After 23 years of providing Houston diners with valuable restaurant information, B4-U-Eat.com posted this unexpected message on February 18:

As of today, b4-u-eat.com has “closed” after beginning as a BBS in 1991and moving to the internet in 1995. We thought 23 years ago Houston was a great dining out town and think it is even more so today. We’ve enjoyed keeping up with the changing landscape and will miss all our loyal users. Happy dining!

We had a chance to express our appreciation for B4-U-Eat founders Jane Hudson and Harry Parker during lunch recently and discovered more about the behind-the-scenes operation of the website … and what lies ahead.

What is your relationship with Harry?
We are not and never have been romantically attached. People have always assumed we were married. When we were typesetters working long hours, our office was next to the old Circus Restaurant. One night at about 10 pm we were exhausted but went to Circus for a drink. After a while our bartender asked me something referring to my “husband” next to me. I told her that happens all the time, and may I ask why she assumed we were married? She said, “Sure. You’ve been sitting here drinking for 10 minutes and neither has said a word to the other. You MUST be married!”

How did you meet and how was B4-U-Eat created?
We met when Harry was a freelance programmer and I was a salesperson at a typesetting company and formed our own business from five of Harry’s ideas that the owner had rejected. During projects that required late hours, we ordered in or treated employees to late dinners out. We had Post-it notes everywhere of new places to try, but that was a mess. Harry was frustrated that he couldn’t find a place with an open kitchen at 11 pm that served Bananas Foster and took American Express. So he started a database of restaurants for us to use. Friends started calling to ask about steaks in their zipcode, so he installed the database on a dial-up bulletin board. As more and more people started using it, many started emailing reviews of restaurants to us. In 1995 we moved it to the internet, and reviews were a part of each restaurant’s listing.

Who were your first contributors?
We rarely met contributors. When PBS interviewed us in our fifth year, they wanted to interview one so we contacted one of the most prolific ones, Reviewer X, who was the first we ever met! We didn’t use graphics, and our users tended to be on our site only three to four minutes at a time, so large corporations often put a link to B4-U-Eat on their intranet for employees. That really increased our numbers. Texas Medical Center frequently had the most users each month, and a group of them requested we add MetroRail stops for restaurants within two blocks of the rail. They went downtown for daily happy hours and said that sure would help them. Other user requests were signature desserts, patios, rewards programs, upcoming events.

Which restaurant was listed first?
Our first customer was Rudi Lechner. He was a great mentor to us as well. Small owners and our reviewers always gave us leads about who had signed a lease or moved everything out overnight. A couple of owners actually hounded us to start a newsletter since we seemed to be a magnet for information. Another owner once suggested we get a corporate Costco account and show up with business cards at 7 am on Thursdays when dozens of chefs and owners alike had coffee and chats before shopping.

What changes in the food industry, good and bad, have you seen during 23 years at B4-U-Eat?
The saddest change in reviews is we used to deal with rascals only during school holidays: Easter, Thanksgiving, summer. Occasionally owners would fake reviews of their competitors, but they were easy to spot. Now adults are rascals, and the owners require their employees to write the negative reviews from home. We decided early on to monitor reviews before publishing because of vulgarities, racism and the fact we depended on their accuracy ourselves for first visits.

Share some scathing comments you had to read and edit.
We edited profanity at first, but one reviewer convinced us we had no right to publish our edits under his name. He was right, so as a rule we either published or held reviews. We’ve received reviews that gave details of an owner’s tax evasions or mistresses or status of their child-support payments.

Which was the restaurant with the best reviews?
Out of 70,000 reviews I couldn’t possibly come up with that! They truly did all begin to sound alike. One morning, before Thelma’s Barbecue became famous, we saw she had received 250 hits overnight. The month before, she had received a total of 10 hits. Most of the hits came from Boston, where the PBS station had televised a show that featured Thelma’s the night before.

What was the best part about being behind B4-U-Eat?
Best part was the emails from our users. Their comments were hilarious or snarky or full of scoops. Hearing that an owner of a small place had paid his dues, worked hard and was expanding was always great news.

What was the worst part of being behind B4-U-Eat?
The worst part was when people insisted we must know the best steakhouse or Mexican food or simply the Best Restaurant in Houston. It depends on so many variables that Monday’s dinner was exceptional and Tuesday’s was incomparable.

You have been accused of censorship in the past. Can you explain the process of posting reviews?
We never censored. We prohibited owner/employee reviews of a competitor, any mention of racism on either side, any accusation of health violations (report it to the Health Department and protect us all), attacks on a person’s personality or character. We loved opinionated people, even if we totally disagreed with them. The opinions of uneducated people are valid, too, and we stayed with essay reviews instead of a star rating system so everyone can choose which reviewer’s concerns/delights match their own. The people who complained the loudest knew exactly why their review wasn’t published, including the regular reviewer who posted on Yelp years ago that we had closed. Sometimes the reason was one sentence that didn’t meet our rules and the person was a longtime reviewer. In those cases we contacted them, explained and asked if we could remove the sentence. But we didn’t have the manpower (or desire) for a department dedicated to explaining why a review wouldn’t be published. Any statement or prediction that the restaurant is going to close would keep that review from being published. Reviewers never gave their credentials for making that prediction, and it had no business as a rumor getting ground by us. Often funny when someone would predict some restaurant “won’t last a year” when it was already 16 years old.

According to the reviewers on B4-U-Eat, what was their biggest dining disappointment?
The biggest disappointment for the first 20 years was poor service. It was taken personally. It was also used to claim that the person would never eat there again. I never believed that a person who enjoyed a spot since they were 15 years old and would never return because a new waiter mistreated them. Lately, the biggest disappointment is often that the chef won’t change three points of his recipe to satisfy the diner.

Are there plans to make the B4-U-Eat database public again in the future?
We have no plans to make the database public again but we’re certainly not destroying it. Houston is such a great restaurant town. It’s amazing the number of restaurants that have opened just since B4-U-Eat ended last month.

What lies ahead for Harry and you?
We have no plans at this point. As small business owners know, it’s never a 9-to-5 job. But when you’re doing something you love, that doesn’t matter. But we’re both “retirement age” now, and it’s time for rest and relaxation, maybe a vacation.