What You Serve Is What I’m Having
My Ethos of Eating
In 2014 when I was SF/NorCal editor of Zagat, I wrote a national article about how you can teach yourself to eat everything—exploring how palates are trainable with a little savvy effort, like eating the best of an ingredient in season or prepared by chefs who best showcase it. Especially if you dislike that ingredient. I even talked to and quoted food scientist and writer Harold McGee to back up my theory, one I'd proven personally, having slowly converted myself to eat (or even fall in love with) everything I once hated.
That ethos still guides me. But an even deeper philosophy shapes my 25 years of obsessive eating and research—18 of them spent professionally writing, judging and consulting in dining and drink. For me, it's more than culinary curiosity—it's a spiritual principle. It's about what every person and culture can teach me, what the senses reveal about the wild beauty of the Divine—the Source of all things. Taste, touch, sound, smell, sight and intuition all bear witness to this richness.
Food and drink are no less than sacraments in my life: daily rituals both utilitarian and transcendent, sustenance and art. Sheer deliciousness is one of existence's most recklessly generous gifts. A friend once told me they'd be fine downing freeze-dried food packets to “avoid wasting time on a meal,” to get nutrients and move on. The thought horrified me.
How cultures transform the same ingredients into infinite expressions is just the beginning. The pleasure of the table is also communal, familial, connective. It's where strangers become friends, where the outcast finds welcome. It’s central to Jesus’ message—from turning water into (top-tier) wine after the guests were already tipsy to gathering society’s forgotten and dismissed at the feast. Exuberant decadence and radical inclusion.
For me, eating and drinking, like music, are daily tools of transcendence and connection. To pause. Truly taste and feel the food or liquid down my throat is sensual and spiritual. It's about presence, gratitude, nurture, inclusion, giving back generously as I’ve been given to. It's about honoring centuries of tradition, the hands that crafted the meal, sourced its hard-won ingredients, the earth that provided it.
It’s also about creativity and joy. Just as eight musical notes produce billions of songs, hundreds of ingredients inspire endless dishes and cuisines—each derivative yet uniquely its own. As of now, I’ve dined at about 14,500 restaurants (roughly 600 a year, tracked in spreadsheets since 2001) and even more bars. I’ve visited more than a couple hundred distilleries, wineries, and breweries worldwide. Multiply that by countless tasting menus and individual bites or drinks, and I’ve tasted hundreds of thousands of things. Besides bringing immense joy, adventure and relationships, this journey has honed my palate, teaching me to appreciate even ingredients I once loathed, expanding my little world into vast-yet-familial worlds.
This philosophy shapes how I travel, connect, explore. I don't just go anywhere: first I research, vet and seek out the best. But once I’m there, I eat what the chef is cooking. I order the spirit, grape varietal or dish I’m less familiar with. I taste the region’s specialties, savor what’s in season, embrace the creator’s perspective. It's not about what I'm craving or what feels safe. While I favor fish over meat and try to eat less of the latter for the environment and health, if a place excels at meat, that’s what I eat. Culture and tradition take priority. I let the people behind a place or region guide me toward why and what they cook, drink, craft and create.
It’s not about comfort, although I’ve been graced with immense comfort from foods of every nation. It’s about growth, expanding my horizons, pushing boundaries, finding joy in every culture and place I’m privileged to encounter. Across my beloved state, the nation (having grown up on both coasts and the middle) and the world, there is no corner where I have not found genuine hospitality and beauty.
Of course, legitimate allergies exist. I know industry friends who navigate deadly ones. But like Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, whose book The Man Who Ate Everything shaped my early food-writing career, I believe many aversions are limiting … and often bullshit. He wrote, “No smells or tastes are innately repulsive.. and what’s learned can be forgot… A tiny fraction of adults, between 1 and 2 percent, have true (and truly dangerous) food allergies. All human cultures consider fur, paper, and hair inappropriate as food. And that's about it. Everything else is learned.” Amen.
My experience dining with thousands of people worldwide confirms this. I find most aversions stem from unfamiliarity, fear or worse: weight concerns. Believe me, I’d love to be 20 pounds lighter, but my bliss is too great to sacrifice for being skinny. Amen, Portion Control. It may not keep me slim but allows me eat everything without being overweight.
I understand not everyone is food-obsessed. But I believe every human can enrich their joy—and spiritual connection—by being a little more open. By trying new things, tasting everything at the table, embracing cultures and people behind a dish, asking them to guide you. It’s not just an adventure: it’s a spiritual rite of passage. A doorway into wider spaces, deeper connections. Into understanding what was once unknown, even feared. And finding it can be a nurturing friend or, occasionally, ecstasy.
I hold deep gratitude for the heroes of hospitality: servers, bussers, barbacks, line cooks and more. For the farmers, fishers, butchers, makers who work tirelessly, often against oppression, to provide the ingredients that sustain and enrapture us. Especially those working ethically and sustainably, honoring traditions while caring for the earth, animals and our bodies. I cherish centuries of tradition as much as innovation. We need both: the wisdom of age and experience, the rootedness of tradition. The fresh minds of youth, the creative mashups of cultures pushing tradition into new realms.
The endless worlds of food and drink show us how this is done: high to low, fine dining to street food, distillery to bar, family recipes to boundary-pushing dishes. We need all at the table. Each layer is Divine: a part of the whole, a fully-functioning Body, beautiful and life-giving.
Thus, my guiding principles remain:
What you do is what I do.
What you eat is what I want to discover.
What you drink is what I want to taste.
What you cook is what I’m eating.
What you create is what I’m tasting.
What your expertise is is what I need.
What you serve best is what I’m having.
I hope you’ll join me, whether vicariously or as a personal guide — a Critic in Your Back Pocket — to your own taste adventures. Together, let us celebrate what each place and people can teach us. And have a hell of a delicious time doing it.
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Love this, thanks for sharing!