On past lives

and silly jobs.

Someone recently asked me what I did for a job, and my response was, “Fucked if I know.” Sure, I write words. I take these things we have all learned, arrange and rearrange them into beginnings, middles and ends. I form sentences. I string together ideas. They become paragraphs, and eventually, they tell a story.

But for many years, I wasn’t telling the stories that I wanted. The stories I told came in the form of Tweets, reports, instructions, recipes, SEOs, menus, website copy, terms and conditions, and reviews. So many fucking reviews.

At the gym, someone I trained next to for months said they didn’t realise that I was me. The me of review writing. The me that figures out what to praise, what to lend constructive criticism to, and what to convince people to spend their money on. When they figured out who I was, their first response was, “That’s my dream job.”

Because I have no filter, I said, “It’s actually fucking awful.”

Admittedly, when I started reviewing, phones had cameras. I didn’t have to run to the toilet after every course pretending to blow lines in the bathroom just to make notes. I could lean into my Asian-ness and have a completely inconspicuous photo shoot with my plate of food. Dining etiquette had been completely thrown out the window, so I could text myself the pressing thoughts I didn’t want to forget.

But that’s not the issue. There are so many terrible things about reviewing, especially when you’ve worked in hospitality. The main being that you cannot switch off. If you can see the room going down, it physically hurts to sit back and watch the team either descend further into the weeds or struggle to claw themselves out.

Reviewing is also a young person’s game.

Consider this: there are 21 meals a week. Take seven of them away, because cafes is a whole other category and that leaves you with 14. If you’ve worked in media or publishing, you know that you don’t get lunch breaks longer than 15 minutes if you want to get all the content out for the week, which leaves you with seven nights. Assuming you have a KPI of writing one new restaurant review a week, a bar review, have media events to attend and you’re working on updating a feature, you will need to go to at least two restaurants, two bars and five feature-related venues a week. That’s nine venues a week during the off-season (not including media visits), which means you don’t get to eat for yourself at any time. Of those nine venues, on average, six of them will suck and not be written about. Those are the meals that will give you palate fatigue and are a waste of time and stomach space. Don’t even talk to me about indigestion and acid reflux.