Notes from the road and from the table — what was worth the trip, what was worth the plate, and what wasn't. This is a personal notebook — where we went, what we ate, what it cost in time and shoe leather, and whether it was worth it. No sponsored posts, no affiliate links, no press trips. If something was disappointing, it says so.
Photographs are my own unless credited otherwise. Places and prices were true on the day I wrote them down and probably aren't any more — check before you go.
Entries that review somewhere carry a rating out of five. Notes and odds and ends don't — not everything is a verdict.
A scale is worth nothing unless it can say no, and the failure mode is obvious: if everywhere I enjoyed gets five, the number stops carrying information at all. That is how the big review sites ended up averaging four-and-a-half out of five and telling you nothing. So the levels below are a contract. Three stars is a good meal. Five is meant to stay rare.
| 5 | Worth crossing a city for | |
| 4 | I'll be going back on purpose | |
| 3 | Glad I went | |
| 2 | Fine. Something was off, or it wasn't for me | |
| 1 | Wouldn't return |
Half stars exist for the places that sit between two of these.
This page is a page turned down to come back to — places spotted, recommended, or walked past with a window worth a second look, filed there until there's time to actually sit down and eat. No stars yet, because there's no meal to score. Once one of them gets eaten, it graduates into a real entry and comes off the shelf.
There's an RSS feed if you'd like new entries to come to you. There's no newsletter, no tracking beyond an anonymous, cookie-less page counter, and nothing here is for sale.
Entries generally go up after I'm home again, not while I'm away.