AUGUST 19 — Everyone is entitled to an opinion. I am increasingly unconvinced though that every opinion deserves to be important.

There is a difference, and somewhere in our enthusiasm for the democratisation of information, we seem to have forgotten it.

I have spent most of my adult life working with food. And one of the stranger developments I have watched over the past decade is the transformation of the diner into the reviewer.

Not simply someone who eats, experiences and forms an opinion. That has always existed, and it should. But someone who feels an almost reflexive compulsion to publicly assess, score and pronounce judgement upon what they have experienced.

Dinner is no longer simply dinner.

It must be documented, interpreted and rated. Four stars. Eight out of 10. 7.3. Would return. Wouldn’t return. Overrated. Underrated. Worth it. Not worth it. Hidden gem. Eew, cringe.

As though the complexity of a restaurant, a living organisation involving cooks, growers, fishermen, craftspeople, servers, cleaners, designers, producers, ingredients, seasons, cultures, techniques and thousands of hours of accumulated knowledge can meaningfully be flattened into a number chosen by someone peering over their dessert through a screen at the table.

We should perhaps ask ourselves when this became normal. The right to speak is not the same as the authority to judge.

There is something genuinely valuable about the democratisation brought about by the internet. 

Restaurant criticism was once concentrated in the hands of relatively few publications and critics. 

That system had its own problems: gatekeeping, cultural bias, limited representation and enormous power concentrated among a small number of people.

Opening the conversation was healthy. But somewhere along the way we confused two very different principles.

The first is democratic: Everyone has the right to express an opinion. The second is epistemological: Every opinion possesses equal value.

The first proposition is something I believe in. The second is obviously absurd.

If I attend a performance by a concert violinist, I am perfectly entitled to say that I did not enjoy it. My enjoyment belongs entirely to me. What I cannot reasonably conclude from my displeasure is that the violinist possesses poor bowing technique. I don’t know enough.

This seems embarrassingly obvious in most fields. I can dislike a building without imagining myself as an architect. 

I can find a piece of software frustrating without assuming I understand its engineering. 

I can dislike a ballet without publishing a technical assessment of the dancers.

Yet food occupies a peculiar cultural position where the fact that we have eaten throughout our lives appears to confer upon us expertise in cooking. 

It does not. 

Eating gives us enormous expertise in one subject: ourselves.

You know whether you enjoyed your dinner. You know whether something was too salty for you. You know whether you liked the room, whether you felt comfortable, whether you considered the experience worth your money and whether you would return. All of these are legitimate.

But there is an enormous intellectual leap between: “I didn’t like this.” and “This is bad.” An even larger one separates: “This is bad.” from “The people who made this don’t know what they’re doing.”

Social media has almost completely erased these distinctions. What it has normalised is not merely expression, but a peculiar form of epistemic entitlement: I experienced it, therefore I understand it. I understand it, therefore I am qualified to judge it. 

There is something faintly solipsistic in assuming that the limits of one’s own taste must also constitute the limits of the work.

A star is an extraordinarily silly instrument. Consider the absurdity of the five star rating. What exactly are we measuring? Deliciousness? Technical execution? Hospitality? Value? Originality? Comfort? Cultural importance? Luxury? Authenticity? Personal preference? Whether somebody brought the bill quickly enough? A rough tablecloth? Waiters who put plates down with the synchronisation of a submarine crew?

All of these completely different things are collapsed into a single symbol. It has the aesthetic appearance of measurement without possessing the intellectual discipline of measurement. 

A restaurant receiving 4.6 stars appears somehow objectively better than one receiving 4.3. But what exactly is the unit?

There can’t be one. The precision is spurious.

One diner deducts a star because the food is too spicy. Another because it isn’t spicy enough. One believes portions are too small. Another dislikes feeling full.

Someone dislikes fermented flavours. Someone else awards five stars precisely because of them. One reviewer thinks a restaurant is too expensive because dinner costs RM500. Another considers RM500 perfectly reasonable.

We aggregate incompatible preferences, expectations, cultural backgrounds, levels of knowledge and circumstances, divide them by the number of respondents and produce a decimal. 

