Another year gone by, another fifty or so restaurant reviews under the now-taut belt. While looking back over my life and work of the past twelve months, I can't help but note that imperfections abound. And so, resolutions to improve. For 2011, I vow:

• To not eat pork belly or a banh mi for at least one whole month.
• To never drive to a stationary food truck court. Sort of counterintuitive, no? I mean I thought the whole idea was for them to drive to us.
• To make it to more dives.
• To stop muttering unpleasantries under my breath whenever it takes ten minutes or more to get the check. Which is pretty much always.
• To refrain from asking the sommelier whether he or she can recommend a good French wine with cute animals on the label.

• To remember to bring my pen-flashlight to reviews.
• To remember to bring earmuffs and mittens to reviews.
• To remember to remove quarters from my car before handing it over to valet.
• To finally meet The Burger Beast, and to turn him on to cheese blintzes. I'd like a good blintz blog. I mean, "The Blintz Beast" has a nice ring to it.
• To order more vegetable-based entrees. These seem to be getting a lot better.
• To order less middle eastern platters. These seem to be getting worse.
• To be very skeptical concerning claims of organic and farm-to-table labels.
• To say to waiters, "Why don't I just send you the review when I'm finished writing it?" in response to being asked "How was it?" after every single course.
• To use the term flavorful less often.
• To try and pretend that hosts and hostesses at fancy hotel restaurants aren't annoyingly pretentious.
• To always carry around my novelty sunglasses with strobing lights around the frame, and to put them on whenever music in a restaurant becomes too clubby.
• To continue to stress value.
• To continue to mock Miami Spice.
• To not "accidentally" pee on the shoes of bathroom attendants when they hover too close to the urinal. Actually, I never did that, but having to bring cash to the restroom in order to take a leak is capitalism run amok.
• More snappy one-liners!

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