Why I'm Writing Again

In the fall of 2012, I had dinner at Thomas Keller's French Laundry in Yountville, California, and it rearranged something in how I thought about food.

It wasn't the food alone — though the food was extraordinary. It was the formality I wasn't expecting, the choreography of the service, the sheer intentionality of every course landing in a room built for exactly that meal. I remember being a little taken aback by it, and then completely won over. That night I understood, for the first time, that dining could be an experience in its own right — not sustenance with better plating, but something closer to theater, or ritual, or art, depending on the night.

A few months later, I started a food blog called Premeditated Gluttony. For a few years, I ate my way through fine dining rooms — locally, and increasingly internationally — and wrote about what I found. There were stretches where I ate four or five meals a day just to keep up with the writing. It was a strange, wonderful kind of obsession.

I built the whole thing on one rule: I never accepted a free meal to write about a restaurant. Not because chefs and owners weren't generous — they often were, sending out a dish that wasn't on the menu, or spending twenty minutes at the table talking through a tasting menu — but because I wanted the writing to be trustworthy in a way that's gotten harder to find, especially now, in a world of paid influencer posts and incentivized Google reviews. Premeditated Gluttony wasn't a review site, and it wasn't an awards site. It was simply a recommendation site — here's where you should go.

Which meant I had to decide what to do with the places that weren't very good. My answer: I still wrote about them, exactly as if I were going to publish. I just didn't. Instead, I sent the piece privately, by email, to the chef or the restaurant. I wasn't there to hurt anyone's business — I was there because I loved the industry, and a private, honest note did more good than a public takedown ever would. More than once, a restaurant I'd quietly critiqued came back asking for more of my thinking. That's how I ended up with a genuine network of chefs, bartenders, and restaurant owners rather than just a readership.

That instinct hasn't changed, and if anything I believe it more now. Experience is subjective, and I don't think everyone has to agree on it — the best restaurant in the world can have an off night, and a mediocre one can catch every condition going right and shine. That's part of why I've always been a little uneasy with ranking-style lists — the World's 50 Best format and its imitators — even though I sit on the other side of that world too, as a taste advisor for the Chinese Restaurant Awards here in Canada. I'm drawn more to recognition than ranking, closer to how Michelin works than a numbered countdown, because recognition can hold more than one truth at a time and a ranking has to pretend it can't.

I never tried to monetize any of it. It was a hobby, and the network it built was reward enough. Eventually work and a growing family caught up with me, and I let it go quiet. But the readers never quite let it go — for years, people have been asking me when I'd start writing again.

What actually made this the moment, rather than some other year, is simpler than any of that: I've semi-retired. Stepping back from full-time work didn't just free up time to write — it freed up time to go back out and live the things worth writing about in the first place, which is really where all of this starts.

Just Savour Life is that answer, though it's a bigger idea than Premeditated Gluttony ever was, because I'm a bigger, older version of the person who wrote it.

I've always thought of myself as a kind of cultural mutt — Chinese by ancestry, born in the Philippines, and raised in Canada from the age of five, though I've never really left the Philippines behind; I still make the trip back more than once a year. A minority in both places I've called home, and never quite a stranger in either. That mix means I rarely walk into a room, a restaurant, or a country with a single set of expectations. It's taught me that a lack of warm hospitality is sometimes just a cultural difference, or a language barrier, not a lack of care — I felt that clearly on a recent trip to San Sebastián. And it's taught me to chase the local experience over the reviewed one. In San Sebastián's old town, at La Viña — often credited as the birthplace of Basque cheesecake — I watched tourists order the cheesecake exactly as the guidebooks describe it. The locals I was with did something different: they poured sweet sherry directly over the cheesecake, not alongside it as a pairing, but into it, so the sherry became part of the dish itself. You don't find that in a five-star review. You find it by going with someone who already belongs there.

That's the instinct behind Just Savour Life, and why it goes beyond food. Even the Michelin star — the ultimate symbol of a destination restaurant — started as a way to get people to drive further and wear down their tires faster, because Michelin made tires before it made restaurant guides. Sometimes the getting there is the point. British Columbia's Sea-to-Sky Highway, twisting up from Vancouver to Whistler, is that kind of drive — the kind that asks for a convertible and a clear day, not a destination. Cars have always meant more to me than transportation; they carry emotion, memory, occasion.

Golf carries its own version of that. I didn't take it up out of any passion for the game — I took it up to spend four uninterrupted hours with my father, who loved it. It became less a competition against other players and more a quiet one against myself, and — especially across Asia, where country club culture runs deep — a genuine way to build relationships I still rely on. An injury has kept me off the course for a while now, but that hasn't changed how I think about the game.

None of this makes me any kind of expert without blind spots, and I'll say that plainly. I can navigate almost anywhere with a map in hand, and then get spectacularly, hopelessly lost in a single train station — Seoul does it to me, and so does Tokyo, where Shinjuku and Shibuya have both beaten me more than once. I barely ever get jet lag, maybe once every five or seven years, and when it finally catches up with me, it puts me down for a week. Nobody's immune to the parts of travel that don't cooperate, and I don't think a writer should pretend otherwise.

My grandfather's generation didn't really have hobbies. He worked, and worked, and worked — the one thing he let himself genuinely enjoy was a good meal. I don't think that's a criticism of him; it's just a different era, with different permissions. Just Savour Life is my attempt at a different one: taking the time to actually notice and enjoy what's around me, while still chasing the harder, better things worth working for. If any of this resonates, I hope it gives you permission to do the same, wherever you happen to be starting from.

I don't know exactly who's going to read this. I only know I want it to stay honest — an unsponsored, unswayed account of the places, meals, drives, and rounds of golf worth your time. That was true in 2012, and it's true now. If there's one thing underneath all of it, it's this: I don't believe I'll ever know everything, and I fully expect to learn as much from the people and places I write about as anyone reading this might learn from me. Call it lifelong learning, dressed up as a food blog.