Becoming an Amateur Food Critic
Writing your own formal restaurant reviews can give you a standardized comparison of places you've eaten. You might try to shoot for a common word length for each of your reviews. You can pack a lot of thoughts, feelings and information into 200 words.
Come up with your own rating system as a yardstick to measure all restaurants by. Try ranking elements like:
Class |
Service |
There are many other things you can rate: safety, finding the place, personality of the chef, whether the owner was on site, etc. Or you might just keep it simple and keep your rating system to a few symbols; $ to $$$$ for price, P,F,G,E (Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent) for quality, the number of bites out of a round cookie for flavor, or even just stars for your over—all experience. Four or five options for each ranking is common. If you try one to 10, you'll probably find yourself coming up with discrepancies from restaurant to restaurant because you're thinking about it too hard. The more options of ranking you have, the less fair you are likely to be.
This article appeared in the October 2000 issue of Personal Journaling.