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When I’m writing about a new establishment, I try to not read too many other articles about the place before making my own observations. But I certainly will scan what’s out there just to have some sense of what I’m getting into, which is how I found an August 13 article on Edhat.com, explaining that The Mullet — which Lama Dog owner Peter Burnham opened in the Funk Zone last month — was serving cocktails with hot dogs, spam, mayonnaise, and ranch dressing.
“Some of the new cocktails that customers expect to taste include The Dog Tail (made with bourbon-soaked hot dog, soda water, bitters, and mustard), Pickle Slick (mayonnaise, pickle, gin, dill), Hawaiian (pineapple juice, cubed spam, rum), and Hidden Valley Ranch Water (ranch dressing, sparkling water, lime, tequila blanco),” Edhat reported.
“Whoa,” I thought. “Pete is really going for it.”
Sure, they sounded kinda gross, but knowing that Pete has great taste, I figured that his mixology team found some way to make mayo work with gin and mustard with bourbon dogs. And then, of course, spam with anything is great, which some would also say about ranch.
Imagine my surprise when I wandered into The Mullet on its first Saturday afternoon ever and Pete greeted me with a menu full of mullet-themed concoctions — but completely devoid of tube meat or condiments!
“Where’s the mayo drink?” I muttered, to which Pete guffawed. Edhat had unwittingly reported as fact the April Fool’s Day joke about wacky cocktails that was posted to the Lama Dog Instagram account on April 1.
When Pete saw the article on August 14, he “lightheartedly responded” in the comment section to clarify that the drinks were a joke. “While we will have no hot dogs or mustard in any of our drinks,” he wrote, “we appreciate the inspiration and who knows what the future holds.”
Despite that notice, the article remained untouched until this past Wednesday, when it was finally corrected. Plenty of other people were confused like me.
“We had so many people texting me, ‘What’s up with your drinks?’” said Pete. “It’s a little annoying for people to think we were actually serving mayonnaise in a shot glass or whatever. But who cares? It’s not gonna affect business.”
As we hung out that Saturday, sipping on mullet-inspired drinks, Pete and I assumed that Edhat site had employed some content-scraping tool, AI-powered or otherwise, to help report and write the story. There was no byline, after all — it just said “Edhat Newsroom” — which is unlike many of the Edhat articles that do have human names attached. And it’s not just the posting of a press release either, like we do at the Indy with our Announcements section — if it were, there’d be no hot dogs or spam mentioned.
Plus, last November, I discovered that Edhat partnered with a company called LH2 Holdings, which wants to be a “digital Berkshire Hathaway.” I found that out after reading this article about generational restaurants in S.B., published last November.
Though I liked the angle of the article, the content felt a little impersonal and distant, like it was spit out by an AI aggregation tool. And that tracked, as LH2 proudly proclaims that it has “AI-powered Technology at its core” and uses “AI-powered Media Operating system” to “unlock growth, distribution, and long-term value.”
The author in the byline was indeed a real person, Kathakali Nandi, although she lives in Kolkata, India. She continues to write regularly for Edhat on all sorts of stories, though most now do not seem to be about Santa Barbara specifically anymore. I sent her a message via LinkedIn this week, but she hasn’t responded yet.
When I looked up Nandi last fall, I found that she’d been hired in October by LH2, and then I read on that company’s website that Edhat was one of their holdings. (That page, lh2holdings.com/portfolio, no longer exists, and the Wayback Machine seems down right now, so you just have to believe me.) That made me think that Edhat had been sold outright, which is what I told our newsroom, as that would be major media news for our town.
For those who don’t know the history, Edhat was the first news aggregator and community website of its kind in Santa Barbara. I wrote a feature about its launch and its creator, Peter Sklar, when it started back in 2003 or 2004 (pre-Independent.com, so there is no link), and I also wrote about Peter’s way-too-young death from cancer at age 50 in 2012. (Given that I turn 49 this weekend, realizing now that he was only 50 hits a little closer to home these days.) Sklar and his wife/widow Sue Foley built a strong community around Edhat, and the site remains a popular place for reading news, adding comments, and so forth.
After I alerted the newsroom last November, reporter Ryan Cruz quickly reached out to Lauren Bray, who’s basically been running Edhat since 2012. She explained that the site had not been sold, and that she was still the owner.
“They are a group of web experts that help scale independent media publishers by bringing in infrastructure that usually only large media companies have access to or the resources for,” she emailed Ryan about LH2. “They work as business partners, and have no ownership stake in Edhat.”
Ryan also asked Lauren directly about LH2’s use of AI. “LH2 uses AI to figure out relevant stories that would perform best with our readers,” she replied, explaining that the company analyzes the data to see which stories had the most views and which future topics might be most popular with readers.
When it came to Edhat, Lauren was very clear: “AI is not used to write news stories.”
I’m not in the newsroom these days, and I’m not entirely sure why we didn’t run a story about Edhat at the time, but people get busy and more pressing priorities arise all the time. So I moved on — until Hidden Valley Ranch Water caught my attention again.
If AI isn’t being used to report and write Edhat’s news, how did this happen? I went straight to Lauren Bray myself, and she immediately took responsibility.
“That one’s on me — deeply embarrassing for someone who prides herself on spotting a joke a mile away,” said Bray. “I’m currently pregnant, so perhaps my overworked pregnancy brain is rendering me humorless. Truly sad.”
She corrected the piece this past Wednesday morning, even giving me a shout-out: “High five to eagle-eye Matt K. who ever so kindly pointed out the error.”
Like me, Lauren remains curious about the potential for those fake drinks. “The real tragedy here is that I apparently won’t get to satisfy my post‑birth mayonnaise hot dog cocktail craving,” she said. “Maybe they’ll make a one‑time exception.”
Lauren also confirmed that everything she told Ryan last fall still stands. “Our news stories are written and edited by humans,” she said. “We use modern tools for housekeeping and data but the reporting and writing are done by people with pulses, albeit sometimes humorless ones.”
Maybe, just maybe, we can get The Mullet team to concoct one or two of these ridiculous ideas into something actually tasty. But even without such wizardry, the new bar is worth checking out.
Read my feature about it here, sans spam.
From Our Table
Here are some other stories you may have missed:
- Bibi Ji closed with no fanfare last week, which is a big bummer.
- The Santa Barbara Vintners one percent fee seems to be working.
- It’s time you check out Domingo’s Café in Old Town Goleta.
- Go relax at Rideau Vineyard.
- Get a New York-style slice at Milio’s Pizza on State Street.
- Bob’s Well Bread brings back its challah or Rosh Hashanah.
- Colombini Bakery specializes in Italian loaves.
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