Valentine's Day Dinner at East Thirty-Six

Right in time for Valentine's Day, my boyfriend and I had a chance to spend a very romantic evening having dinner and sampling cocktails at East Thirty-Six, the Wellington and Church cocktail bar and bistro, which also happens to be our favourite splurge in the city.

E36 held a social media contest for its fans a few weeks ago. A dinner for two was the prize, which I handily won last weekend. Obviously, I was more than glad to use this opportunity to take Matt out to celebrate the V-Day. It was not our first time at the restaurant, so we came determined and prepared to be adventurous with the menu.

Lunch in Valencia

I had an extraordinary lunch in Valencia today. So extraordinary, in fact, that it warrants its own blog post, not a handful of tweets (no matter how much I love Twitter).

I also love Foursquare, and those who have known me long enough are aware of how fanatical I can get about my check-ins and how furious I was when the app was split into two. This, however, is not the time to rant about Swarm (which did improve a lot since its release). Foursquare got worse in my opinion - it's slow, buggy and clunky, but I still use it because we've got history, the app and I. I'm a Superuser Level 2 (humblebrag). Four and a half years worth of check-ins, ratings and tips are in there. I like making lists. And whenever I am in a new place and hungry, I use the app to find nice places to eat.

Foursquare can be a hit and miss for restaurant recommendations, since it's based on other people's opinions of them, and opinions are subjective as hell. But the hivemind works sometimes: when Foursquare is a hit, it's platinum.

That was a long winded way to say that I discovered an amazing place for lunch using the app today. I checked into my hotel in Valencia and, running out of time before places started shuttering post-lunch, picked two promising restaurants that were right next to each other on a nearby street. The first place looked too expensive even for me in the holiday-goddamit-I'll-have-what-I-want mood, so I settled for the second one.

Their lunch menu deal was a tasting menu. Imagine that? For 13.50€ plus drinks. No choosing dishes; they only gave me the menu to ensure I was okay with eating what they were offering. I just said yes and was subsequently presented with the following:

• cream of something soup
• tiny veal kebabs with tzatziki that was fresh fresh fresh
• a squid and vegetables taco in the softest bread shell
• the absolutely damn unexpected rice with green peas, egg and sashimi
• apple purée with cookie ice-cream and yogurt mousse. In a jar.

Never had anything like it in a seemingly Mediterranean restaurant, which it wasn't, turns out. Fusion? Asian? No labels necessary. I asked the restaurant manager, Catina, to reserve a table for me tomorrow night. I actually have a rule that I don't eat in the same place twice when travelling, unless I'm in some remote location that has no other options (like a few towns in Priorat, for example). I fully intend to break this rule tomorrow night, because if this was lunch, I want, no, I NEED to try their dinner.

No food pictures to illustrate the post. Was too busy eating.

El Delicat
Carrer del Comte d'Almodóvar, 4, 46003 València
963 92 33 57

Opinions Good. Reviews Bad.

Writing about food is hard, and whoever said it wasn't is pretentious or lying. Writing about food is hard, because it's an attempt to describe something that's indescribable. (You're better off snapping a picture and posting it to Instagram. Maybe.) If you write about food in a restaurant review, you also present your writing as a solid and objective look at something that can only be subjective. I have a big problem with that. It feels like opinions are being shoved down my throat, and this is not the feeling I want to associate with food.

What are being passed off as restaurant reviews are opinions - glorified and authoritative sometimes, but opinions. Of course, the same can be said about pretty much any other review - wine, film, music album, a poem, a novel, your friend's new haircut.

Are opinions wrong? No. But when it comes to entertainment and hospitality, opinions sometimes count for too much while offering very little. People who share them elevate their experiences and thoughts to the level of universal usefulness and applicability, but these experiences can never be truly universal - there are 7 billion people on the planet, after all. And restaurant reviews are the worst offenders, because there is nothing more subjective than sensory experience of food. It is dependent so much on everything else besides the food itself, that the experience may not even be applicable to the next time you, the reviewer, visit that eatery, let alone to someone else's visit.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, yada yada. I agree. Everyone is. What irks me is the belief that opinions and experiences transfer. The belief that subjective can ever become objective if imparted by someone smart, someone older, someone with 10 thousand Twitter followers. A trusted source is a better source when it comes to facts, but food experience can never be a fact. Wine experience can never be a fact. Even experience of weather can differ a whole lot.

The jist of the post is not "Don't read restaurant reviews". Read whatever you want to read, but take it with a grain of salt and don't let it limit you. Don't feel bad if you hear a bad opinion disguised as a review of a place you like. Please don't think that you shouldn't drink a certain wine if someone said it wasn't good. You can drink anything you damn well please (if you are of legal drinking age). Ain't no such thing as a bad wine or a bad dish - if you like it.

If I post something about a restaurant I went to, just remember that everything I say about the food or drinks specifically is just my opinion and you can safely ignore it if you feel like it. Better yet - share your own opinion with me, and we can have a discussion.

Opinions are great and interesting and open doors to interesting debates. Opinions aren't great when they shove something down the public's throat - no matter how subtly. Just share tips on when to beat the line at Uncle Tetsu's Cheesecake in Toronto or recommend a place to eat if you want soft jazz music and table candles. Don't tell me if eggs benedict are too buttery - maybe I like them just this way.

(I'm aware that these are not eggs benedict. It was a delicious potato salad from Cañota, Barcelona.)

Foodie in the Mission 101

I spent my weekend in San Francisco exclusively in the Mission district, only leaving the neighbourhood once to go to Haight-Ashbury. Considering the circumstances and the fact that I'd been to San Francisco before and done a fair share of sightseeing, I don't feel bad about it. The Mission is a great place, and I mean Great. To eat, to drink, to have breakfast or afternoon tea, to shop, to do anything you want - you can do all that in the Mission. Below are the food and drink establishments that I have visited last week and loved.

Paprika (3324 24th Street) is a cozy restaurant with a classy vibe, specializing in goulash and sausages. There are two goulash options on the menu, one slightly more expensive than the other, with sour cream and sauerkraut - that's the one you should get. Delicious.

Mission Pie (2901 Mission Street) is a pie shop, duh. Their banana cream pie is to die for. They also have hearty stew served with kale, which is all the craze in California, apparently.

Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen (3150 24th Street) is a deli cafe, where I had a slightly hungover breakfast. Chopped liver, pastrami scrambled eggs, bottomless coffee make Kaplansky's in Toronto look like a joke. Or maybe I'm just biased!

Zoe's Bar and Restaurant (3088 24th Street), has great cocktails that, considering the level of fancy, are quite decently priced. Trouble and Strife with beaten egg and a flower on top particularly stands out.

Boogaloos (3296 22nd Street) is a favourite breakfast haunt of the Mission hipsters. Chorizo scrambled eggs with black beans and salsa tomatoes tasted great and filled me up till a very late lunch. Since I was there at 9 am on a Friday, all the hipsters were at their coworking offices, presumably.

When I needed a coffee break to get some work done, my two coffices were Philz Coffee (3101 24th Street) and Haus (3086 24th Street), both lively and full of Mac-yielding people of all ages. Philz has only brewed coffee, some 20 types, and Haus serves espresso drinks. Both naturally have Wi-Fi.