Daniel Delaney of VendrTV has a very fun gig. With the goal of sniffing out the best in street food he gets to taste delicious food, make episodes for his web series, and now travel. During his recent trip to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Southern California, Tubefilter met up with Daniel to find out what is happening with his popular web series since we first discovered him back in February.
Tubefilter: We last talked to you when you were launching your first episode. How many episodes have you made so far?
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Daniel Delaney: Yesterday was our four month anniversary. Somewhere around fourteen or fifteen.
Tubefilter: Right now you are on a West Coast tour and you started in Seattle?
DD: We rented a Mustang convertible and we started in Seattle and have been tooling down the west coast. Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles.
Tubefilter: So far on the West Coast what has been the most memorable food?
DD: Well there have been memorable foods and there have been memorable events. I think that my favorite food was this little Bosnian woman’s cuisine in Portland. Her name is Zeba. She made Bosnian pitas, made from filo dough which is stuffed into a tube and spiraled like a cinnamon bun. It has lamb inside of it. It was kind of amazing. My most memorable event also took place in Portland. We were hanging out with Jesse Sandoval who is the drummer in the band The Shins. He has left and started a food cart. He was a great time. We had a lot of fun with him at the shoot and after the shoot.
Above: Nuevo Mexico (Portland, OR)
Tubefilter: What else is happening with the show?
DD: The show was picked up by the NextNewNetworks. We are making th switchover in the next few weeks. They are going to start to distribute our content.
Tubefilter: Does that mean paychecks for you?
DD: It means that the show doesn’t cost me money. VendrTV was also asked to create a cookbook.
Tubefilter: What are your ultimate goals for the project? What do you hope it will lead to?
DD: I am very pleased with where it is now. I said at the beginning when we first talked. I am not interested in seeing in on the television. I am not interested in hosting a show on the Food Network.
Tubefilter: Would you if they offered it to you?
DD: Maybe, but I am really proud of the show in term of what is on the web right now for food. I think we are one of the higher quality shows and I would like to see more food shows go in that direction. I think that is where everyone is going. That’s where things need to be. I’d like to see more people funneling their time and energy into the web.
Tubefilter: Tell us about your deal with the Next New Networks.
DD: We have a distribution deal. They are picking up our content. They partner with iTunes and YouTube. It’s going to be a great way for us to broaden our audience and try to connect with new people. They have all of these other channels below them. They certainly have the expertise to help grow things. They have so much knowledge about creating web video content. It is exciting for us to work with them and learn from them. The fact that, in this economy, they are able to develop and pick up new shows is a great thing. It is saying a lot for their company.
Tubefilter: Have you had any corporate sponsors, offers of corporate sponsors, advertisers?
DD: Right now the show takes around 70 hours to produce between the research, the filming, and the editing. It’s just really difficult for me to be really aggressively reaching out to people. We just hired a PR person. He’s really talented. He has worked for Threadless and a bunch of other great companies.
Tubefilter: Threadless knows what they are doing. Did you know that they have almost 700,000 twitter followers? For an independent t-shirt company. That’s pretty amazing.
DD: Hopefully we’ll move in that direction. Jeff is a really smart guy. In each city, he has gotten us press. I am confident that things will start moving forward. My first priority is my audience and my community. I love advertising. I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. Companies like the Deck Network that put out really targeted messaging, that’s great. I am all for advertising, if it helps and the show and if valuable to the consumer. If it’s ads for diapers, then I don’t know.
Tubefilter: After this trip to the west coast, where are you going next?
DD: We are going to take a break from filming. After this trip we will have enough content to take us up to January. We have shot almost thirty episodes on the west coast. I also started a new recipe technology company and I am also going to be working on the cookbook. So for the next six months, we’ll be editing those episodes. There are a lot of things in Texas that we want to cover. Also when we get back to NY sometime in July we have one more week of block shooting on the East Coast which will include Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York City. We are going to do a really fun episode with Gary Vaynerchuk where we will run around the city pairing wine with food.
Tubefilter: What countries to you want to go to? What country in the world do you think has the best street food?
DD: Germany has a big Turkish influence. Germany has my favorite street food in general. I am not sure if the next thing will be a European tour or if we will do something in Asia or India. It would probably happen about six or seven months from now. In that time I would have to do a lot of research.
