Every Thursday for the last few years my dad and I have gone to a different restaurant for dinner. I suppose we've missed one or two Thursdays here and there, but not many. This Thursday tradition of ours is a sacred thing. My old man comes up after his work day ends, we usually shoot the shit for an hour or so, then watch an episode of some show, then we go to dinner.
It started out with Breaking Bad. We were going to the same place every week back then (The OLD Canterbury) so we could pack in two episodes per night (and sometimes three, you know how Breaking Bad can get, am I right?). I think it was somewhere around the end of that show when we decided to go to a different restaurant each week. Living in the city like I do, there's a lot of places that are walkable, and so many more within a short drive, it didn't make any sense to stick to one place.
We really wanted to keep track of the restaurants. For a while I was keeping the receipts, but they faded fast, illegible in a few month's time. I remember some of them, of course (the Pink Door, The Wurst Place, Serious Pie, Smith, Lunchbox Laboratory, Paddy Coynes, Pinkies, Von Trapps, Vito's, Olympia Pizza, 22 Doors, Charlie's, Broadway Bar and Grill, Eastlake Bar and Grill, Skillet, The Comet, Moe's, Oddfellows, The Elysian, Julia's, etc...) but certainly not most. If I see a place, I remember being there, but there's no record of all those places we sought out. Over a hundred restaurants.
So, we decided to start reviewing each place on Yelp. It's a great way to keep track of how many places we've visited. We're not too far into it, we really should have been doing this from the beginning, but today I posted our thirtieth review (for The Matador in Ballard). It's funny to me reading back to our first couple reviews that were just a few sentences, but it didn't take long until we were giving more comprehensive reviews. "Comprehensive" might be a code word for "verbose".