Hi swampy
I am on the same mission as you, the same mission as most members of both boards actually....and since andy advertises his ten year experience it is only human nature for people to want to know more, but andy is something of an enigma....He says he gets BIR results using his recipes, but alot of the people (myself included) try these same recipes, following them to the letter, don't get the same result
and when they post to say as much, they get told it's their fault, either they've burned something, forgotten something or used inferior ingredients :
(or they haven't mastered the use of a spoon :-X ).
As I have said before, I aren't questioning whether he has ten years experience, there are many bad indian take-away/restaurants which have been open alot longer than that....in almost every town or village there's one that you'd avoid like the plague, yet they seem to outlive better, cleaner establishments. People are naturally going to be curious of where the restaurant is, what the food is like, and obviously want some proof to back up andy's claims. Tis the way of the world I guess lol. Like I said to Andy myself, yesterday, if he wants to use the ten year tag, he should expect that people are going to question him and indeed doubt him when they don't get results/clear answers. He can't have all the praise and none of the criticism.
I was also told that andy doesn't own these other sites of which he is admin....strange, because when you Nominet the names of those sites, the owner of the domains comes up as
REMOVED the same man who owns RCR..(Don't complain about me printing his name, it's out in the public domain so I have broken no privacy laws :
)...since these sites are claiming secret insider knowledge of so many different cuisines, either andy is very well connected in all aspects of the food trade or there is something fishy going on.....I know what I think and I leave others to make up their own minds.
I also find it suspicious that Andy (who apparently owns or co-owns a hosting group, pays other people to host his sites, and is trying to get money out of well-minded folks to pay for the hosting..?180 no less!..Now why would you pay someone to host you when you are capable of hosting it yourself? I also find it hard to believe that as a well established admin (or co-owner of internet hosting services) would not immediately realise that if someone does not receive an activation email, they would naturally re-register from the same IP using a different email as the board software he's using does not allow duplicate emails :
instead he posted a misleading post making out that members were trying to gain access to the server via the website itself (to me, it read as though someone was trying to hack the site :
even going as far as to name names
). If andy were such the tech-head he claims to be (although funnily enough from one of his loyal supporters I've learned that he's only been a co-owner these past 4 weeks and his participation is purely monetary, "convenient" again? :
).
It just seems to me that when someone probes andy deeply (ooh err missus! ;D) that he backtracks on those claims, which again causes people to doubt him further.
I don't go to RCR to use andy's recipes as I prefer the recipes from Darth, Jeera, Cory Ander etc who don't claim to have his vast experience, yet get far better feedback and results from their "inexperienced" recipes.
Andy's recipes are given far too much credit, even by people who have not tried the recipes! I have to wonder if he would have been held in such high esteem without posting the "ten year experience". I also find it laughable that people think because he has ten years experience he is better able to tell who has cooked a good curry purely by looking at a photo of it :
.
Ali (the resident chef) during chef's hour uses words which when spoiken, would be in pidgin English, yet the words and grammar are spot on
(I know I'll probably be shot down by someone saying that the chef speaks, but someone else is typing :
)
The trouble is, I just don't buy into it all. There are too many incongruities in what he says, and as woks up has already said, Andy's ten year recipes are constantly being updated or changed to fit when they get less favourable results.
I think that better recipes are laid by the wayside in order to push andy's recipes, which in my opinion are not as good, and to me that is unfair. I see some members at RCR who to me, appear only to be arse-kissing in their replies, yet when someone posts in opposite they get labelled and sometimes are held up for ridicule. Hell I didn't even post there and I was called out by some ignorant member who didn't even have the decency to ask me to clarify what I'd said. Maybe he was right to call me a fence-sitter, (I was a fence-sitter until yesterday :
)but he more or less told me not to go back to RCR ;D Which is another problem I have....it seems that whenever I login to RCR I'm being asked to explain my posts here, which has nothing whatsoever to do with RCR :
If people have a problem with what I post here, they should take it up with me here, at this board, no go tattle-telling to gain points/get creedence/cause trouble back there :
(and in this case, I think it was purely done to cause more rifts and more trouble). I wouldn't care so much if I had been embroiled in any previous goings on, but I wasn't! :
I know I don't get the same trouble here when I've posted at RCR, yet I have been told that all the bitterness stems from this board.....funny when you consider that in RCR's rules it states not to be copying and pasting things from other recipe sites but it seems perfectly OK to do it when it's against this board or one of it's posting members
RCR appears to be extremely cliquey to me, so I go, look at he recipes but I don't join in with the forum as a whole, as, because I don't share in certain member's adulation of andy I am seen as a dissenter :
in fact apart from one post in which I comment on one of andy's recipes, the only other posts I have made there are about all this strange, puerile behaviour and tale-telling and muck-raking made by some members...As I told Andy, he is the one in charge, it is up to him to set the tone and put a stop to it. No doubt if I were getting the same treatment here, I would say the same to the admin here, but I don't, so I have no need to.
I prefer this board to RCR, for many of the reasons posted above, and I don't see why I should be persecuted for it :-X If there was a better atmosphere and less back-biting and bitching from some of the members at RCR, no doubt I would feel the same of that place too, but it's like entering the schoolyard most of the time for me :
And so to end, Swampy, I
AM like you, I just aren't being given the same treatment as you when I am there. At the moment I feel as though I am being watched almost, and all because I happened to post here :
I should not have to answer for my posts made here or anywhere else for that matter to people or admins at RCR.
As I've said in a previous post, by all means try andy's recipes, you might like them, but don't denounce anyone who says they don't or insult their intelligence purely because your views differ from theirs.
Those websites I've posted above rang alarm bells for me, for I have to wonder if andy is trying the same trick again, now that he's had some success with the indian food site (albeit most of his members followed him from here, for whatever reasons) since all forums appear to boast about their own resident chefs (Kim, Ali, Lorenzo....I'll be surprised if the mexican chef isn't named Jesus (haysoos) or Consuelo
)who are only too willing to give out their secret, "insider" knowledge.....Knowing how secretive and protective most chefs are of their recipes, I think Andy has had a fantastic stroke of luck getting one from each different cuisine who is willing to spill the beans
Or maybe I should set up a website advetising my 20 years mastery of the yorkshire pudding, I might just be on to something..... ;D (it's all in the heat and the handling of a ladle
)
As I've said before, if andy is going to make claims, he should be more than prepared to have questions about them. Banning people for being a bit nosey isn't the way to carry on
Swampy, Please don't think badly of me for questioning things, I'm only human after all
Topic: Invasion of Privacy? (read 69,630 times)
