Finding 72 Market Street’s Kick-Ass Chili Recipe Online

I'll be far away from the real Jerry McGuire, sports agent Leigh Steinberg who hosts his famous Super Bowl Party every year, watching the game at home instead with friends and family on our new Panasonic HD Plasma with Bose Surround Sound.

I handled public relations for the release of Leigh's book “Winning with Integrity.”

But I'll definitely pay close attention to the halftime show, which is being directed by my client Kenny Ortega and produced by Don Mischer, who the NFL trusted to oversee the live entertainment on the heels of Janet Jackson's “wardrobe malfunction” last year.

Anyway, I decided I'd make a pot of chili, and the best chili I've ever had was served at a restaurant that's no longer open called 72 Market Street in Venice Beach, California.

My wife Celia said she'd seen the recipe for their “Kick-Ass Chili” published in the Los Angeles Times Food Section so I went online to try and find it.

The L.A. Times has an online archive where they charge $3 a story, and I'd have been happy to pay it, but none of my searches returned the story, or if they did, the search results didn't indicate so.

I searched “72 Market Street”, “Seventy-Two Market Street”, “72 Market”, “Seventy-Two Market”, “Kick-Ass Chili”, “Kick Ass Chili” and numerous combos of all of the above but no luck.

I even tried the advanced search option, limited my search to the Food Section, and selected “recipes” as the article type, and no results.

Then I searched many of the same combos in Factiva, and when I queried “72 Market and chili recipe” I got a search result that read like this:

Almost Angus' Los Angeles Times , 23 January 1997, 1607 words, ROSE DOSTI, (English)

DEAR SOS: Some time ago, I asked you to try to obtain Black Angus Restaurant's marvelous chili bean soup. I also kept looking and found an almost perfect match in the Junior League of Albuquerque's “Simply Simpatico” cookbook. It is …

So after multiple queries to try and search, find and save the recipe, I get the first 250 characters of the story, which say nothing about what the article returned really is.

In fact, I have to purchase the story in hopes that the recipe will actually be in it.

If they really wanted to sell the recipe, why not write a better meta description? Forget about SEO for B2B. These guys don't even understand SEO for B2C.

After opening five or six stories returned in the search results I finally found the recipe.

So I posted all the different search options and the recipe for 72 Market St. Kick Ass Chili to my blog, so next time I Google it, I'll be able to find it without having to search aimlessly and purchase a bunch of stories that don't have the recipe in it from the Los Angeles Times clunky online archives or from Factiva, which is great for searching back stories in numerous print publications.

But since they're just transcripts, and since text transcripts make poor micro-content, the only way to know what you're getting is to open the story and see.

Headlines like “RESTAURANTS In the Mood CHILI” say little about what the article it introduces actually is.

And I feel pretty darn sure that this blog post will be the number one search result in Google and Yahoo! within a month for all queries looking for this recipe.

So here it is.

72 MARKET STREET KICK-ASS CHILI

Ingredients

• 1/4 pound bacon, diced
• 3 pounds beef stew meat, chili grind
• 1 1/2 pounds pork butt, chili grind
• 2 tablespoons peanut oil
• 1 2/3 cups chopped white onions
• 2 jalapenos, diced
• 1 3/4 teaspoons oregano
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 2 1/2 tablespoons minced fresh New Mexico serrano or California green chiles
• 2 1/2 tablespoons ground pasilla chiles
• 1 1/4 tablespoons cayenne
• 1 3/4 tablespoons chopped garlic
• Salt
• 1 (16-ounce) can tomato puree
• 1 pound plum tomatoes, diced
• 6 tablespoons water
• 1 1/4 cups ale
• 3/4 tablespoon lemon juice

NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION

Each of 6 servings contains about: 647 calories; 531 mg sodium; 165 mg cholesterol; 36 grams fat; 21 grams carbohydrates; 58 grams protein; 3.01 grams fiber.

You should also know that this recipe comes from world famous chef Leonard Schwartz.