Luiz Hara author of top food blog, The London Foodie, has a lot on his plate. From food and hotel reviews, Luiz is moving into travel and has already worked with top hospitality brands to make it happen. He has also written a cookbook which is being published later this year. In this interview Luiz talks about the blog, the book, his supper club, blogger compensation, best practices and more.
What’s new on The London Foodie? In the last year, The London Foodie has expanded its Travel and Hotel review section and is now featuring a number of gourmet destinations including top dining options and hotels in places like Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Bali to name a few. This has been a natural progression from writing about food, since readers interested in food will also research their holidays looking for destinations that are not only fantastic places to stay and visit but also provide wonderful foodie experiences.
Give us an example of successful brand collaboration. What did you learn from it? Within the last year, there are two collaborations that I have enjoyed tremendously.
The first was with The Marriott Hotel Group, who enlisted the help of five British tastemakers to design and develop their dream lodgings. They invited me to be the head of the ‘foodie financials tribe’. There were a few ‘tribes’ involved, including foodie, technology-driven, sporting and fashion. Each one of us had to collate information from their respective ‘tribe’ and help The Marriott to design the ideal hotel room for that group. It was a great opportunity for me to engage with my social media and blog readership, and collate a large number of suggestions for the perfect ‘foodie financial’ hotel room, and I believe I conveyed their message in a way that enhanced the brand of Marriott and improved hotel guest experiences. The best features of each one of these ‘tribe’ rooms were then combined into one design after a public vote, which is being created as the hotel room of the future for the Hotel Marriott group. The project was written up in the Daily Mail, and can be viewed here (
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-2810925/Travellers-reveal-amenities-dream-accommodations-including-hover-bed-hot-cold-tub-selfie-wall.html)
The second collaboration was with another hotel collection – The Edwardian Group. They invited me to work with them over three days, and experience their hotel restaurant May Fair Kitchen’s behind the scenes operations. This was hugely educational and interesting project for me to be involved in. I spent one day travelling around Kent and Oxfordshire visiting their meat and vegetable suppliers. I also spent a lovely morning at a cattle farm, and learned a great deal about cattle breeding and all the work involved in rearing cattle for top quality beef. I was also fortunate to be able to visit the restaurant’s meat supplier and have a masterclass in butchery. Back in the restaurant, I spent a day shadowing the Head Chef during a busy lunchtime service. This was hugely interesting, and a gave me a glimpse of what goes on in the restaurant of a large 5-star hotel. This piece was written up here
http://www.thelondonfoodie.co.uk/2014/11/behindthescenes-at-mayfair-kitchen.html
How do you use social media to promote/share content? What are the challenges? I view social media as blogging on the go. It’s a great way to share content without having to sit down and take hours writing up detailed reviews. I also like using Instagram as it allows me to post content on Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. I have found that also using hashtags for a series of Instagram and Twitter posts helps me later to piece together a more detailed blog post, especially when travelling. It’s good to be able to register interesting places and dishes on the go with the click of a mobile phone camera. Blogging and social media go hand in hand. One challenge is that social media is dependent on wifi, and when travelling it is not always available. I do not use social media if I have drunk alcohol, as I would hate to upset anyone with a rash judgement or comment.
What advice would you give to a someone who wants to start a blog? If you are thinking of starting a blog, there is one thing I cannot over-emphasise – make sure you are focussing on something that you find absolutely fascinating, because the blog will take up a huge amount of your time and effort to maintain it. In addition, you will need to enjoy writing. I cannot imagine my life without The London Foodie – not only have I met wonderful people through it, but the blog was the catalyst for me to leave my former career in investment banking and embark on a new one training at Le Cordon Bleu and now cooking and writing about food. So the potential benefits are huge, but there are thousands of blogs that have started and been abandoned because it is hard work to maintain it. I spend 12 to 18 hours working on the blog every week, holidays included. It’s a huge but wonderful commitment.