The rating system performs a rather neat conceptual trick: it makes the incommensurable appear commensurable. Then we call the result a rating.

There are contexts in which aggregation is useful. If hundreds of people independently report that a restaurant routinely loses reservations or keeps customers waiting for two hours, I would pay attention. 

But 4.7 versus 4.5? I struggle to understand what profound truth about cooking is supposedly contained within those two decimal points. It is pseudo-quantification: subjective preference dressed in the reassuring grammar of mathematics.

The confidence of incomplete knowledge. Food presents a particular problem because it is immediately accessible.

Everyone can taste. But tasting something is not the same as understanding it.

The finished plate conceals almost everything that produced it. You may not see the farmer’s decisions. You may not recognise the variety of an ingredient.

You may not know the culinary tradition being referenced. You may not know whether bitterness is intentional. You may not know whether an unfamiliar texture is technically difficult or technically disastrous. 

And crucially, you may have no reliable sense of where the perimeter of your own knowledge ends.

This is not an insult to diners. It is simply how expertise works. The more deeply I have gone into food, the less comfortable I have become making absolute pronouncements about cuisines and traditions I do not understand. 

Knowledge does something inconvenient to certainty: it introduces context. 

Context creates qualifications. Qualifications make certainty more difficult.

Social media rewards almost precisely the opposite behaviour.

“I don’t know enough about this culinary tradition to judge what the cook intended, although personally I found the bitterness difficult” is a responsible statement. 

“Unbalanced. 5/10.” is content. These days content and the appetite for drama wins.

The performance of discernment. This leads to what I find more interesting than the reviews themselves. 

Why do we feel compelled to publish them?

Before social media, you could have a disappointing dinner, complain to your partner on the drive home and continue with your life. 

Today consumption has become performative. We don’t merely eat. We produce evidence that we ate.

We demonstrate where we ate. Then, increasingly, we demonstrate that we possess the discernment necessary to judge where we ate.

There is social capital in being difficult to impress. If everything is wonderful, perhaps you lack standards. If you can identify flaws invisible to everyone else, perhaps you possess taste. 

Criticism can therefore become a performance of discernment. Disapproval becomes a credential. 

“The sauce was delicious” tells the world almost nothing about you. “The acidity lacked precision and the dish failed to resolve conceptually” sounds considerably more impressive. 

Whether the speaker understands acidity, precision or what exactly needed resolving is another matter entirely. We have somehow separated the performance of connoisseurship from the inconvenience of acquiring expertise. 

The restaurant becomes material from which a person constructs the identity of knowing food, where to go, what is and isn’t good, under or overrated, the Vespucci of an eatery. 

I don’t merely eat at restaurants, I am someone who ranks them.

And once an audience develops around that identity, something interesting happens. Attention begins to resemble authority. It isn’t. 

Followers are not qualifications. This distinction is increasingly important. 

A person can have 300,000 followers and know very little about cooking. Another person can have 800 followers and possess extraordinary knowledge. 

Neither number tells me anything useful about their understanding of food.

Followers measure the ability to acquire followers. Views measure views. Likes measure a particular form of audience response. Virality measures the capacity of something to spread. 

None measures truth. None measures knowledge. None measures intellectual seriousness.

And yet restaurants increasingly behave as though these numbers constitute an ersatz system of professional accreditation.

Someone with sufficient followers walks into a restaurant and suddenly their dinner possesses greater institutional importance. 

Why? Because they have distribution. Distribution is commercially useful. But we should call it what it is. Reach is not expertise.

A sufficiently large audience may give an opinion the patina of authority, but the underlying opinion has not necessarily become any more informed. 

The danger begins when restaurants themselves forget the distinction. Restaurants helped create this problem. 

We cannot blame social media users entirely. The restaurant industry eagerly participated in creating this culture. We invited influencers, gave away meals, reposted praise, asked people to tag us, begged for reviews, displayed ratings and plaques, celebrated stars. 

We treated people with audiences differently from people without them. 

And then, having spent years teaching the public that their online opinions possess enormous value, we became outraged when they believed us.

That is partly our responsibility. If a social media food reviewer validates us, intellectually we cannot suddenly declare a negative review from a social media food reviewer meaningless simply because we dislike it. 

