Most of my dining experiences, in particular at nicer restaurants, involve an evaluation along a very narrow spectrum. When someone asks me how the food was, it’s almost always good. The service is always good. The bread was good, the salmon I ordered was good, and the wine pairings were good. If it’s not good, it’s really good. Which just means that it’s a lot of good and practically indistinguishable from something being just good. The only difference is that “really good” is usually said with more verve than “good” when being given as a reply. If I enunciated and emphasized good like I normally do when I tell someone that a restaurant is really good, it would have the exact same effect. I say “really good” with a different inflection, a higher pitch, and a tone that is supposed to convey everything with regards to the meal that I can’t, won’t, or am too lazy to go into detail about.
80% of the restaurants that I have visited with which I have had even the slightest sliver of expectations fall into the murky category between good and really good. Of course, considering that expectations usually suggest some prior emotional investment to the meal followed by a monetary one after, I tend to give restaurants that are just shy of good a pass and call them good anyway. This is why, in my opinion, in the lexicon of restaurant reviews, the word good, or any derivative of it, carries absolutely no evaluative or judgmental value whatsoever. If my goal is to give an honest review, playback, or evaluation of a meal, telling someone it was good means I really haven’t said diddlysquat. Essentially, what I just told you was, “Yea, whatever, why don’t you go try it yourself, then you can be as equally middle-of-the-road as I am being to you right now when you go and describe your meal of indistinguishable quality from thousands of others that you’ve had and called, ‘good’.”
As such, when I review restaurants, I’ll do my best to be precise about what I liked, what I didn’t like, which parts stood out, and which parts didn’t. If the entire meal was good, that means that the meal was one big flat-line, like a dead patient in a hospital bed. I am not completely sure about this, but I think that comparing a meal to a dead patient in a hospital bed is not a flattering comparison1. A truly special meal will have highlights and courses that make you exult and pine for just one more bite. If I can express that, I’ll (hopefully) be much more successful in convincing you to see for yourself and dine at said restaurant so you can experience the parts of the meal that were so much more than just good.
Speaking of highlights (and lowlights), there are the 15% of restaurants that are either mind-numbingly bad, unimaginably awesome, drown in the deep end of the pool of my expectations, or rise far above and beyond what I had expected. These are the ones that we already describe to our friends as “Amazing!” or “That restaurant was a complete fucking train wreck and if it burns down tonight I would be totally fine with that because then no other diner would have to endure the two hours of shitty service and food that I received at this garbage-in-a-pail2 establishment.” These, I think, will be the truly fun ones to review in terms of the ease with which I can express my opinions. Actually, true to my sadistic sense, I’ll probably take perverse pleasure in ripping apart restaurants that manage to really fuck it up, whether it’s by serving me hair with my glass of water or sending my friend a plate of food with an ant in it3.
Lastly, there are the 5% that draw a “meh.” Think Gru’s mom in Despicable Me. I truly think that a restaurant that doesn’t draw much of a reaction is harder to make-over than one that draws a strong negative review, if only because in the latter there is a clear indication of what needs to be fixed. The mehs are the ones where everything is just slightly subpar, and nothing is quite exciting enough, and each dish somehow just misses the mark, and the entire dining experience is wholesomely forgettable and no one will remember the food they ate there again in 24 hours.
I’m sure I’ll have well received reviews as well as ones that people disagree with as I write about the restaurants that cross my path in the future. If so, please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with me, and I’ll be happy to get back to you on the subject.
1. But what do I know. Maybe some people find it to be a compliment of the highest order.↩
2. Certain people are convinced that I made this saying up, but even if that's the case I'm of the belief that if I keep using it, it will catch on eventually. It means finding shit where you're not expecting it. Like if you go to reach for your pail to build a sandcastle on the beach and some dickwad has thrown garbage in there while you weren’t paying attention. Then you go, “What the fuck! Why is there garbage in my pail?”↩
3. The hair came at Spiaggia, the most disappointing fine dining experience of all time due to supremely shitty service, and the ant came at Mary’s, a diner I used to go to all the time right next to my high school. They made these ridiculously tasty bacon and egg sandwiches that I went back for even after the ant incident. Some foods are worth risking for I suppose.↩
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