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As far as we can tell, Steve Dolinsky's taking on a second career as our personal nemesis. How else to explain his recent Q&A with WBEZ, in which the interviewer points out that Dolinsky got himself "in an internet pickle with bloggers and on-line foodies who criticized you for reviewing a restaurant on your twitter feed. This, after you talked about how you shouldn’t review restaurants after one sitting." (In case it wasn't clear that he's talking about us, the phrase "on-line foodies" links to this thar blog.)

Dolinksy's response is characteristically both defensive and tone-deaf. As with his blog-that-is-not-a-blog, we're not sure whether the guy is playing a really advanced game, or just has no idea how the internet works:

Not sure how expressing an opinion in 10 words or less, or updating a Facebook status qualifies as a “review.” As someone who’s been covering the food scene here since 1995, I think I’m entitled to express my opinion on occasion. I never do so on ABC obviously, but if someone asks me about a place, I’m going to give my honest opinion; that’s what a dining budget is for, and it provides a level playing field without bias. Unlike Yelpers and some bloggers from sites/publications that do not have a dining budget, I don’t attend media dinners or freebies for press only. If someone considers a Twitter feed a review, they’re just lazy readers. They should spend more time reading Frank Bruni or Tom Sietsema or Michael Nagrant and less time whining about me.

It's interesting that Dolinsky refers to both "reviews" and "opinions," and draws a hard line between the two. We agree — a review is a particular format of expression, and opinions are what a review contains. The problem, though, is that when you're a figure as visible as Dolinsky — who wears as a point of pride that he's been "covering the food scene" for over a decade — your publicly expressed opinions actually, you know, count for something. It doesn't matter if it has anything to do with his "dining budget,"* if there's an ABC logo floating nearby, or if he writes it on a scrap of notebook paper and tapes it to his bedroom window. If Steve Dolinsky publicly expresses an opinion on a restaurant, that opinion counts.

This is the core of what bothers us. It's the Spiderman thing: With great power comes great responsibility. We're not saying Dolinsky is a kingmaker, but he's built his house on the public expression of his opinions. The problem is, when he signs online, those opinions don't just get expressed to the Friday night watchers of his ABC segment. They also go out to his 178 Twitter followers, his god knows how many Facebook friends, the readers of his blog. Everything he says in those media are not only visible to those folks, but are also visible for all eternity, even if you try to delete them. (Do you see what we did there?)

If Steve Dolinsky wants to be taken seriously as an arbiter of the food scene, he should familiarize himself with the ways it's changing. He cites Frank Bruni of the New York Times, Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post, and Chicago's own Michael Nagrant as folks who we should be spending more time reading before we're qualified to criticize him — but you know, all three of those guys have embraced the changing media of food journalism, blogging, Twittering, but also protecting the currency of their opinion. If Dolinsky wants to play fast and loose with his own, that's grand, but he shouldn't put the goods out for display and then get mad at us for looking.

5 questions with…Steve Dolinsky [WBEZ]

*On that topic! We fail to see the relevance of a dining budget to Dolinsky's argument as a whole, since we can confidently say we've never taken a free meal that's even remotely related to this blog. Our boss has never even bought us lunch.