The more sensible conclusion is that neither should determine what we believe about ourselves.

Both are information. Neither is the truth. 

This is, increasingly, the position I find myself returning to as an attempt to restore proportion in an environment that has become structurally disproportionate. 

Definitely not to ignore customers and criticism which is often the most honest form of feedback a restaurant will ever receive. 

And certainly not to retreat into the comfortable fiction that “they simply do not understand us,” which too often functions as a rhetorical shield for either arrogance or underperformance.

Restaurants, if they are to remain intellectually and operationally coherent, must cultivate a more disciplined form of attention. They must listen carefully, even obsessively, but they must also resist the contemporary conflation of listening with compliance.

These are not the same epistemic acts. If 20 independent guests report that the bathroom is unclean, we are no longer in the realm of interpretation; we are in the realm of operational failure. 

If there is a consistent pattern of disordered reservations, the signal is unambiguous. If diners repeatedly misread what a restaurant is trying to communicate, then the burden of explanation, at least in part, returns to the kitchen and the service floor.

This is where humility isn’t simply a monastic virtue but a methodology: the capacity to recognise when repeated observation has crystallised into pattern, and when pattern demands correction.

But the inverse is equally important. If three individuals on TikTok express dislike for an ingredient that is structurally integral to the cuisine being articulated, this does not automatically constitute a problem. 

It may simply indicate a mismatch between intention and audience literacy, or between culinary language and its reception. 

If someone suggests a dish “needs more salt,” that is not yet analysis; it is preference, and preference is not always actionable beyond the personal.

And if a restaurant is assigned a score — 6.8 versus 8.2, as though these figures correspond to a stable, translatable unit of culinary value, one is left in an epistemological impasse. 

There is, quite frankly, no coherent operational response to such precision masquerading as measurement.

What restaurants must recover, therefore, is not indifference, but discrimination: the ability to distinguish signal from noise, where signal implies structured, repeatable, contextually grounded feedback, and noise refers to the ambient churn of uncalibrated opinion. 

Social media is exceptionally efficient at collapsing this distinction. It endows every utterance with the appearance of weight by attaching to it a numerical scaffold; views, shares, likes, followers, stars, scores, engagement metrics. 

These are not measures of validity; they are measures of circulation. And yet circulation is easily mistaken for significance.

A post viewed half a million times acquires, almost reflexively, a sense of authority. But reach is merely a description of distribution. It tells us how far an idea has travelled, not whether it is conceptually sound, gastronomically literate, or even internally coherent. 

In other words: virality is not epistemology.

The restaurant cannot be designed by referendum. This is where I think restaurants need courage. A serious restaurant must eventually stand for something. 

It must make choices. And meaningful choices necessarily exclude alternatives. If every diner preference is incorporated, seasoning becomes an average, music becomes an average, lighting becomes an average, service becomes an average and eventually the restaurant itself becomes the average it was engineered to satisfy.

Perhaps commercially that is exactly what some restaurants should do. There is nothing wrong with businesses designed to satisfy the largest possible audience. 

But restaurants that aspire to express an idea cannot operate entirely by referendum. Artists don’t ask audiences to vote on the next brushstroke.

Writers don’t rewrite every paragraph according to comments beneath the previous one. A restaurant attempting to articulate a particular cuisine, philosophy or relationship with its environment must be permitted the possibility that some people simply will not like it. 

Think of Banksy.

That is not necessarily failure. Disagreement is the cost of having a position. What should matter instead? Restaurants should develop their own hierarchy of evidence. Listen most carefully to people who understand what you are attempting to do.

Listen to your team, producers, peers in your own ecosphere. Listen to thoughtful critics, whether professional or amateur, who demonstrate knowledge, curiosity, comparative experience and intellectual honesty. Listen to customers when patterns emerge.

And perhaps most importantly, listen to criticism that makes you uncomfortable and can explain why. But stop surrendering emotional sovereignty to every star, story, reel and anonymous paragraph written after dinner. 

Read it. Consider it. Ask whether there is evidence inside it. Take what is useful. Then move on.

Move on.

