My Week with Patch: In Which I Explain Why I'm Not Mean Enough to Write Reviews for a Living

If there’s one piece of advice I’ve taken a little too seriously in my life, it’s “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” It’s difficult advice for me because I’ve always had a tough time with the “not saying anything at all” bit – I really like to talk. But I don’t talk smack because I was taught well by my preschool teachers.

So this week I had to break that rule. And I wasn’t happy about it. It appears neither were a lot of readers. But as many journalists before me have said, “If you’re not making somebody mad, you’re not doing your job.”

The main reason I decided to do my Local Lunch reviews this week is because I’m not good at writing reviews, mostly because of my aversion to saying mean things.

My first journalism class freshman year of high school, reviews were the only thing I had serious trouble with. I got a B on my submission. A solid B. How tragic. (I soon learned that a B on a paper is pretty great by the standards of every college class, so I’ve let that one go). The thing is, I’ve never much improved because I’m still afraid to hurt people’s feelings.

Look, I don’t like judging things. Being judgmental is not a pastime of mine as it was for many of my recent high school classmates. And part of the reason I dislike judging things is because there’s always the chance I’ll misjudge them and hurt people’s feelings.

Like on Tuesday. I went to Chi Tung Restaurant. I wanted so badly to love it because I knew it was a place that many locals cherished. But I couldn’t honestly say I loved it. And even now, it probably sounds like I’m apologizing for it. I’m not. I stand by what I said. Now I just happen to know that most people don’t feel the way I feel. And that’s fine – in fact, that’s great. I’m glad people are standing up for Chi Tung. The world needs more people who stand up for what they believe when someone challenges that belief.

But aside from the fact that I’m admittedly not a great reviewer, I chose to do this segment for another reason: I’m a total scaredy-cat. And trying something new is good for you, which is why I probably should have ordered something other than “the usual.” I was afraid because I liked what was comfortable, and I wish I had taken a chance.

But I can’t change that. If I’ve learned anything this week, it’s that once you say something, you can never take it back. Particularly if that thing is published on the Internet where it is cached, so even if you were to take it down, it’d still be out there somewhere in Google’s vast web of archives. But I don’t want to. Because I know that with some more experience, I’ll become a stronger critic – one that doesn’t feel unnecessarily guilty about being respectfully negative – and I can look back on this review and say, “That was my starting point. May not have been great, but that’s when I realized that if you don’t have something nice to say, just be honest. It’ll save other people the trouble of having something not nice to say too.”