I don’t relate to a lot of foodie culture. I approached [the Midwestern Diner] from the perspective of looking at the craftsmanship of food in a more artistic way. I saw a parallel between running a contemporary restaurant and running a film set. You can make a film that’s just a series of iPhone videos cut together. A chef can do a pop-up dinner where you get 16 people in a room, cook the whole thing yourself, bust your ass, and you’ve got a wonderful dinner. But in order to reach a larger group of people, to make a larger cultural impact, there’s a significant amount of logistical work, things that are not glamorous. That’s often overlooked. People are much more interested in the beautiful finished thing on the plate, the same way that people watch a film and they don’t care so much about how the filmmakers got to that.
After being laid off from his job at an advertising agency in 2014, Vincent Labriola started the site Midwestern Diner, which consists of long-form interviews and videos profiling chefs, brewers, distillers, and other people involved in the local food and drink scene. A filmmaker by training, Labriola was intrigued by similarities he saw between making food on a large scale and making movies, and wanted to create a series of short documentaries about people who work with food and drink in Chicago. He added written interviews after realizing how long the videos took to complete—though those interviews, which often run to several thousand words, were time-intensive themselves. For a year Labriola worked on the project nearly full-time, taking on freelance gigs to pay the bills and occasionally recruiting friends to help with photo or video. Last fall, he put the site on hold indefinitely. The 28-year-old spoke recently about what made him start the Midwestern Diner—and what ultimately made him end the project.
I’m of the opinion that everybody has something at least a little bit interesting to say—or their own way of saying something that maybe a million people have said before. When things would go off topic, I left it in. I liken it to an interview with Bruce Springsteen: part of it will address the thing that’s coming out, but the rest of it will be whatever else the hell Bruce Springsteen wants to talk about—and you’re interested because he’s an artist.
There was this notion that everybody brought up—some people were more skeptical than others—that the community supports each other. Especially brewers. Brewers would be like, “I didn’t have this sort of hops, so I just called up this other guy and was like, ‘Do you have any hops that I can have?’ And they’re like, ‘Sure!’” I think there’s a sense of community and identity here.
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