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

nytimes.com

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

#71

Post by ghaff »

EGreg wrote: post #50
slv77 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have tried and the IRS has even provided a helpful guide on if your endeavor is a hobby or a business ( https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/fs-08-23.pdf ).

Thanks for this! I didn’t know the guidelines were published. This is like FINCEN’s 2013 and 2019 guidances for cryptocurrencies. “The limit on not-for-profit losses… does not apply to corporations except S Corporations”. It doesn’t seem to mention LLCs. These are “disregarded entities” at the IRS level, so what does that mean? For tax purposes they are treated as sole proprietorships? It seems to me there is some “m…

I had a small "hobbyist" software business once upon a time. I made a point of only deducting expenses that seemed reasonable and not red flags for a software business, and only deducted up to just below my revenue (about $7K/year in the 90s). That seemed safe if maybe somewhat conservative.

Doesn't work for a lot of things (including reputable restaurant reviews) but bloggers also have the opportunity to get free stuff if they get noteworthy enough. Yes, it's a source of bias but so long as everything isn't how this thing they were given for free is fantastic, I don't have a problem with it. I've reviewed books (and a few other things) sent to me and I've given some pretty negative reviews as well as positive ones.

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

#72

Post by ghaff »

crispyambulance wrote: post #7

Yeah, I think anyone who travels a lot for work very quickly realizes that restaurant food eaten everyday, if you're not careful, will very rapidly put pounds on you. Now with Wells' article we know how much worse it becomes if that's your job too. As Anthony Bourdain wrote... "In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal." He's not exaggera…

When eating out a lot is your job (including eating out at places you wouldn't naturally have gravitated towards), like many things it becomes work.

I eat out when on vacation and business trips and really don't want to cook even if the hotel has a kitchenette. I also rarely go out at home to eat unless it's to attend an event or to socialize.

When I was an analyst I definitely gained weight until I developed the discipline to not eat the three meals a day (plus also snack breaks) just because they were there and often good.

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

#73

Post by ghaff »

fuzztester wrote: post #25
matwood wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>I disagree. If we're talking about restaurants and not fast food, it's portion size that's typically the issue in the US. i think you are right. i have always seen big portion sizes in restaurants when i have gone to the US. also, very recently, i saw a youtube video in which a french person says the same thing. they said that even though the French eat a lot of fat, their overall portion sizes are smaller than thos…

It is a generalization but maybe I know it's because there's often a lot of relative filler in entrees and I often gravitate towards one or two starters/apps. That said I mostly don't find portions in Europe (including France) to be especially small.

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

#74

Post by standardUser »

krallja wrote: post #70
standardUser wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither do many major cuisines, like Mediterranean, Mexican, Thai, Japanese and Chinese.

Is butter really the problem here? Because to me it sounds like the problem is habitual over-eating.

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

#75

Post by ghaff »

bsder wrote: post #32
Larrikin wrote: post #27

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…

For most people, it's also not just the technique (and, to a lesser degree, gear), it's also the sheer number of fresh ingredients often required. Desserts may actually lean more towards technique/time and less towards ingredients. I took a croissant class and produced at least serviceable croissants (with a chef correcting things here and there). But much as I like a hard to source fresh croissant I'm not going to routinely spend half a day making a batch.

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

#76

Post by dustincoates »

dredmorbius wrote: post #22
polar8 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…

Does that control at all for type of restaurant, both by market segment (e.g., fast food vs. sit-down fine dining), and by cuisine (e.g., "American" or "steakhouse" vs. various ethnic or vegetarian menus)? Because I could see a lot of variability amongst those. And without controls, the study will default strongly toward fast-food, doughnut shops, pizza, burger / franks stands, and the like. Several of which have pro…

> Several of which have pronounced associated negatives (see, e.g., Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me (2004).

There may be associated negatives, but Super Size Me is a terrible piece of evidence of it. Spurlock not only intentionally ate far more than any normal person would, but also declined to mention in the movie his copious alcohol consumption. (Not that I expect someone to admit to their alcoholism in a movie, but when you're making a polemic about how what you consume is bad for you, not mentioning that you're drinking a lot of alcohol during the same period isn't great!)

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

#77

Post by solveit »

pbj1968 wrote: post #60
cm2012 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author literally described how women food writers keep their health while writing food columns - they taste the dishes but don't eat the whole plate. He doesn't say this makes women worse food writers at all. He could just copy this strategy. If he doesn't have the will for it, semaglutides would make it really easy. You still enjoy and taste food the same on it, you just get full quicker. So there is an easy sol…

Semaglutide is not a drug taken casually. Speak from experience on this one. :-/

What went wrong?

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

#78

Post by greggsy »

shalmanese wrote: post #3

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…

“… evaluated 67,391 burrito-selling establishments…”

How does this even work?

If a local or federal government attempted to do this type of survey, they would end up having to pay McKinsey seven figures just to plan the whole operation..

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

#79

Post by elliottcarlson »

Last spring, I was at my friends new at the time restaurant, when he let me know that Pete Wells was at the table behind us (and how important this night was for my friend) -- I noticed the sheer amount of food - pretty much the entire menu - that was coming and going from that table. I didn't even put it in to perspective how demanding that was on the body, since all I could think of was how I wish I had his job tasting amazing food all the time. The review came out a few weeks later, and it was a pretty nice review - took quite some time before reservations were obtainable again.

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

#80

Post by AlbertCory »

awithrow wrote: post #66
bsder wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have you actually pointed an IR thermometer at it? On mine (which I sold), it was 900 at the back and 600 at the front.

It was just too much trouble. A pizza steel in a kitchen oven, preheated, works very well; maybe not as good as a 700F oven but WAY easier. And 5 minutes instead of 1 minute is not a big sacrifice.

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