A restaurant that attempts to answer every piece of online criticism will eventually stop cooking for people and start cooking for the algorithm. I cannot imagine anything less hospitable. Even the mere sense of the word hints at nothing comfortable. Algorithm.

Taste, inconveniently for everyone involved, requires humility on both sides of the pass. Not the performative kind we sprinkle over press releases, but the uncomfortable admission that chefs are wrong often enough to keep us employed, and diners are not automatically right just because they have a fork and a WiFi connection. 

We make bad dishes. We overthink good ones. We occasionally dress up confusion as “conceptual intent” and hope nobody notices the sauce split was just… a sauce that split.

But if kitchen arrogance is a known disease, diner certainty is its equally contagious cousin. The idea that “I didn’t enjoy this” must automatically escalate into “therefore this is bad” is one of the more successful modern delusions. 

A diner’s honest reaction is valuable; a diner’s instant taxonomy of right and wrong is less so. Somewhere between those two lies the increasingly unfashionable skill of saying: I don’t know what I just ate, but I’m not sure the Universe requires my verdict on it.

There is, in fact, a dignity in restraint. In distinguishing dislike from defect. In encountering something unfamiliar without immediately reaching for a scorecard, as though every meal is a referendum on civilisation. This is not indecision; it is epistemic humility, the recognition that an experience can be entirely real without one’s explanation of that experience necessarily being correct. 

Not everything needs to be ranked, optimised, or uploaded. Sometimes dinner is just dinner and the most radical act in contemporary dining might simply be to finish it, pay for it, and leave without issuing a judgment that history did not ask for.

Perhaps we should eat again The internet arrived with a rather noble promise: to democratise criticism. And in many ways, it did. It gave voice where there was once gatekeeping, visibility where there was once obscurity, and access where there was once hierarchy. 

It flattened the old architecture of authority with almost reckless efficiency. In doing so, it revealed a truth we are reluctant to admit that the democratisation of speech is not the democratisation of understanding.

Everyone can publish, review or award stars. That part, I suspect, is no longer reversible. What remains within our control is the weight we choose to assign them. 

And here, I would argue for restraint: one should take complaints, patterns, informed criticism, and one’s responsibility to diners with absolute seriousness, but without surrendering judgment to them. 

But the numerical verdicts; the stars, the decimals, the neat little abstractions of experience should be understood for what they are: a mathematical costume for subjective preference.

If we are honest, our relationship with food would be healthier if not every encounter had to be immediately converted into evidence of our discernment.

But this is not only a message for restaurants. It is also, perhaps more urgently, a message for those who consume these platforms so uncritically. There is a difference between forming an opinion through curiosity and deploying a platform through reflex. 

A difference between encountering a meal as a lived experience, and reducing it to content before the last bite has even been swallowed.

We are, slowly and almost imperceptibly, training ourselves to experience life at a remove, through ever thicker layers of mediation. To stand in front of something real — food, music, performance, place and immediately ask how will this perform when I post it?

It is not unlike attending a concert and never actually hearing it and anticipating its reception elsewhere, rather than allowing yourself to be undone in the moment by the thing you came to witness. 

The Smashing Pumpkins are on stage, the lights are low, the sound is immense, and instead of being inside the music, inside the distortion, the nostalgia, the volume, the shared emotional collapse of a song you once loved, you have interposed a glowing rectangle between yourself and the experience, capturing a version of it that is already diminished the moment it is recorded.

Food suffers the same rapid erosion. A dish arrives, and before it is tasted it is photographed. Before it is understood it is captioned. Before it is felt it is rated.

Experience becomes artefact before it has had time to become memory. The experience is no longer an encounter; it is raw material for publication. 

But food, like music, was never meant to function as evidence. It is meant to be lived.

To be curious is to remain present without immediately converting presence into judgement. To eat in order to understand something, rather than to declare something. To allow a meal to expand your experience of the world, rather than merely your profile of it.

Sometimes you can dislike dinner without the restaurant being bad.

Sometimes you can love dinner without it being great.

Sometimes you can encounter something you do not yet understand.

And sometimes, most radically of all, you can simply eat.

No stars required.

* This is the personal opinion of the writers or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.