I’ve been the Dallas Observer’s food critic for five years now, and as you might expect, I’ve gotten some hate mail. After one editorial in 2019, an angry reader blocked me on Facebook (and one restaurant owner wrote a reasoned, non-angry reply for the paper). Restaurant owners and chefs have gotten upset when I didn’t like their food, and customers get upset when my recommendations lead them astray. Just the other day, I got a message from someone calling themselves “WetStickyLove,” telling me that one of our Top 100 Restaurants is actually “mall chain level.” But the biggest theme of five years’ worth of hate mail is something that surprised me. The most common message isn’t that I’m an asshole, or have no taste, or don’t know a haddock from a hole in the ground. The most common complaint is that I cover restaurants in Dallas’ suburbs.