Restaurant Review Writing Refuge

Harvest takes debit/credit for payment and does not have a card limit that I could see.

Harvest may have just taken the spot I previously held for Jersey Java as my favorite coffee place in South Jersey and I will tell you why: they are focused around the whole bean part of the business.  I don’t care that Jersey Java doesn’t roast their own (since they source from Square One Coffee, which I also enjoy immensely) but nearly every time I order a pound of coffee to take home, it is treated as a special event and an inconvenience.  Harvest Coffee Roastery may not have tons of art hanging on the walls or an open mic night, but since I am just going in for COFFEE, that’s all I want.

There are two things that I hope Harvest changes for the future:

1) They need to embrace an iced coffee brewing method that does justice to their amazing coffee.  A cold brew method doesn’t have to involve the elaborate glass towers you see in some shops.  The iced coffee cubes, while a cute idea and better than pouring hot coffee over water cubes, does not taste fabulous.

2) Appropriate cups for different temperature coffee.  I know plastic cups cost more money, but you really can’t serve iced coffee in paper cups.  Logistically the cup will deteriorate if you don’t drink the iced coffee immediately and you also will begin to taste a lot of paper in every sip.  With the summer months approaching, it would be a benefit to their business.

Same with their tasting glasses for hot coffee: ceramic or paper, not plastic with hot coffee. You taste the plastic

I’ll definitely be back to buy my whole beans here, no matter what.  I am so glad Harvest Coffee is here!

Holy pretentiousness Batman! Although I still am actually this picky about my coffee, I now try to be more discreet about my impossible expectations for every coffee shop I walk into.

So I went back to see the very first Yelp review I had written to try and remember why I had started writing Yelp reviews in the first place. My very first Yelp review was from December 2011 to leave positive feedback for a wine/spirits shop in Providence, RI–I had contacted them by e-mail to see if they could do a gift card for my friend Matt, who was a RI resident at the time. The owner was nice enough to let me give my credit card info by e-mail and mail the gift card to Matt, even though they did not offer the service online at the time.

Then, after I became a vegan eight months later, I started writing a lot more reviews. Looking at the dates, I would write several in one sitting. This is because when I started writing Yelp reviews, I realized it was something I could try to get away with writing and posting on the internet that my then-husband would be unlikely to find. And even if he found them, I thought he might be less likely to be angry about them.

This was my first husband’s core excuse for discouraging from writing: my blogging is largely non-fiction, and because of that, when I was writing about my life, I would be disclosing facts about him. And if I was going to do that, I would have to have my posts approved by him.

I remember the flash of white-hot anger I experienced when he first suggested he would be “approving” my blog posts.

“That’s crazy. That’s censorship! I am not writing these posts for you!”

“Whatever you publish on the internet is FOREVER–you can’t take it back. I have a right to know what you are going to say about me!”

This argument went on: I tried to explain whatever I would write that might mention him would simply be in service of whatever actual idea I was exploring and was not going to be endless posts centered around him. He said he wanted to read ever post before I published it.

We had just moved in together a few months before. I am ashamed to say that I capitulated to this request initially: I would draft and send him blog posts to review. To add insult to injury, he would refuse to read them for days, saying he was too busy or just forgot. I can’t remember his exact responses to the first few I sent him, but I remember we had more fights as we quibbled about details that had nothing to do with him. He would question what right I had to document conversations I had with other people.

“Have you reviewed these conversations with those people to see if they agree with what you are writing?” he would ask me.

“Uh, no. Because I am not a journalist. This post is blog post is about doing yard work. It is not a controversial topic on which I think my old roommates are worried about being misquoted.”

“Well I don’t think that’s fair.”

And so we would argue on and on. Within the following month, I gave up writing.

Until I discovered the world of Yelp reviews. And so I poured myself into the ones I wrote from 2012 until I moved to Columbus in 2014. Because I thought they were going to be the only things I was going to publish online for the rest of my life.

But now I am publishing a lot of my own writing. I left the husband who didn’t appreciate me or my writing. And now I have a husband who loves both.