We’re a little obsessed with food. And puppies. But not at the same time because that would be weird…
Our friends who really know us, come to us first when they’re going somewhere new, to ask what the best restaurants are and where they should eat. It’s how we plan holidays, it’s how we spend our weekends, it’s how we go about life (food=life right??) and Lex has a bucket list for just about everything. Because she’s also obsessed with lists.
So we thought we’d document our journeys through all of our noms to entice us to try new tastes, flavours and adventure in our city and beyond. And while we’re at it, we thought we’d share our experiences with others who might be interested in trying it after us. The below is our explanation on how we now rate restaurants and recipes, and why #bellyrubs should be the way forward in life, whether you are a puppy or a human, or a human version of a puppy (us). Or a puppy version of a human, in which case, please send video examples…
3 categories. 3 points per category = our belly rub rating. But we’re going to give you fun descriptors rather than detail the actual points, because all food is subjective and let’s be honest you don’t care about the points anyway. You’ll want to know what you might experience, whether it’s a restaurant or a recipe, but the rating is really pretty arbitrary just to help rank things.
Restaurants:
Re the rankings… Price is separate and not included in our belly rub rating, because, to us, price doesn’t always equate to the best culinary experience even though pretentious peeps and companies might want you to think so. We’re self-defined food snobs, but we’re not rich, so affordability is definitely important!
Category 1: The Food (duh). We’ll list out the menu items we ate and why we picked ’em. We’ll consider whether there was a stand-out dish that would be our go-to meal or whether the menu changes seasonally and gives you new reasons to keep coming back. We’ll rate booze here too, because a good cocktail or bottle of wine can totally make a meal go from meh to woof.
1 point means we could probably cook it at home, but we were lazy and chose to go out instead. 2 points equates to a pretty great meal that we’d take our friends back to and recommend again. And 3 points translates to it’s basically food porn, our mouths were watering before we even arrived and the dog certainly isn’t getting the doggy bag because we’ll be either licking our plates at the restaurant or every morsel of leftover that we couldn’t possibly eat in the moment will be devoured by the human puppies. 4 points (which we’ve decided is possible in a 3 pt rating system) is for the restaurant that is just the bomb didggidity. We’ve only experienced about 2 of those in 20 years so far…
Category 2: Ambiance. We’ll tell you about the general feel of the restaurant. You know, would you take your mom, is it worthy of super date night, could you hear yourself think or did the metal of the chair dig into your hip.
1 point means it’s really nothing to write home about, but just because it’s a hole in the wall in terms of ambiance, doesn’t mean the food doesn’t make up for it. 2 points should be decent enough for a blind date or your picky parents, but doesn’t require dressing up or make you feel fancy. 3 points is pretty swish, you just want to touch everything because ooooo marble or it’s got an awesome and unique vibe that makes it stand out. 4 points… not really sure, but we’ll let you know when we find one that knocks our socks off.
Category 3: Service We’ll rate this from the moment we step out of the car (smell of the parking garage aside) to the moment we leave, including whether doors were held or we got sat next to a drafty window. Was there a wait? Good pauses between food courses? Great waiter/ress? Does valet service only mean you can’t get an extra cocktail with that precious $10? Do they visit your table too often? Did you get that weird visit from the manager who lingered too long? Or did a 120lb Bernese mountain dog visit your table for cuddles (good for us, bad for those more allergy ridden)?
1 point here is run of the mill average waits, average service, nothing extra. 2 points means we helped the waiter stack the plates on the table because they made us laugh and well, we’ve all been in that job. 3 points means they knew our names by the time we walked out the door, and we’re basically best friends now so we’ll see you next week.
Recipes:
We have a literal mini-mountain of recipes that we’ve torn out of 10 years of Fine Cooking, Real Simple, Bon Appetit, Southern Living, BBC Good Food and a host of other magazines which we’ve wanted to try. But they’ve been sitting in a box and moved across the ocean from London, down the East Coast a couple times, and visited 5 lovely home, before one little recipe may have been tested. Cue us posting them here, forcing us to try at least one new recipe a week. It might be a drink (or if we’re feeling REALLY lazy a good wine review…), or it might be a full blown seven course menu complete with wine pairings. All odds suggest it’ll likely be somewhere in between most of the time.
Overall, our ratings will include the noms themselves (taste), number of “feeds” in 3 different levels and the ‘hands to mouth’ time. Noms explains itself… do you want to eat it? # of feeds will be defined as (1) # of Stu’s – i.e. those who could eat 4 baskets of bread before a 3 course meal and think it’s a completely normal night, also known as the family hoover (2) # of normal people – like that regular serving amount with just enough left for the puppy being oh so polite for the whole meal and then (3) # of people on a diet – because, well, calories. “Hands to mouth” time is our ever-so-polite ‘nope’ to the rubbish about preparation time versus cooking time. Who cares – everyone just wants to know how long it will take from getting all the stuff out of the fridge to serving it up in an actual dish to our hungry family right? Plus, in our experience, unless you’re trained in real life chef knife skills and your timing skills are the equivalent of a Formula 1 driver, a 20 minute recipe is ALWAYS at least double that to produce. Again, #nope.
In terms of what we’ll actually rate on, it will be the following:
Category 1: Faffiness. Real word, to us anyway. Defined as the level to which one either knows one is going to literally be in the kitchen for 6 hours but drool worthy food that was worth the wait (1 points)… or one can sling 4 ingredients in a slow cooker and eat 8 hours later by barely lifting a finger (3 points)… or one might be cooking for a pretty standard amount of time and tolerably following a few steps in the process (2 points).
Category 2: Ingredient Weirdness. Because sometimes a recipe isn’t worth the tour of 3 supermarkets and 5 hour road trip to Charleston that you had to make to find ‘oak moss absolute’ or ‘bohea lapsang souchong tea’. Oh yes, these are real things. We’ll rate ingredients from Heston Blumenthal levels of weirdness (1 point), to slightly annoying but attainable items that exist in more speciality shops like Thai basil or whole organic hazelnuts (2 points), to the run of the mill every day ingredients available in a decent supermarket (3 points). For the US, we’re pretty loyal to Publix, Harris Teeter, Wegman’s, Whole Foods and HEB depending on the region of the country we’re in. While in the UK, we’re pretty loyal to Sainsbury’s on the whole, but will shop at Waitrose or Tesco as needs must.
Category 3: The Noms. The most important part…Is it good? Would we cook it for friends? Will it make it on a supper club menu one day? (Oh yeah, we’re those exciting people.) How much does the puppy want to eat it too? 1 point gets you a recipe that the dog would happily eat, but we’ll pass thank you very much. 2 points is probably a good helping of homemade mac & cheese that everyone loves but no one goes to work raving about. While 3 points is the mac daddy of the nailing macarons for the first time ever, that also incredibly…tasted amazeballs, or should it be amazediscs?
We’d love to know what you think of everything – so please leave us thoughts and your own reviews as you try things along with us.
love & cuddles