Ten-plus years on kitchen lines, the last five running one as a kitchen manager. Games and books are the wind-down, not a hobby scheduled around a day off; reading usually starts with prep-burned fingers and whatever the crew left in the fridge. Came to genre fiction through mass-market paperbacks that survived being shoved in a cargo-pants pocket during breaks, and to games through a rotating after-shift group that plays two blocks from the restaurant.

I run the line at a mid-size kitchen in New Orleans, six nights a week, and most of what I read or play happens after close, somewhere between the last ticket and last call. I got into board games through the crew's after-shift table at a bar two blocks from work, and I've been buying too many since. I write these down mostly so I remember what I actually thought before the next double buries it.

What this is

Somebody asked me once whether there's a formula behind the ratings, why one thing gets a 3 and another gets a 5. There isn't. I write the review first, actually work through what held up and what didn't, and the number comes out of that afterward, whatever the review already said.

I turn down review copies from publishers and game companies. It keeps me from owing anyone an opinion on something I wouldn't have picked up myself. The same logic runs the other way: if a book lost me by page sixty, that's not a review, that's just me complaining, so it stays out of the log.

Every so often something shows up in the feed that isn't a review at all, the after-shift table, something from a bad service that somehow ties back to a hobby, life out here in New Orleans. It's up for the same reason everything else is: it actually happened, and I wanted it written down.

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