Facts all come with points of view, facts don’t do what I want them to*

We always try the food before lining up a photo shoot at a restaurant and thankfully Evoo restaurant in Darwin, Australia was the real deal.

Jen asked the other day in the comments about fact checking and encounters with unreliable sources. The boring type of fact checking that’s really important (phone numbers, addresses etc) is getting easier thanks to online telephone directories etc. But I think what Jen is getting at goes a little deeper. If we’re doing an update to a guidebook, we first look at who the last writers were and where they were coming from to determine just how reliable the sources are – this is apart from the necessary checking phone numbers and addresses. If you allow me, I’ll generalise for a moment using a couple of examples.

If it’s a single straight guy who wrote the previous material, the bars and cafés will be covered well, shopping not so much. It’s pretty obvious that sending a straight guy to Milan to cover the fashion district it isn’t going to be as good as sending Lara. If the publisher sent a 20 year old with no food background to a Michelin-star restaurant, that person has no benchmark to measure it against. If it’s a former chef doing the reviews, there is a good chance that those selections make a pretty good baseline from where to start. So research fact checking is dependent on who went before. I’ve seen hotels and restaurants that I didn’t give positive reviews to but still had to include in a book go back to being given glowing reviews in the next edition – even though it’s common knowledge with people in the know that these places are overhyped. Most of the time I can tell whether they’ve actually visited that place they’re reviewing – because I certainly have.

If we’re doing a magazine story on a city or town and we want to get the best spread of hotels, bars, restaurants and sights, we research using magazines and websites that we trust – hardly ever guidebooks. I can’t remember the last time, for instance, that I opened a Lonely Planet guidebook to look at a food review or a hotel review of a five-star property. That’s because I know that it is what they don’t do well. We often have (or soon make) friends in the business in the cities we visit and we ply them with booze, compliments or a combination of both to get to the core of what’s great about a dining or hotel scene in their town or city. We just wait for the “you know what you guys should really try…” moment they give is to either add a place to our list or confirm that we need to visit one. It’s then that we’ll explore a little, take some risks (we only have so many days in a city) and sometimes regret that we did it. But a wasted meal or a regrettable hotel night is not something we like – it means we can’t write about it – but we don’t hesitate in not putting a place in that we don’t think is good enough.

The great thing about magazine stories is that if there is only three hotels and three restaurants to be included in a story, we’ve either stayed, ate, drank or had fun at a place last time were there (and stuck our heads in to make sure that it’s still good) or we’re staying there this time and really making these personal recommendations. Places that we’d be happy to take friends or happy to go back to next time we visit. Sometimes we have to leave out renowned places because they just don’t live up to expectations. We get the industry gossip on that as well and ask people what they really think of *** restaurant or *** hotel after we’ve visited it ourselves. Most of the time we’re in agreement. We think our radar is pretty finely tuned.

In my next post I’ll go through a couple of examples of this, how we come to rate places and how there is no substitute for experience as a travel writer.

* Lyric from Crosseyed and Painless, track two, side one of Talking Heads’ brilliant album, Remain in Light, from 1980.