Does the World Need Your Displeasure?

Dining alone isn’t for the faint of heart. 

Not many people know how to do it well. Even fewer hospitality professionals know how to serve solo diners properly. 

Thus was my conundrum last night. 

I was at a recently opened restaurant by a famed hospitality group in Bologna. They should know what they were doing. But they didn’t. And I took every mistake personally, mentally compiling a list of their supposed indiscretions. 

Then the waiter came over and made a comment that sort of revealed him to be a little bit of a dork.

It made me laugh.

It was endearing. 

I realized then that the list of mistakes I had been tallying in my head didn’t really matter. Maybe these people weren’t trying as hard as I wanted them to, but they were still trying. It occurred to me that no one really needed my displeasure on this topic. 

That was a revelatory thought. For the past decade, so many people have been asking for our opinion - Yelp, Google Reviews, businesses themselves - that it became the default assumption that the world desperately needed our review. 

But does the world really need your displeasure? 

There’s so much of it out there. Maybe it’s not a terrible idea to hold it back a bit, to keep it to yourself.