Meta Resto Summary and Resto Summary

I have to admit that I feel a bit more of a poseur than I even usually do when I write restaurant reviews. I think of restaurants in the same way as as art museums. I prefer the small ones to the big ones, I usually enjoy the good ones, I appreciate it when the staff is friendly, and I like them to be clean. But I know even less about great food than I do about great art. This fact alone makes me feel that any restaurant criticisms I might make are shallower than an inflatable kiddie pool.

And I cannot content myself with the mundane aesthetic bromide, "Well, I know what I like." I don't know why this sentence so grates my raw nerves. Is it that knowing what one likes is passed off as some kind of uncommon virtue? Is it that the phrase is implicitly completed by a self-contented "and therefore I don't feel it's necessary to learn anything more" ?

These Sunday-brunch thoughts aside, I have to agree with friend Sheila who says that it's much more fun to read negative restaurant reviews than positive ones. It's also more fun to write them.

Dei Frescobaldi Ristorante, Via de' Magazzini, Florence is not the worst restaurant we've been to in Europe. But it provided us the least value for the money.

Don't go. But it was pretty damn clean.