Nightwood is in GQ, too. Here's why you didn't know that.

Last Thursday the Twitterverse got all aflutter when news came that the Bristol had been selected by GQ's Alan Richman as one of the best new restaurants in the country. Here's how it went down: Ellen Malloy, a publicist who owns the website the Bristol uses for their PR, started the tweets like so:

THE BRISTOL IS ONE OF THE 10 BEST RESTOS IN CHICAGO ACCORDING TO GQ MAGAZINE!!!! WOOOOTTT!!!

Malloy quickly corrected herself—the list is of the best restaurants in the country, not Chicago—but she had already been retweeted copiously: This girl RT'd it,  this guy RT'd it, this guy RT'd it, they RT'd it...there was a lot of chatter. Steve Dolinsky chimed in as well, sort of taking credit:

I'm glad Richman listened to me: congrats to Bristol for being the only Chicago rep on 10 Best Restos in GQ

What nobody was talking about was Nightwood—or, more specifically, Nightwood's rigatoni with confit of mutton, which Richman selected as one of his top dishes of the year. Or HotChocolate's Mindy Segal, which Richman wrote a nice blurb about. Even XOCO and Rick Bayless—both big topics on Twitter—were looked over, even though the cubano torta was named one of Richman's favorite artisanal pork sandwiches. (The ever modest Bayless tweeted about the Bristol, but didn't mention the kudos he himself received.)

Was this a matter of the Bristol's props being somehow more noteworthy than the others? I guess that's possible, though personally I think having one of the top five dishes is just as notable as being one of the top ten restaurants. But more than that, I think what happened on Twitter that day was indicative of a publicist using social media to bypass journalists and hit the general public itself. Malloy has over 3,000 followers on Twitter, and though I have no numbers to go by, I think we can safely assume that many of her followers are not journalists. Regular restaurant-going people follow Malloy because she doesn't just represent food personalities—she's become a food personality herself.

It's a brilliant situation for publicity, because Malloy (and other publicists like her, though I don't know of any with such a following) can generate buzz for her clients without having to use a journalist or story to do so. But I wonder if all of her followers know the score. Because her enthusiastic tweets come from her personal account (her company has a separate twitter account, and the two often tweet the same news), Malloy's tweets could easily be taken as just that: Simple enthusiasm, without an agenda. And who knows, maybe a lot of her tweets are. After all, Malloy does tweet about restaurants that don't use RIA. Though even then, one has to wonder if the motivation is signing more clients. So you see what I mean—it's complicated.

Is it a problem? Not really. Malloy is a great businesswoman, and she's just working hard for her clients. Besides, if one of her followers doesn't realize that there may (or may not) be other motives at work, that's their error—the onus is on us to examine the source from which we get our news.

But it does speak to a new and, for me, slightly itchy dynamic in the media. Publicists, restaurateurs, journalists and readers—we're all playing in the same sandbox now. The traditional tiers of distributing information have been leveled. So now there's more information, but a crucial tier—one that was supposed to separate those with an agenda from those without—is gone. And without it stories can get skewed.

So from my journalist's chair, the people walking around knowing that the Bristol was named in GQ, but not that XOCO, HotChocolate and Nightwood (all of whom don't send out press releases) are—they don't know the whole story. In fact, they only know a quarter of it.

But from a publicist's chair? Those people probably know everything they need to know.