Whether you are a blogger or not, we all have mortgages or bills to pay and if a blogger has enough readership and is giving his or her time to provide a service that has a financial value attached to it, I believe they should be remunerated
How do you work with PRs? I work with a small number of PRs, many of whom I have known since I started my blog, and who are now good friends. More recently I have been working with travel PRs. I only work with PRs who have clients in keeping with the subjects I write about. I think it is wonderful to work with PRs who are genuinely interested in their clients and are doing a great job for them. You can’t help but feel inspired by such professionals. I think it is not a tough job to sell a fantastic product or client, but the challenge is to be creative and enthusiastic about products which, though great, are not well known. One such example was the good people at Atomic PR with whom I have worked recently. They came up with idea of The London Steak Award for their Malbec wine client Graffigna, an Argentinian label owned by the Pernod-Ricard Group. I admit that I had never heard of Graffigna before, and I don’t imagine many other Londoners have either. Atomic PR came up with the fantastic idea of The London Steak Award, getting people to nominate their favourite steak restaurants in London via various social media channels. I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of their panel of judges in choosing London’s best steak. The four restaurants were chosen by public voting, and generated a huge interest in finding the best steak, as well as getting Graffigna’s Malbec brand on the map.
Do you feel bloggers need to be compensated for the work they do? There is no right or wrong answer to this – some bloggers monetise their blog while others prefer not to. Sometimes the ‘benefits in kind’ provided are equivalent to being paid, for example with overseas press trips. Whether you are a blogger or not, we all have mortgages or bills to pay and if a blogger has enough readership and is giving his or her time to provide a service that has a financial value attached to it, I believe they should be remunerated. This is down to the blogger, and I do not judge bloggers who work for free or charge, it’s a matter of personal choice.
What do you feel about sponsorship disclosure? Again, this is a matter of personal choice for each individual blogger – I disclose sponsorship whenever I feel this is relevant to the feature I am writing. For example, I will always disclose press trip sponsorship as I feel that these are high value experiences and I want my readers to make their own assessments on how objective I am being in my opinions and recommendations.
I disclose sponsorship whenever I feel this is relevant to the feature I am writing. For example, I will always disclose press trip sponsorship as I feel that these are high value experiences and I want my readers to make their own assessments on how objective I am being in my opinions and recommendations.
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List three best practices PRs need to follow for better blogger outreach?
1. Be personable – contact the blogger, invite them for a coffee or a bite to eat, introduce yourselves and your clients. This is a great way to start a working relationship and bloggers will be more likely to support you and your clients in future.
2. Engage with bloggers on social media – bloggers will Tweet or Instagram their experiences – some of these have been arranged by the PR agents themselves. These should be retweeted, regrammed or commented on if possible, conversations on social media will generate interest and brand recognition of PR clients and bloggers, so everyone is a winner. Tweeting the links of bloggers’ posts on social media would also help this.
3. Remember to thank bloggers – it is always good practice to thank the blogger for a blog post if a link was sent to you (or not), particularly if they have not been paid for their time, this is a good way to make contact or to continue a healthy working relationship with them.
What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? I have just written a cookbook named “Nikkei Cuisine – Japanese Food the South American Way” which is being published in Autumn 2015 by Jacqui Small Publishers. I am Japanese-Brazilian and cook Japanese and Nikkei food at my supper club in Islington. For those who do not know this, Brazil has the largest Japanese community outside Japan, and the cuisine created by Japanese immigrants there (as well as other places in South America including Peru) is called Nikkei cuisine. My grandparents had to recreate their Japanese food using local ingredients they found in Brazil and this style of cuisine is referred to as Nikkei. In the process of writing this book, I travelled to Brazil and Peru, met the most renowned Nikkei chefs in South America and will be writing about these experiences in The London Foodie. It was a fascinating journey of discovery not only regarding the food of my ancestors but also about my own family history, a story of migration, food and love.
The Top 10 UK Food Blogs for 2015 will be published this week – stay tuned!
Editorial information on Luiz Hara, The London Foodie and thousands of other media/blogger contacts and outlets, can be found in the Cision Media Database.
Luiz Hara author of top food blog, The London Foodie, has a lot on his plate. From food and hotel reviews, Luiz is moving into travel and has already worked with top hospitality brands to make it happen. He has also written a cookbook which is being published later this year. In this interview Luiz talks about the blog, the book, his supper club, blogger compensation, best practices and more. 
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