What I learned: I learned that doing restaurant reviews often puts you into this mindset of awareness as soon as you walk into a restaurant. It’s weird. The smallest details of food that you probably wouldn’t have noticed before, and the types of comparisons you begin to make between restaurants, all of which comes from paying more attention to what you’re eating and the way it’s presented.

For the blogging portion, what I found to be most interesting was the fact that often felt like I was trying to verbalize and dictate the types of thoughts that usually hit your mind immediately and all at once when you’re eating. These are thoughts related to food texture, flavoring, and identification of ingredients (which is the hardest part). I feel like a regular eating experience involves a focus mainly on whether or not you’re enjoying the food (pleasure or displeasure), but in order to “review” food, you’re forced to be more thoughtful and mentally breakdown the process of eating. Then you have to communicate those thoughts (which is a difficult task if you’re not taking notes at the table-something that had I done, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to review restaurants while with friends anymore. They thought the vlogging was weird enough.)

To make my project experience as interactive as possible, I tried to do a variety of difference things in terms of the mediums I used to communicate my food experiences. Mainly, I used the traditional method of just writing blogs. However, I also tried posting some of these on yelp.com, and even if that experience didn’t turn out to be quite as interactive/communitylike as I thought it would be, it was interesting to me to be posting my own restaurant review alongside numerous other normal, non-food critics. Finally, I tried a vlog. This was definitely the most fun way to communicate a message, and I think what it captures best is the blogger’s personality. Definitely a good tool for keeping the message entertaining and engaging.

Next time, I’ll just vlog everything.