years ago but someone forgot to tell it. The current shell of its former self will not be missed.

Hi,

Chowhound was my introduction to the internet food community.

I do appreciate their being there when I needed them, because I learned a lot. It is from the Chicago Chowhound Community that LTHforum sprang from.

Sure the parting was not pretty, but in many respects we grew out of it.

The Chowhound community was tolerant of cheap eats to fancy food. I really enjoyed the full range of expression it offered. As I long described the experience: all the needles in the haystack now hung out together. I am sure some of us were in the same restaurant at adjacent tables without knowing how deep our food interests were.

Sure, it was a competitive environment there (and here), where you need to know your stuff and not be surprised someone may know more than you. If you can handle it, great. Or as I call it: all the big fish in the small pond have gathered.

Whenever my family travelled and I could not find an answer, I would check Chowhound. I hope I can find Melanie Wong from the San Francisco board, who always has great information.

I do have get over there to find some of my posts to copy.

Regards,
Cathy2

I just checked on chowhound, and it sounds like some people have moved to the Hungry Onion site, which was started by somebody in the UK that was unhappy with chowhound. Food Talk Central was mentioned as another site people have relocated to. LTH Forum was mentioned several times for people in the Chicago area.

There are some people that are worried though that there will be no good place for people to go for home cooking advice.

I don't have a lot of fond memories of Chowhound, as I joined there shortly before this forum was birthed, and joined this wonderful family. The core folks who shortly after started and regularly posted on LTH made me feel very welcome, and I said to myself, "these are my people."

I have pretty much good memories about Chowhound, and one point that bears mentioning is that when that chat site started up, we'd yet to have other social networks like Facebook and Twitter and all the others that are now part of the fabric of everyday life. In the early Aughts, the idea of connecting with *strangers* online and then, gasp, actually meeting up with these people in real life to, for instance, go on 24-hour eating odysseys, well, that was something new. And it was exciting. We felt like we were in uncharted territory and on the cusp of a new kind of community. We were.

NFriday wrote:There are some people that are worried though that there will be no good place for people to go for home cooking advice.

On facebook, you can find cooking groups around specific topics or broad. There are places like here, too.

When you engage in a community, like LTH, you come to know whether people know what they are talking about or not. Siskel and Ebert come to mind: if Siskel likes it, you may, too OR Ebert loves it, you may not. You know whose style parallels with your taste.

It just takes a while to figure it out.

Regards,
Cathy2

Like Cathy (whose post makes many of the points I would have made myself), I have very good memories of Chowhound that go way back. I still recall getting an occasional private query from Jim Leff about things I posted or responding with answers or advice.
I haven't visited in years (except, perhaps, to find old reviews I had posted there), but it was ahead of its time in many ways and that old iteration, at any rate, will be missed.

David Hammond wrote:I have pretty much good memories about Chowhound, and one point that bears mentioning is that when that chat site started up, we'd yet to have other social networks like Facebook and Twitter and all the others that are now part of the fabric of everyday life. In the early Aughts, the idea of connecting with *strangers* online and then, gasp, actually meeting up with these people in real life to, for instance, go on 24-hour eating odysseys, well, that was something new. And it was exciting. We felt like we were in uncharted territory and on the cusp of a new kind of community. We were.

Very good points, as are Gypsy Boy's too, I think, about Chowhound being ahead of its time.

I discovered Chowhound and then the LTH listserv when I was living in Chile 20ish years ago, homesick for American food and English conversation, back when internet access was not ubiquitous and certainly not on everyone's mobile phone.

People over at Chowhound asked Jim Leff if he would be interested in starting another group such as Chowhound, and he said no.

I did not realize that CBS owned it for a while and bought it from CNET. Apparently when the present owners redesigned the website is when the website really went downhill.

I think their cookbook of the month is moving to Hungry Onion.

NFriday wrote:People over at Chowhound asked Jim Leff if he would be interested in starting another group such as Chowhound, and he said no.

I did not realize that CBS owned it for a while and bought it from CNET. Apparently when the present owners redesigned the website is when the website really went downhill.

I think their cookbook of the month is moving to Hungry Onion.

Not surprised by Leff's response: the time for starting up that kind of site has likely come and gone (and it's possible Leff also signed some kind of non-compete when he sold the site).

David Hammond wrote:

NFriday wrote:People over at Chowhound asked Jim Leff if he would be interested in starting another group such as Chowhound, and he said no.

I did not realize that CBS owned it for a while and bought it from CNET. Apparently when the present owners redesigned the website is when the website really went downhill.

I think their cookbook of the month is moving to Hungry Onion.

Not surprised by Leff's response: the time for starting up that kind of site has likely come and gone (and it's possible Leff also signed some kind of non-compete when he sold the site).

It's very unlikely that a non-compete would extended 15+ years but that's just a guess.

=R=

ronnie_suburban wrote:It's very unlikely that a non-compete would extended 15+ years but that's just a guess.=R=

True.

I think the shutdown of Chowhound was precipitated by the advent and popularity of Reddit forums. As well as the Chicago Chowhound forum seemed like a ghost town the past couple years with minimal user engagement.

Leff made it very clear that he did not want to ever set up another site. I think he said he would rather spend several hours in a Nazi dentist's chair, than to set up another site.

In my memory, the worst part about Chowhound was the existence of several posters who shilled for certain restaurants. You make a comment about a restaurant and within an hour there would be a post attacking everything you said. That was too much drama for my tastes.

I have mixed feelings about my time on Chowhound. I joined the site shortly before discovering the LTH forum and was immediately welcomed by its core members, who made me feel like I had found my community. These experiences stand in stark contrast to my time on Chowhound, which was not as enjoyable.

nuhanabiha wrote:I have mixed feelings about my time on Chowhound. I joined the site shortly before discovering the LTH forum and was immediately welcomed by its core members, who made me feel like I had found my community. These experiences stand in stark contrast to my time on Chowhound, which was not as enjoyable.

The Internet is not about enjoyment, it's about anonymous personal attacks and propagating conspiracy theories.

spinynorman99 wrote:

nuhanabiha wrote:I have mixed feelings about my time on Chowhound. I joined the site shortly before discovering the LTH forum and was immediately welcomed by its core members, who made me feel like I had found my community. These experiences stand in stark contrast to my time on Chowhound, which was not as enjoyable.

The Internet is not about enjoyment, it's about anonymous personal attacks and propagating conspiracy theories.

i wouldnt dream of arguing about the horrors of social media (i dont participate, except for LTH). but for several years the chicago chowhounds that i hung out with (many of whom are here on LTH) were a very welcoming group. i made several life-long friends and many casual friends there. but LTH was definitely an improvement and i never went back to chowhound...