Gone are the days of spontaneity when we could walk into an unfamiliar restaurant based purely on its aesthetic and menu. In the olden days, pre-World Wide Web, maybe you had a dog-eared Zagat book of restaurant reviews, but for the most part you went in cold. Nowadays, we have health inspection ratings, Instagram influencers, and online reviews to consider before setting foot inside a restaurant and ordering just one meal out of tens of thousands in our lifetime.
It shouldn’t be this complicated. If you want to live life on the edge, go into a restaurant as unprepared as I was for my SAT in 1985, but if you’re going to take the time to look at online restaurant reviews, be sure to read them the right way.
Always look at the overall rating first. There can be 3000-plus reviews, but if the overall rating is a 4.6 out of five stars, it’s a …