“Obsessed but amused” is how Lockhart Steele describes Eater, his most recent blogging venture.

Created in the spring of 2005 by Steele and partner Ben Leventhal, Eater focuses on the business of New York City restaurants, giving its readers a basic rundown of who’s hot and who’s not at the moment. In this way, Eater has successfully capitalized on the speed with which a New York restaurant can go from highly regarded to struggling, or vice versa.

The blog came came into existence while Steele was running the real estate blog Curbed. and Leventhal was producing a popular email newsletter called She Loves NY. Having gotten to know each other through a mutual respect and enjoyment of each other’s web projects, a New York restaurant blog seemed like a logical next step, says Steele.

Co-owned by Steele and Leventhal, the blog is based in New York City, with both bloggers managing their own portions of the site from their respective apartments; Leventhal’s in the Village and Steele’s on the Lower East Side. Operating with advertising as its sole source of revenue, the blog functions as a resource for those interested in the latest happenings in the New York restaurant world—the openings, the closings (a permanent sidebar features an up-to-date feed of both), the failures and the great successes.

But you don’t necessarily have to be obsessed with the minute details of the Big Apple’s restaurant business to enjoy Eater. The website, of course, welcomes more than just New York City food lovers. “Eater is directed at people who care as much about the atmosphere and vibe of a great restaurant or bar as much as the food,” says Steele.

Much of the blog’s readership is involved in the business of New York restaurants, which is beneficial for the site, since its audience provides many of the tips that often result in prominent scoops.

One of Eater’s most notable scoops happened last fall, when an anonymous email tipped them off that Pierre Schaedelin, executive chef of Le Cirque, was leaving the restaurant he had called home for the past eight years. Though Le Cirque’s owner, Sirio Maccioni, initially denied claims of his departure, he was quoted almost two months later saying, “I am firing the chef,” confirming the authenticity of the email originally received by Eater.

Eater is part of a new wave of food blogs that focus less on restaurant reviews and recommendations and more on “pointed restaurant criticism and tidbits of news,” as the New York Times noted in a February article about Eater and similar sites.

The business of New York restaurant news is a competitive one, with everyone’s sights set on being the first to break the story, whether it’s about a Lower East Side restaurant offering up a new WiFi service or exclusive photos of the just-opened Whole Foods Market on the Bowery. “We’re obsessed with getting the news first,” says Steele.

With a reference to the blog leading a recent New York Times article about disposable gloves and sanitation practices in restaurants, Steele and Leventhal are steadily garnering more and more press coverage for their site.

“For Eater, the opening of a new Keith McNally restaurant is the biggest deal in the entire world,” says Steele. “Obviously, even our most impassioned readers probably don’t feel that way in relation to what’s going on in the wider world. But while you’re reading Eater, we want to suck you into that frame of mind.”