You Asked for My Restaurant Recommendation. Now, Seriously, Go to the Restaurant.

It’s not about wasting my time. It’s about wasting yours.

I really, really enjoy giving a restaurant recommendation, and I think I’m pretty good at it. What, you want something early evening on the East Side before a show at the Manhattan Theatre Club? Empellon. You’re visiting Detroit? Bev’s Bagels, Mabel Gray, Ladder 4 Wine Bar, Sister Pie, Warda Pâtisserie. Landing at LAX, coming from Chicago, and only for 48 hours? Holbox, Soban or Sun Nong Dan or Ham Ji Park, Quarter Sheets for a slice of cheesecake to go (if time is tight).

The requests come from old friends and Instagram friends. Podcast listeners and the very sweet Gen Zer who cuts my hair. I think I’m good at this not because I’m the most traveled or most plugged-in person working in and around the restaurant world. It’s because I know the right questions to ask, and because I simply know to ask questions. The first question, preferably posed via text or email (my preference; off the dome IRL recs can go sideways fast), is always the same. “What do you want?” It’s intentionally broad. It’s going Dr. Orna Guralnik on the situation. You want a date night? You want cheap? (Good luck.) You want something with a Jewish flavor but healthy and not Jack’s Wife Freda? You want “good Mexican”? (Yikes—I hate that one.)

For New York City recommendations—my hometown of over two decades and my natural wheelhouse—I next ask about party size, neighborhood (I always press for an answer even when it “doesn’t matter”), time of day (key), and the context of the meal (essential). For an industry friend who is visiting for future-restaurant research, I’ll have a very different set of options to offer than for an old family friend looking for the classic NYC experience. (For the record, I’m always nudging folks to hit up P.J. Clarke’s, Abraço, Emilio’s Ballato, Sam’s Restaurant, and Peking Duck House for classic New York.)

But the point of this is not to list a bunch of great restaurants. You can read Robert Sietsema, Gaby Scelzo, The Angel, Vittles, Austin Tedesco, and others who have a very different style of restaurant recommending for their great cities. No, I’m here to say that if you ask me for a restaurant recommendation, you should fucking take my recommendation. No, for real—that list of restaurants I have provided? Take that list, write each name into Google Maps, and save them. Go to Resy and make some reservations. Plan your visit around these recommendations. If you are going hard, visit them all. If you have only one free meal, lock it in.

Taking that restaurant recommendation seriously makes for a happy day.

But regardless of whether you take this advice or don’t, whether you think I’m being sensitive or that my ego has grown to the size of one of those Black Tap ice cream sundaes (take the kids there, seriously), this is not about me, it’s about you. Listen, I’m good! As mentioned at the top, I love giving restaurant advice. It keeps me sharp and drops me into the world of Eater Maps to cross-check my initial instincts. I enjoy logging into Swarm (formerly known as Foursquare) and being taken back to that great bakery in Seoul (Meal° for milk bread, but also Tongue Planet) or reminded of my January visit to London (Rambutan, Prufrock Coffee, BRAT, skip Rochelle Canteen). I love helping friends and strangers achieve their restaurant nirvana. No, this isn’t about wasting my time. It’s about wasting yours.

I just returned from Barcelona, where I was helping cohost one of our TASTE Travels culinary tours. While our schedule was packed, I knew I had a couple of open time slots to explore the city on my own, and I knew to hit up my friend Matt Goulding, cofounder of Roads & Kingdoms—the guy to know in Spain. He was fast to reply (game recognizes game). Ultramarinos Marín: the first and only rec. He did slide in La Cova Fumada for some casual, old-school seafood after a morning dip in the Mediterranean. Gresca and Berbena came up for modern Catalan cuisine. I plugged them into Google Maps. The end.

There’s a natural instinct for “restaurant people” (most people, truly) to seek out these tips—with the intention of visiting, mind you—but then, once on the ground in these locations, to start melting down. Maybe there’s some disorganization or jet lag playing tricks. Maybe they’ve reached out to four different people, and working through it all is feeling overwhelming. Fair. Maybe the hotel is much farther away than expected. Maybe Uber sucks and biking is easier, limiting mobility somewhat. These are all reasons to deviate.

But it’s in the urge to find your own path, the draw of making your own discovery of the place nobody has mentioned, where you will most certainly go wrong. Don’t do this. I repeat, please don’t do this. For real: Barcelona, Rome, New York City, and Tokyo have so many very bad restaurants—awful places that actually look kind of cool, or at least “local.” But in the end the cooking may be subpar, the price exorbitant, and a real feeling of regret will creep in and could burn for some time. You don’t want that. So just take my restaurant recommendation. I took Matt’s straightaway, and I had an incredible time at Ultramarinos. It was that simple.