Soapbox features the country's best chefs
— spin-free, uncensored and off-the-cuff—
giving you the ultimate backstage pass to the country's hottest restaurants
Content Marketing Platform
Soapbox is a content marketing platform for chefs. We develop stories based on the topics and trends our chef members are posting about, curating their posts into stories for diners to enjoy. Every member of RIA has an opportunity to be a part of our stories — all they have to do is answer the questions we send each day via email. Anyone working in a chef-driven restaurant can join — for free. Just request an invitation and get started today!
Personal Profiles
Each of our Premium members has a personal profile, accessible through the Soapbox Profiles directory. Personal profiles include Essential and Extended Information and answer to our thousands of Behind the Line questions — the questions you've always wanted to ask.
Essential and Extended Information
Essential Information includes the basics that media need when writing about a chef. We encourage our members to fill out all of the information as it was designed by industry professionals to answer key questions. The information is timestamped, so a journalist knows how up-to-date it is. We encourage our members to fill out this information completely, as it acts as a foundation for their user profile.
Behind the Line
Also included is a section called Behind the Line. Behind the Line is a database of more than 2,500 questions designed to showcase our members' inspirations, philosophies and backgrounds. Also included are questions about home cooking (and home bartending and sommeliering), travel guides and offbeat questions we think you'll love. Each subset of questions is strategically targeted to a specific job within the restaurant industry, depending on the "role" they play in the theater of the restaurant world. So, sommeliers get wine questions and owners get owner questions. Pastry chefs get lots of questions about sweets, and line cooks get different questions than executive chefs.
Front Burner
We think you could spend a lifetime learning about restaurants, but we all know that most restaurant news boils down to: What's on trend, what's in season and what's the gossip. So, every day we send our members a few questions designed to keep all of us abreast of what's going on with all of them.
What's New
All of our members, regardless of their membership level, can participate in our What's New features. Designed to capture what is emerging in restaurants right now, What's New is probably a little different than what you are used to when you read up on trends. First, any chef, mixologist, sommelier or other restaurant professional can chime in. Also, we feature trends as they emerge, at the source — not after they trickle down. Ours are also more inclusive, giving everyone — not just the chosen few — a chance to share what they are doing. We are happy when some of our members are showcased as part of a small roundup of restaurants cooking X or serving Y, but we have a sneaking suspicion you also wondered about everyone else. As an added benefit, we are learning that members are taking inspiration from this group sharing to create new dishes.
QOTD
Another section that features all of our members, regardless of their membership level, Question of the Day responds to what is happening in the news right now. Face it, our members are mostly too busy to hang out on Twitter all day to see what everyone is talking about. That said, they often have an opinion they would like to share on the culinary topics of the day. So, we make it easy for them by letting them know the gossip, the culinary news and the fun culinary questions everyone has for them — and giving them a platform to speak for themselves.
Restaurant Profiles
You've all heard that today's news is tomorrow's birdcage liner. We'd like to add that the conventional press kit is garbage before it's even sent out the door. Press kits aren't searchable, they aren't complete, and what isn't canned and bloated hyperbole is soon-to-be-dated misinformation. In short, we think a chef deserves better.
Soapbox restaurant profiles are designed as flexible, searchable, filterable and comprehensive marketing platforms for our members.
Tips and Hints
Aggregated Information
Navigate to a personal profile of any chef. Click on one of the specialties or the cuisine they've identified as a particular expertise. You'll be delivered all the other chefs who've selected the same. Dying to know which chefs have vegetable gardens, or which mixologist is making her own condiments? Discovering new chefs who are interested in what you are interested in is as easy as clicking a link.
We've also added aggregated content to Behind the Line. So, if you are perusing a profile and find your interest piqued by a particular question, you can click on that question and find out how other members have answered that question. And in case there are too many (we are excited for that day to come!), you can filter by individual, restaurant, cuisine, role, region or metro area.
One Ground Rule
Before we start, there's something we ask you to keep in mind: All of the answers come directly from our member chefs, mixologists and sommeliers. No editing.
Does that mean there are some typos, bad word choices and a few dangling participles? Sure. The fact is, our members are chefs, mixologists and sommeliers. They aren't writers. So we have one ground rule for our website guests: Before you judge a member on his/her English and spelling, we ask that you first have him/her over for a multi-course dinner and ask them to judge your cooking.
We think that will help you shift your perspective a wee bit, and we will then be able to thank you for helping us celebrate that our chefs spent their school years skipping English class so they could explore the world of food.
Thank You
And with that information, we think you're on your way. If you have questions, you can contact us. If you are a restaurant professional, you can request an invitation. Thank you for your interest and support.