O Good Taste, Where Art Thou?

Recently I bemoaned to a friend, “I just feel like good taste is so rare and lacking in these end times.”

“Wait, what?” she asked, laughing. “What do you mean by that?“

“Well,” I began, “in this age of Yelp and review sites up the wazoo, you would think it would be easy to figure out what’s good and what isn’t good…but it still takes a lot of work. You have to filter through so many reviews to figure out what’s only probably good.”

I’m not talking just about food, although that’s a big part of it. Let’s say you do filter through enough reviews to verify that a Yelp 4-star restaurant is actually good. How are you supposed to know what to order (arguably more important than where you should go)? Do you need to make reservations? If yes, then how far in advance?

Basically, you still need a human curator to tell you all the relevant information pertaining to what’s actually good.

I am one of those curators.

Which isn’t to say that everybody will like or agree with my recommendations, but it’s a start. If you like white meat chicken, for example, there’s nothing I can do for you. On the other hand, if you like things that actually taste good, then we should talk — you’ll probably like some things on my list.

1.

Earlier this month a friend of mine was visiting from London, so we went to Fantasia to enjoy the best taro balls in the Bay Area world (also their taro milk tea is AMAZING). Even though we were both full, afterwards I took him to Honeyberry so he could have one of their famous roti buns for the first time.

In this case, simply knowing about roti buns at Honeyberry isn’t enough — you have to know to get the chocolate ones, since they’re the best. Unfortunately they were out, so I opted for the next best thing — the cream cheese roti bun. It was cold but I knew that you could warm it up the next morning and it’d still be good. The plain ones were about to come out of the oven, but they’re honestly just a waste of calories.

The next morning I woke up to his text.

Few things make me happier than introducing a friend to something and finding out that they really liked it. Not that I need validation to know that I have good taste, but it feels good to broaden and enrich somebody’s else life, even if it’s with something as simple as a roti bun (by the way, if you haven’t had one you don’t know what you’re missing out on).

2.

I love (and know) massages. Last Thanksgiving I went to Thailand for 2 weeks and my goal was to get a massage a day. Although I missed a couple days, I made up for it in duration — I averaged an hour a day for the whole 2 weeks I was away. Were the massages life-changing? No…but it was good enough, and cheap (first massage there was $17 for 2 hours).

One of the best massages I have ever received, though, was from this Filipino woman named Evelyn at my company’s wellness center. She could tell exactly where I was sore, and knew what pressure to apply without asking (borderline painful). In fact, that’s the litmus test to see if a massage therapist is good or not — they shouldn’t ever need to ask you whether you need more pressure because they know what pressure to apply (I’m fine with them confirming what they already know). If I ever have to tell a therapist that they need to apply more pressure, they’re doing it wrong.

It’s also not enough to know who gives good massages at the wellness center…since it’s so difficult to get an appointment, you have to know that the appointment window is extended by a month every month around the 1st. I recommended her to a coworker a few months ago, and she just got back to me recently to let me know how her massage went.

That made my day.

3.

Of course, I’m often also the recipient of recommendations. Since I have such good taste, though, I’m skeptical of most recommendations I do get. A few months ago I visited my friend Steve in LA, and in the week leading up to the visit he called and said, “Oh, I got some Cuban pastries that I think you’d like.”

“Cool,” I said, “looking forward to it.” Internally, though, I was thinking, “I hope this isn’t a waste of calories…how good can these pastries really be?” Having had amazing pastries in Paris, Tokyo, and Taiwan (an underrated mecca of good, cheap food), I was having a hard time believing that some random Cuban pastry shop (who knew Cubans made pastries anyway?) could beat out the stuff I have had.

Well…I tried their guava cheese strudel (among other things), and it blew me away. It was delicious and amazing and best of all, cheap! It was especially good after warming it up in the oven….I even picked some up to bring back to my coworkers on the way home. (And of course, many of them were equally amazed by how good it was.)

So…thank you, Steve, for surprising me with that recommendation. I’d also like to thank the many other curator-friends in my life for showing me things I would not have discovered on my own — you know who you are. I am truly grateful for your recommendations, and have learned so much from you about what’s good, what makes it good, and my own preferences. I’m probably guilty of pawning off some of your recommendations as mine, but I know you don’t mind. The bottom line is: we need more good taste in this world, and we need to do that by any means necessary.