About the Guy Behind the Reviews

I'm Paul - a full-time IT Consultant & Systems Administrator by day, and an avid traveler, photographer, and adventurous eater the rest of the time. I live in San Antonio, so you'll find a heavy concentration of reviews here in San Antonio and the surrounding area, but I'm on the road through the rest of Texas often enough that it shows.

How This Became a Website

I've been writing food and travel reviews for over 15 years now. It started almost by accident - I'd opened a website for snowboarding, and most of what I was reviewing back then were the restaurants in ski resort towns. Even further back, in the late '90s, I'd toyed with the idea of a site devoted entirely to late-night eating and finding the best hamburgers around. That idea sat on the back burner for a long, long time.

In the meantime, the reviews never stopped. They moved to Google, where I picked up Local Guide and Local Expert status in a number of cities, and eventually Top 10% Reviewer standing in several food categories. In 2023 I started a Facebook group to bring those reviews to social media directly. And in 2026, that old late-night-burgers idea finally got dusted off - this site is the result.

Getting it off the ground fast was only possible because of AI - it's what let me bring over the bulk of my existing Google and Facebook reviews to get a real database going from day one, instead of starting from zero. The goal from here is simple: keep eating, keep ranking, and see what finally beats the best I've already had. Now that everything's actually structured and ranked in one place, that's a lot easier to track than it ever was scattered across Google and Facebook.

An Adventurous (and Increasingly Spicy) Eater

I'll try just about anything once. If you dig through these reviews you'll run into snails, alligator, rocky mountain oysters (calf fries, if you're not familiar), pickled everything, and regional specialties I'd never heard of before I showed up. I have a particular soft spot for Thai and Korean food, and I go looking for spicy food on purpose - which is exactly why there's a whole "Spiciest Food I've Ever Eaten" section pulled straight from the regular reviews. Fair warning though: as I get older, my tolerance for the truly punishing stuff seems to be quietly declining. I'll keep chasing it anyway.

I'm a Bit of a Cook, Too

When I find a dish I genuinely love, I'll go home and try to make it myself - and if it's something the restaurant makes in-house, I'll take a real shot at cracking the recipe. It's less about replacing the original and more about the exercise itself: trying to reverse-engineer a dish sharpens your ability to actually taste what's in it, in a way that most people who just eat it never pick up on. It's also taught me a lot about how the same dish shifts from region to region, which shows up in how I write about food.

About the Photos

Every photo of food on this site is a photo of the actual meal I was actually served - never a stock photo, never someone else's shot, never a "representative image." Most are shot on a Samsung Galaxy phone, usually using its food mode, which sharpens the macro focus and makes colors pop a bit more than a standard shot would. When a photo comes out blurry from bad lighting, or glared out because I'm seated at a table with no overhead light and nothing but a phone camera to work with, I'll sometimes touch up the exposure in Photoshop or with AI so you can actually see the dish. That's the extent of it - correcting for bad restaurant lighting, not changing what's on the plate.

Transparency

On the rare occasion a restaurant invites me in knowing I review, comps a meal, or someone else picks up the tab, I try to always call that out specifically in the review itself. If a review doesn't mention it, I paid for the meal like anyone else would.

How I Write a Review

I keep it flat - no fancy production, no elaborate video. Every so often, if a place is something genuinely special, I'll put together a video, but that's the exception, not the rule. Most reviews stick to the basics: why I chose the place or how I ended up there, what I ordered, how fast the food came out, how the main items actually tasted, whether it was expensive or cheap for what you got, whether the portions were generous or skimpy, and whether I'd go back - either for the same dish, or to try something else on the menu.

Always Open to Suggestions

I take recommendations, and I'm always happy to try somewhere new - though fair warning, my own list of places to get to already runs a few hundred deep. If you've got an idea for a feature you'd like to see on this site, I'm genuinely open to hearing that too.

I know I'm just one person, and food taste is personal - what I rank highly isn't going to land the same for everyone. But enough people have tried places I've ranked high and come away impressed that they started working through my reviews looking for their next meal, and I've got a solid following on Google who wait for the next post. That's the story of how this site came to be. Hopefully you find something on here worth the drive.