Taste Is a Group Chat
We like to believe taste is personal. That it forms slowly, privately, somewhere between the plate and the palate. That what we like arrives unannounced and uncoached.
It doesn’t.
Taste is negotiated. Softened. Pre-approved. It passes through a series of hands before it ever reaches your mouth.
By the time a dish is called “interesting,” it has usually already been discussed. Not publicly. Not formally. But casually, in messages that never see daylight. A DM sent after service. A voice note from a friend who ate there first. A “you’ll love this place” text that quietly frames the experience before it begins.
Taste rarely shows up alone. It arrives with context.
The group chat doesn’t need to be literal. Sometimes it’s an unspoken one. A mental list of whose opinions still matter to you. Chefs you trust. Writers you respect. Rooms you want access to again. It’s there in the hesitation before a critique, the softening of a sentence, the decision to describe something as “thoughtful” instead of saying it missed.
Food media likes to pretend this doesn’t exist. That taste emerges cleanly, untouched by proximity or politics. But proximity is the politics.
The closer you are to the kitchen, the harder it becomes to be surprised. Or disappointed. Or honest.
This isn’t corruption. It’s gravity.
When everyone eats together, opinion bends inward. Dishes are discussed before they’re digested. Restaurants become “important” before they’re consistent. A place can enter the canon before it has learned how to breathe.
And once a narrative takes hold, it becomes difficult to taste outside of it.
There are restaurants that feel inevitable the moment you step inside. Not because of the food, but because you already know how you’re supposed to feel. The room is familiar. The references are legible. The ambition has been translated for you in advance.
You are not tasting freely. You are confirming something.
This is why certain restaurants seem immune to criticism, while others never quite escape suspicion. Why some chefs are granted patience, and others are expected to arrive fully formed. Taste, like trust, is distributed unevenly.
The group chat doesn’t decide what’s good. It decides what’s allowed to be unfinished. What can be complicated. What deserves time.
What falls outside it often has to shout.
None of this means taste is fake. It means it’s social. Like language. Like fashion. Like humor. We borrow frameworks before we develop fluency. We echo before we refine.
The danger isn’t influence. It’s pretending we’re immune to it.
The most honest moments with food tend to happen alone. Late. Unposted. Unremarked. When there’s no one to impress and no one to report back to. When you don’t know yet whether you’re supposed to like something.
That’s where taste still has a chance to form.
Quietly.
At room temperature.