Who am I and what is the purpose of this blog?
My name is Shane, and I’m a chef who loves to travel.
This blog is a place for me to chronicle my experiences, culinary and otherwise, while also enabling me to share some of the insight I have gained while traveling around the world for food. The name of the blog “A Knife Roll Round the World” (and so do meatballs) is a reference to the fact that I will be taking my knife roll with me, sometimes working or staging, sometimes just eating, while I trot the globe in search of sublime culinary experiences.
If there is one thing that frustrates me above all others in the current food climate, it is the difficulty with which one can find truly exceptional food. Maybe I am a jaded snob, turned to bitterness by one too many restaurant let downs, but the celebration of mediocrity that is ever present in this industry is a source of great annoyance. It seems as if the majority of restaurants exist simply because people in America are too lazy to cook for themselves and don’t actually care about quality.
“But Uncle Shane, just use look up reviews. That will weed out the losers.”
Yes and no. Review sites like Google or Yelp will certainly help to eliminate the worst of the worst and can provide some indication of where to go when you’re in a new city. You probably are not going to have a terrible experience if you go to a restaurant that has 4.7/5 stars with hundreds or thousands of reviews. That said, review culture falls short and sometimes even exacerbates the aforementioned problems for two key reasons.
The first reason is that most people just don’t have any taste. As someone who has cooked for a lot of very wealthy people as a private chef, I can assure you that most people have absolutely no idea what constitutes good food. How can I trust these people to determine where I eat? Furthermore, why is the review scale so skewed towards the top? 2.5 stars should be the mean! Instead, some people will avoid a restaurant if it doesn’t have over 4 star. I notice this in all aspects of life too. If someone asks me to review something and I say 6/10, there is no reason their follow-up should be “Why so low?” A 6/10 is above the average! The ranking system starts at 0/10, not 5/10 as some people seem to believe.
The other problem with reviews is that everyone is going to review a restaurant with different things in mind. Some people love great service. Some people love creative cocktails. When I visit a restaurant, the quality of the food is paramount. When my sister Jessie and I were visiting Berlin, we had the goal of finding the best Döner kebab in the city. We took recommendations from her friends who lived there, some people I messaged on Couchsurfing, and just general research on Google. We ate döner 7 times in the 4ish days that we were there. The results? Hands down the best döner we ate was at a place that had 3.1 stars on google. The average user would not even consider eating at a place with 3.1 stars. The negative reviews all mentioned how the staff wasn’t attentive enough or the place was always too busy. It’s frustrating that these troglodytes are allowed to vote.
And so, as the great Dom Mazzetti once famously said, “‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ -Gandhi”. In order to make Dom proud, I will attempt to provide a comprehensive review of all of the places that I go, typically focusing on the local cuisine or famous dish in each place I go. Hopefully I will get better at writing along the way.
Leave a Reply