DM Blog

A while back (March 2008), I decided to start writing food reviews on places I’ve visited:

My recent article, "Ten Places to Eat in Toronto" seems to be very popular. It has brought a considerable amount of new traffic to my blog and I’ve been receiving a lot of emails in regards to this article. (More comments instead of emails would be nicer though…) So, I’ve decided to add a “reviews” category on my blog where I’ll write reviews on places I’ve visited, both good and bad. I consider myself very fortunate to have been around a lot of good food over the years and feel very much up to the task. Coincidentally, I was looking at my spending history in Quicken the other day and noticed that Michelle and I spend an average of $600 a month eating out… Yes, we do eat out quite a bit so hopefully I should have a lot of interesting articles in this new category.

I haven’t really been keeping up with it, partly because of time constraints (I’ve been really focused on my music endeavors lately and haven’t had much time for anything else), but mostly because I gradually lost interest. The thing is, for every review I wrote, I must have read at least five or six other ones on other blogs. It didn’t take me much time to realize that everyone and their sister has a food blog, and the majority of them are extremely unqualified and grossly uneducated when it comes to food. don’t get me wrong – I don’t consider myself to be a food critic guru by any means, but unlike many other pretentious food blogs, my reviews never pretended to be either.

There’s a multitude of food blogs that assert "facts" and make unsubstantiated claims to make themselves appear more experienced and more savvy than they really are. But when asked to back up their claims, or when questioned on their findings, most of them can’t provide any "proof" of their claims, or any logic behind their reasoning. Apart from that, I haven’t been able to find many food blogs that are thorough enough with their reviews.

There are a couple food blogs that I found entertaining and occasionally piqued my interest, but for the most part, the majority of them are filled with mediocre less-than-informative content, written by uncultured, inexperienced reviewers. I remember commenting on one persons blog (sorry, can’t find the link anymore) about his "Best Place in Calgary for Chinese Food" and pointed out the fact that his number one recommendation was also the number one worst restaurant in Calgary in terms of sanitation standards and service. I was surprised to see that even given this information, the blogger was standing by his review insisting that the food there was good (and cheap) enough that the fact the place was significantly infested with cockroaches and mice was a non-issue. Yikes!

So while I’ve enjoyed the increased traffic that writing food reviews has brought to my blog, I don’t think I’ll be continuing with this going forward. Everyone and their sister has a food blog – it’s now a very over-saturated topic with little substance and even less originality… There’s already enough junk on the internet and I don’t want my content to be associated with this mediocrity.

I still very much enjoy food and I’ll definitely continue to try out new places and new foods – you just won’t see me writing reviews about it on my blog anymore.