Reviews vs. Restaurateur

Loosely based off a recent dining experience at a certain Mexican restaurant, whose food was sub-optimal, despite the multiple but largely nondescript reviews claiming it was worthwhile. It's almost as if I'm the only one who doesn't like eating there! 

Ultimate Offering

You can spend an entire day cooking something. You could use all the finest ingredients you can get your hands on. You can painstakingly get everything right, from the measurements of various ingredients to the exact timing of the necessary processes. And at the end of it, the people eating it will still manage to find some flaw, such as "It needs more salt" or "You put your heart and soul into this? Eww."

Second Amendments

Based on that one recipe on the Internet for roast chicken, where the recipe author (you know the one I'm referring to) pins their own comment on the video with, like, 3 paragraphs of erratum. And I don't think it was nicely formatted either. But it does make me wonder if some of my cooking failures might have been because I missed some critical after-the-fact information while reading an online recipe. Then I can use that as an excuse for my poor culinary skills.

Second Opinion

When it comes validating things like whether you can replace some ingredient listed in a recipe with something just as dastardly, the Internet is second to none. Though it can be difficult to distinguish between culinary wisdom and unsolicited cooking advice, you can be 60% - 70% certain that what you're reading has probably been successful in somebody's cooking. Even if it means adding sleeping pills to soup.

Clean Eating

You can't claim to love cooking unless you also have a love for the laborious effort of food preparation, the haphazard risk of things going wrong on the fly and the inevitable task of cleaning up. It would be like saying you love going to work, but only the part where the company pays you. That'll show those snooty home cooks a thing or two about the true cooking experience.

Highly Recommended

Based on all those confused looks and nervous responses I get at various restaurants when I say "What do you recommend" instead of picking something from the menu. I would think that if you're going to work in a restaurant, you'd have some opinion about which food items are good. Unless they're all equally sub-optimal, then I suppose you should just go to another (hopefully more impressive) restaurant.

Artificial Colour

Perhaps you might even go so far as to claim that oddly coloured food is an exotic variant, which can work to your advantage when explaining why it tastes like Play-Doh and smells like burnt rubber. Of course, this is defeated simply by having the other person push back with "OK, you eat some of it first". Man, convincing people to eat arbitrarily modified food is hard work...