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After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

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Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#61
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why eating out is so bad if you're on a diet. Too much oil and fat, sugar, salt, fat, and other stuff

I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US. Oddly enough, the higher end restaurants start to move in the other direction and shrink portion sizes.

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Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#62
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.

Can you suggest a couple of channels? I've never played RuneScape but those videos sound right up my alley.

Not Runescape but a similar grindfest - playing the largest Factorio mod, Space Exploration. 300 hours plus in ~5 hours of video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hRJ-CcwvrI&list=PLtyo3aqsNv...

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#63
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and th…

> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove Not true. Pull out that blowtorch. > your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine. > restaurants in your area will g…

> Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.

I have a steel plate. An hour at 500F only gets it to around 400F.

Which is fine for pizza, actually, so you're right about that.

If you ask big US pizzerias (I don't know about the famous Naples ones) what temp they use, it's usually 650-750. At 900F you have zero margin for error.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#64

Couldn’t the negative effects of 4 rich meals a week be countered by eating healthier the rest of the time and having a consistent exercise routine?

Alternatively, maybe New York Times should spread the job among 4 people so that each individual only needs to eat one rich meal per week.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#65

This is the guy that trashed Guy Fieri's restaurant, right? Guy Fieri (and his restaurants') style might not be for everyone, but he's such a sweetheart and does so much for small businesses, not to mention firefighters etc., that you have to be pretty cold to do that. Still makes me mad.

It is possible both to be a saint and serve terrible food. A food critic isn’t supposed to give you a handicap for being a nice guy.

the food isn’t terrible, it’s just gimmicky. and 90% of the people going to Guy Fieri’s _want_ a trash can full of nachos.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#66
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and th…

> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove Not true. Pull out that blowtorch. > your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine. > restaurants in your area will g…

You can get a standalone pizza over for a couple hundred. I've got an Ooni and it gets up to 900 in about 15 minutes. Its obviously not for indoor use but its great nonetheless. It still takes a good bit of technique to get the dough and timing right but its great to be able to cook a pizza in little more than a minute.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#67
post #33

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

I used to joke that if you go to the movies or restaurants etc. you could open pass-through tax LLCs (which are “disregarded entities” at the IRS) and write those off as a business expense, as long as you had a website as a food or movie critic / reviewer, and even had a way to subscribe for some paid memberships (eg Patreon) and also advertising with affiliate sales (eg Amazon) for recipes, movie rentals etc. You kn…

As I understand it, you can only write off a business's expenses against that business's income, not income from other sources. For example, if you have a W2 income source and you have this business generating losses, you can't take your business losses or write offs and apply them to your W2 income, so you wouldn't really be saving any money as there would be no revenue to write off expenses against. You would need to get the business to generate revenue for this to be a viable idea.

The only case that I am aware of where you can take business losses / write offs and apply them to other income sources is in real estate, and only under very specific circumstances. This is one reason why high income individuals love things like short term rentals which is one circumstance in which this is possible.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#68
post #67
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to joke that if you go to the movies or restaurants etc. you could open pass-through tax LLCs (which are “disregarded entities” at the IRS) and write those off as a business expense, as long as you had a website as a food or movie critic / reviewer, and even had a way to subscribe for some paid memberships (eg Patreon) and also advertising with affiliate sales (eg Amazon) for recipes, movie rentals etc. You kn…

As I understand it, you can only write off a business's expenses against that business's income, not income from other sources. For example, if you have a W2 income source and you have this business generating losses, you can't take your business losses or write offs and apply them to your W2 income, so you wouldn't really be saving any money as there would be no revenue to write off expenses against. You would need…

I am not a lawyer or accountant, but you can fund your business with a loan from your person, and then if the business fails, you can write off the loan against your personal capital gains, and up to $3000 of regular income per year. This is not financial or legal advice.

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#69

Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…

> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.

Man runescape was my life for a long while. Its still the only MMO I know which actually has unique and rewarding quests, activities, and mini games. There's something like 150 quests, most with completely new NPCs, new map environments/interactions, item, skill and map unlocks. For example to gain access to the best sword in the game (at the time) you had to do a quest where you were travelled to a monkey island where you had to sneak around, be creative, defeat a bunch of apes and the boss. And it was actually fairly difficult, you had to prepare for the quest and dying meant losing almost all your items. Nothing like go here kill 20 foxes, come back.

https://runescape.fandom.com/wiki/Monkey_Madness

Re: After 12 years of reviewing restaurants, I'm leaving the table

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why I don't like eating out much anymore. Every restaurant just leans so hard on heavily salting fats to make their food taste good. I'd rather cook myself now where I can actually taste flavors and feel good, rather than just having the primal "mmm good food" button bashed in my lizard brain and feeling like garbage afterwards.

It sounds like you are describing gorging yourself at Taco Bell. There must be better restaurants and eateries than that around you.

Taco Bell doesn’t use butter, AFAIK.
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