Writing a menu is a fine art.

The menu must be appropriate to the room  Like fashion, every detail must be in harmony whether it is designed for a hushed temple of gastronomy or a boisterously noisy neighborhood joint in a college town. It also means (or should mean) being sensitive to the economy: wine and food prices are humbler during hard times.

The menu should be a reflection of what the guests want to eat. This reality check may not always conform with what the cook wants to cook.

Folks want to eat difference kinds of foods at different times of day and on different days in the week.  So is the menus to be sophisticated, elegant, contemporary or trendy, or casual chic,  or country or newish Jewish?

In other words, other words might be better…

Sometimes it seems such a huge effort (and wildly costly too,) to make the decision to go (or not to go) to a conference (or even a party.) And then, when you get there, you have such a good time you forget how tired you are on the long journey home.

When I first moved to Kingston, NY from Manhattan, I was shocked when new friends told me they hadn’t been to the city for years.

Here we have the option to drive, take Amtrak or the Metro North train, or a bus. All are within easy access and relatively inexpensive.  The train ride is particularly wondrous as the route follows the Hudson all the way to midtown.

All the options involve pretty much a five-hour round trip though and the time element is the main deterrent — or was the main deterrent until I was the last person on earth to realize the journey translates into two movies!

Now I have realigned my thinking, I will be doing a whole lot more traveling!

Alan Richman’s Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater chronicles his brilliant career as a wonderfully witty restaurant critic. He says,  “Everybody thinks that what I do for a living is the gastronomic counterpart of test-driving a Mercedes sports coupe or helping Las Vegas chorus girls get dressed.  Actually, the job is part analysis (“Is it good?”), part self-analysis (“Am I the only one who’ll like it?”) and part gluttony (“Good or not, I ate it all”). Unlike Gael Greene, he doesn’t dwell on extraneous matters i.e. S.E.X. He also leaves some ruminations to John Lanchester who, in The Debt to Pleasure reveals his philosophy about more or less everything from the erotica of distaste to the psychology of the menu.

Restaurant critics learn to live in an atmosphere where their presence — if detected — is met with “groveling, and cringing fear and more than occasionally, hostile loathing. But being liked is not part of the job. Honesty is.”  Sometimes honesty though can be quite brutal. Critic A.A. Gill writing in Vanity Fair magazine described an item on the menu f a restaurant that, for decency’s sake shall be nameless: He likened the fish and foie gras dumplings to “fish, liver-filled condoms” and called them “vile, with a savor that lingered like a lovelorn drunk and tasted as if your mouth had been used as the swab bin in an animal hospital.”

That’s telling it like it is, by Jove!

The first qualification for a restaurant critic is to have a stomach of iron.

The second is to be able to write as brilliantly as Alan Richman, Gael Greene, John Lanchester and A.A. Gill.

To get started, start your own restaurant reviewing blog (though you’ll have to pay for your own meals.) Or become one of the thundering herd that contributes to Yelp of other online site that specializes in carping.