Let’s start with who we are not: disclosed or known to restaurant owners, managers, or servers.  We are a restaurant reviewing phantom, an independent person or persons who for decades often frequent, but do not permanently reside, in Delmarva, or Delaware for that matter.  We dine around the country, enjoy Michelin-starred restaurants around the world, visit top-rated restaurants around the country, and enjoy chain, junk, fast, and cheap food with the best of critical eaters.  In short, we are foodies, elitists in that we know what we like and expect, and report what we find, willing to concede that our opinion, formed through decades of experiencing the best and worst according to leading critics, may assist your dining decisions. 

There is no advertising on our website – we are the only Delmarva beach town-area website to our knowledge which is not sponsored.  No restaurant or owner knows our identity; that we have been planning and writing these comments for years; or that we have anything to do with a restaurant review website.  Many of our friends and family know that we are foodies but do not know that we are connected to this project, as we are, and will remain, fully and completely anonymous (nobody likes to wear a disguise while dining).  We paid for every meal we have ever enjoyed, disliked, or hated; make our own reservations; appear unannounced; and never asked for, nor received anything complimentary.  We ask questions when we visit; learn backgrounds; research restaurants through published articles and interviews, along with other publicly available sources, including restaurant review websites; and record our thoughts through this medium.  We have met and interacted with managers and owners who had no idea who we are, and written critically of their restaurants even though we may like them personally; the opposite is true, as some managers and servers we have disliked, but are fair to their food and fair in our review process.  It’s the food, service, and experience which counts, not our view of a proprietor’s personality.  And, as you will observe, we hold restaurants to their published website content, physical artifices, names, and other objects of public discourse; if we see something, we say something.

We are not in this for the money; to the contrary, we have spent significantly dining at all of the restaurants reviewed, many of them numerous times, paid to publish this website, and spent considerable time and effort (to the exclusion of our regular jobs) writing our reports, editing and refining our comments, and making sure we are fair and honest – none of it has been reimbursed or sponsored.  And that’s the thing, no matter what you may think of our process or reviews, we have but one goal: intellectual honesty.  We expect it and give it, and hope you, when reading our reviews, understand that intellectual honesty is what we seek to achieve in our critical comments.  Indeed, it often is said that a critic’s job is not to have passion, pride, or prejudice about the subject – just embark upon critical examination and analysis. That is what we strive for in these reports.

Suffice to close, we will continue to anonymously dine around the beach communities, and will update these reports as we remain critical.  A continued obligation to honest reporting will remain our goal.  Many of you will comment.  Let us know your observations, and we encourage you to be equally critical of our writing and reviews.  Every public remark will be reviewed; indeed, maybe we missed something that is worth reconsidering.  Validating our reviews is a continuing process that we will seek to achieve as we continue to dine around Delmarva.  Yes, we are constantly visiting new and old restaurants to update these reports, but let us know if we missed something.  The poet Robert Browning’s writing was known for its irony, dark humor, social commentary, and historical backgrounds, the same type of writing you will observe in our short reviews, as we take you down the road of culinary adventure that Delmarva offers, including its dining hills and valleys, culminating in more than 100 restaurant reviews in a place that many more, especially from the New Jersey and New York areas are starting to call home.

Finally, we often are asked, “what is your favorite restaurant.” I often respond, “It’s the same as yours,” indeed, it “is the one that loved us the most.”

Happy dining!