I CAN’T recommend your restaurant!!! (Emotional Indigestion)

Considering myself a ‘foodie’ and perhaps (rather self-indulgently) an apt critic of good food, I started writing restaurant reviews a while back. What started out as an enthusiastic endeavor has ultimately caused me “EMOTIONAL INDIGESTION”!

This is my dilemma: I am a product of an upbringing that taught me to NEVER Say Something if you can’t say something NICE!!! While I am NOT always successful with this, I do try!! As I got older, I was profoundly affected by the following advice: “Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”
―Dale Carnegie,How to Win Friends and Influence People Well, I quickly learned that being a self-appointed food critic, puts this practice to test!!

For the most part, I pretty much can ALWAYS find something nice to say. On those rare occasions when my experience at a given restaurant has been completely disappointing, I have chosen NOT to write a review!! Yeah I know………….sound like a ‘cop out’ doesn’t it?

At the risk of sounding like a bleeding heart “Pollyanna”, I find it far MORE challenging to attempt to turn a lemon into lemonade. However, with restaurant reviews, a “ Lemon is a Lemon is a Lemon”!!!

I have sought advice from friends and many of them have told me that I am just not ‘cut out’ to be a critic!! Of course, these same friends know that on a one-to-one basis, I do INDEED have both opinions and constructive criticism. It is just that I try my BEST to not air them publicly if I feel that they can do ‘harm’ to the subject of the comments. In the case of restaurants, this is their LIVELIHOOD!!!

SO In conclusion, I have come to terms with the fact that I am NOT a “Food Critic”!

HOWEVER………..if you are interested in reading about Restaurants that I CAN RECOMMEND, be looking for more of my “LeslieSRQ Dishes it UP” articles on the Sarasota Post!!!