Why I Stopped Reviewing Restaurants

For nine years I ate out five nights a week and wrote about it. I have had tasting menus that cost more than my first car and noodles from a cart that I still think about. I quit last spring, and people keep asking why.

The honest answer is that I stopped trusting my own palate. After enough meals, everything becomes a comparison: this sauce against that one, this room against the last. I could tell you precisely why a dish was good. I could no longer tell you whether I had enjoyed it.

The problem with stars

Criticism also shapes what it describes. Restaurants started cooking for reviewers: plating for photographs, building menus around a signature dish that would read well in print. The places I loved most were ones that did not care what I thought, and there were fewer of them every year.

I still eat out. I just do not take notes. Last week I had a bowl of soup at a counter near the train station and it was, I think, very good. I will never know for sure, and that is the point.