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Yelp ceo brother12/7/2023 To anyone just tuning in, the idea that the CEO of a TV show highlighting the best Fluffernutter bagels would write combative Facebook rants about social justice probably seemed like a head-scratcher. In the moment when Massachusetts restaurants most needed it, the Phantom was dead. Under pressure, and in a thicket of horrifically bad press, parent broadcaster WBZ put Phantom Gourmet on indefinite hiatus and Dave, the man who was once synonymous with the show, stepped down from his position in disgrace. In the rapid backlash that followed, angry fans flooded the show’s station with phone calls, protesters gathered outside a Phantom-owned drive-in movie theater, and restaurants disavowed the program they’d happily partnered with for years. Over the course of 10 days in June, Dave, the company’s CEO, shocked viewers by publishing a series of tasteless, tone-deaf jokes on social media about Black Lives Matter protesters that many considered racist. Three months later, though, it was apparent that the Phantom would not, in fact, be helping TV viewers at home get through anything. In one promotional spot for the show, filmed al fresco with just some bare-limbed trees and brush as a backdrop, Dan says to the camera, “Be safe, eat well,” while sporting a COVID-casual black-and-red hoodie from Saugus’s Kowloon restaurant. Their hyperbolic assessments-most everything was either mouthwatering, outrageous, or ooey-gooey-and their sheer love of local food made Phantom Gourmet’s weekend programming not just a ritual, but an idiosyncratic Masshole institution entirely our own.īy the end of March, it seemed all but certain that the brothers would be our corona-era cheerleaders. Through it all, the brothers bouncily explained to legions of loyal viewers where to find everything from barbecue pork nachos drenched in melted cheese to overflowing banana-split milkshakes. Phantom had remained on TV for nearly 30 years, surviving the various convulsions in food media, the rise of streaming, and two recessions. If there was anyone who could find a way to keep broadcasting through the apocalypse, it was the Andelmans. With dining rooms dark, cooks jobless, and the entire food economy in free fall, when the iconic purple logo lit up the screen that Sunday, a form of comfort food for locals’ souls beamed out across the state. The episode marked the first of several Phantom Gourmet “takeout specials,” tweaked for an audience who could no longer dine out and for a pair of TV celebrities who could no longer work in their Allston studio. But most of all, these two familiar faces-Dave, with his hair slicked back and oozing his smooth-talking swagger, and Dan, flashing a broad grin that highlighted the recent dawning of a pandemic beard-were there to remind viewers in this unfamiliar time how important it was to support local restaurants. That wasn’t the only kind of pie they were crushing on that day-they also had a lot to say about Harrows Chicken Pies in Reading. So one day in late March, as COVID-19 cases surged and shutdown hysteria swelled, the cohosts of the TV show Phantom Gourmet calmly stood 6 feet apart at opposite ends of a folding table in a large field ogling a spread of overstuffed whoopie pies. Like all great performers, brothers Dan and Dave Andelman have a keen understanding that the show must go on.
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