This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on March 18, 2022. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters .
Earlier this week, I was emailed by a representative of a company that is launching a new restaurant in Montecito. They wanted to be featured in the paper before their doors open in June and offered me an "exclusive" to do so.
This is a pretty common request. My old self — the news-reporter-trained one who cared about scoops in an era when exclusives weren’t immediately swallowed up and spit back out by social media and aggregation websites — would have jumped at the chance to be the first one to tell this story.