Crappy crappy restaurant reviews

Something I give almost no thought to in daily life is the presence or quality of local restaurant reviews. I think of them sort of like tap water: When I need them, I expect them to be there and I expect them to be adequate. They certainly don't have to be great, primarily because I honestly don't know what a great restaurant review might look like. Would they inform my understanding of the human condition? Would they illuminate man's casual inhumanity to man? They might, but really I just want them to tell me if I should eat here or go down the street.

I was reading the Washington Post's restaurant reviews recently before a night out at the theater and all I wanted to know was where to eat in the most restaurant-dense portion of DC. Unfortunately, Tom Sietsema's reviews let me down thoroughly. The one I read was about Cure. He damns it with the faint praise by talking about its decor and the sense of deja vu he got from the charcuterie plate, or something. I also looked at the one for Azur, but he just yacks on about what's coming in that space.

If your review of a restaurant has nothing about the food, because it hasn't opened, or bangs on about the sofas, stop, take a deep breath, and hit delete until the tyranny of the blank page is back doing its job of discouraging your further composition. You suck. 

Here's what I want: 1) Is the food good, 2) what's the vibe (loungy, greasy spoon, molecular gastronomy, weird), 3) would I be better served by eating elsewhere within the same a) tradition or b) area? 

Here, for instance, are three better reviews for DC restaurants:
- Rogue 24's three drinks and three snacks for $55 deal is great if you can swing that and are at least a little interested in goofy molecular cooking. The bartender, Brian or possibly Bryan, is a lovely Midwestern sort who clearly cares about his craft, and enjoys talking about it. If you're lucky the Chef will wander by and make you a weird thingamabob while you get positively blotto on the drinks. Like much high-end food these days, this experience will appeal most to people who are "foodies" and can treat the experience half like going for food and half like going to a museum of food and cooking.

Eat a half a loaf of bread beforehand because the snacks are minute and the drinks are weapons-grade.

- The Gin Bar at New Heights restaurant has a very enthusiastic bartender, but her drinks are a little sweet. There are tons of gins there, and she's enthusiastic about them, but I found her enthusiasm got in the way of me trying the gins without her odd tonic concoctions. You may get better results by asking her to go light on the ice.

- Loriel Plaza is great for middle-cost Latin food and margaritas. You go there because they have ample covered outdoor seating with heat lamps as well as high-quality crappy margaritas. They're frozen and yet you can drink as many or as few as needed. The food can be hit or miss, but their masitas de puerco are the best puerco you've ever had. Don't go on weekend nights because it's a goddamned zoo.  Go instead to Casa Oaxaca up the street.

Aruba, not bad!

It's a low sort of human that goes to Aruba and complains about it ... so I won't. I had a good time.

I went with my girlfriend, who is shy about being mentioned on the Interwhatsits and who shall therefore still be referred to as Alphonse Dubai.

Aruba, a tiny island outgrowth of the Netherlands is a lovely place if you can believe songs and tourist brochures, and also obviously if you like white sandy beaches and plenty of Americans. Seriously you can speak English and spend US dollars just everywhere there.

And everywhere in this case is about 13 miles long by five miles wide. It's like a squat Manhattan, but, I think, with more native born US citizens.

Through Alphonse's family we got much appreciated access to a time-share that was going unused, and not being ones to punch a gift horse right in the kisser, we found the cash for the plane and told work where to stick it for a week, before toddling off on our merry way.

Alphonse is a big fan of beach, because she likes sunshine and looks good in a bikini. I, being made almost entirely from English man-parts, am leery on both counts. However, we did find a way to combine our loves - hers of beach and ocean and mine of biology/zen sports - by going scuba diving quite a lot.

We got a 5 tank package and therefore dove 5 times. I think there's probably a certification you can pay for so you do multiple tank dives, but I don't have it and the dive shop didn't care to rig their systems up that way anyhow.

A short note about scuba: PADI, which certifies scuba instruction, is clearly a bit of a squirrely group. Scuba isn't actually all that hard to learn, and while there are all sorts of certifications you can get, and are no doubt supposed to have before you go diving in wrecks or diving too deeply, most dive shops don't really care as long as you remember to keep breathing (actually super important), breath in the correct hole, don't bob directly to the surface unexpectedly, and don't ruin dives for their other paying customers.

For instance, Alphonse and I are certified to 60 feet in open water and nothing more. We're not supposed to dive through enclosed spaces or, say, to 80 feet, both of which our dive shop were totally glad to chaperone us through because a) it seemed like fun and b) that's what they were doing. They were mildly troubled when we admitted after our first dive that we'd forgotten more about scuba than we currently knew, but we went home and watched a couple of YouTube videos on how to set up our equipment, so by the time we came back we'd pretty much completed the majority of what PADI actually charges you to learn anyhow.

We dove a couple of wrecks, one of the Antilla, a German merchant ship that scuttled itself in Aruba at the outbreak of WWII (I'm assuming because if you know you're likely to become POW's, why not Aruba?), and a couple of planes that were, get this, sunk because people might want to scuba through them. Fascinating history. We saw some cool wildlife including an eagle ray, a couple of moray eels, a lion fish, some spiny lobsters, and toward the end of one dive, a huge school of silvery 8-inch fish that I tried to float unobtrusively into the middle of. They knew.

Also, once they'd dashed off, I realized that what it seemed they'd been doing, was feeding on the distressingly large cloud of jellyfish I suddenly found myself unobtrusively infiltrating. It wouldn't have been quite so unobtrusive if you could scream underwater. You can, I learned, get stung. Also you can panic. Lucky for us, the boat came and picked us up right in the middle of this cloud of stingy little bastards. Sigh.

Anyway, a good time was, in balance, had by all, and I finally got to examine underwater life in a spot where you could see more than two feet in a row. Alphonse got to hang out on the beaches. The "lively" Aruba economy of money for slightly less alcoholic beverages than advertized, got money. I'm not sure I'd go back to Aruba, but I'd certainly consider it and I'd definitely try other Caribbean vacations. Not cruise ships.