Disclosure: We Eat Here Co., the parent company of New York Eats Here, runs food events including Harlem Summer Nights and Latin Food Fest. The Infatuation runs EEEEEATSCON. We are competitors in the events business. Every fact in this piece comes from Chase, Infatuation, JPMorgan press releases, or from Infatuation's own materials.
The Infatuation's "25 Best Pizza Places in America" ran on August 21. We posted that they didn't find the best pizza in America. They found the one that paid to be found.
Infatuation's verified account showed up in our comments within hours. No free meals. No reservations. No PR favors. Writers pay for their own dinner. Editorial process is rigorous. Read the about page.
Sure. We never said the writers took twenty bucks to slip in a name. That model is from 2015. The 2025 model is cleaner. You don't bribe the publication. You buy it.
What the about page actually says
Type "theinfatuation.com/about" into a browser. The page tells you, in their words, that in 2021 they were acquired by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
That sentence is the entire story.
We didn't surface the acquisition. Their own About page does. The Infatuation now operates as a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary. The co-founder, Chris Stang, isn't running a magazine anymore. His current title at Chase is Head of Lifestyle. He told The Points Guy this April that the marriage is going well, "one plus one equals more than two."
He wasn't talking about restaurants.
The loop
In April, Chase rolled out Sapphire Reserve Exclusive Tables. Holders of the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, annual fee $550, get prime-time reservations and event access at restaurants curated, in Chase's own language, "in partnership with The Infatuation."
EEEEEATSCON, the food festival the Infatuation produces in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, is "presented by Chase Sapphire." Thirty-plus restaurants per market. The festival landing page lives on Infatuation's own domain.
Before the acquisition, they ran the same play with American Express. The Infatuation's partnerships page brags about a "Best Neighborhood Restaurants" guide series produced for Amex Gold Card across five US markets, paired with private dinner experiences at the restaurants featured. Their own pitch deck called the campaign 75 million impressions of "the Gold Card is the only choice for people who want to get the most from their casual dining experiences."
The Infatuation produced a Best Neighborhoods list as paid branded content for a credit card company. They told you that was an ad. Now they produce a Best Pizza in America list for a credit card company that owns them. They say that one is editorial.
The mechanism is exactly the same. Only the wall came down.
Here's how the loop closes. Chase owns Infatuation. Infatuation produces the list. Worth saying out loud: most of the writers probably can't see this from where they sit. They write about pizza. The restaurants on the list hold reservation inventory for Sapphire Reserve cardholders. Sign-ups drive interchange revenue. Interchange revenue justifies the acquisition. The whole loop runs through one publication that calls itself a restaurant guide.
Every restaurant on the 25 Best Pizza list is, by structure, inventory for a financial product.
What gets on the list and what doesn't
Once you understand the funnel, the list reads differently.
L'Industrie. Razza. Frank Pepe. Pizzeria Bianco. Quarter Sheets. Real spots, mostly excellent. None of them paid to be there in the bribe sense Infatuation rushed to deny.
They have things in common that go past pizza. Most take reservations. Most photograph clean. The price points sit comfortably inside what a Sapphire Reserve customer expects to spend on a Saturday night. The locations are findable on a tourist's itinerary. They are, in different ways, on-brand for the cardholder.
Look at the operators who showed up under our post when it ran. Slicehaus dropped in. Chrissy's Pizza, who confirmed they've been on multiple Infatuation lists and never paid a dime. Paulie Gee's asked, fairly, where the article was. Sambino said he could name ten Brooklyn spots not on any list that smoke half the names that are. That roster knows the New York pizza scene at a level Infatuation's Brooklyn-based writers do not.\
None of them treated the denial as serious. They treated it as the script.
The bodega slice shop in East Tremont that's been open since 1991 is not on the list. The Bushwick joint with no Resy is not on the list. The Punjabi cab driver lunch counter slinging slices out of a deli oven in Queens is not on the list. None of those expand Sapphire Reserve's value proposition. They might be the best pizza in the country. They will never be on a list owned by a bank.
Call it customer acquisition criteria.
The defense doesn't hold
Infatuation will keep saying their writers pay for meals. Probably true. Also irrelevant.
The corruption sits in the org chart. A publication owned by a bank, whose co-founder works at the bank, whose flagship festival is presented by the bank's credit card, whose readers are funneled into a cardholder reservation product, cannot review restaurants. It can market them.
There's a reason the New York Times draws a hard line between editorial and the business side. There's a reason the Washington Post stamps sponsored content in different typography. The Infatuation didn't separate those teams. They merged them, sold the merger to a bank, and called the absence of a wall "honest."
Digiday saw it coming. In a 2020 piece on Infatuation's pivot toward branded content, the entrepreneur Joe Procopio observed that the company was "starting to explore their reviews as a kind of content marketing engine." That was a year before the Chase deal closed. The acquisition proved him right.
Content marketing engine. Their critics' words. Their parent company's business model.
What the operators need to see
The honest version of the 25 Best Pizza in America list reads: twenty-five restaurants whose presence here helps sell a $550 annual fee credit card to people who want to feel like they have access in this city.
Call that a sales sheet with bylines.
The operators in our comment thread already saw it. The lists are baloney, as @pavlovaloves put it. The slice down the block is better than the slice with the press hit. The places that get the line are not always the places that get the trophy.
Those operators are right. They are also outside the funnel. They will stay outside the funnel. The funnel doesn't exist to find them.
Eat where you want. Just know who's selling you the address.
New York Eats Here is the editorial arm of We Eat Here Co. We cover the operators, the workers, and the economics other food media won't print. Subscribe at newyorkeatshere.com.
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