Quick update from the RJG

Hello everyone! Back again, after a long silence. After a nice bit of restaurant going last summer and early fall, Mrs. RJG and I fell back into the habit of eating at home, with a few dinner excursions, mostly to our standby's that we've already written about here, and dutifully updated. Seems the Santa Fe trip wore us out! LOL. I have to say it's been a somewhat permanent status for us. It's certainly a lot healthier this way!

In any case, we do have a few exciting new restaurants to review, as well as continuing our update program. My original plan was to update an existing entry every three years, and that's still my intention. There are some long time favorites, and even those we only frequent occasionally, that need a good thorough scrubbing. So we'll be pushing those forward to keep them relevant and up to date.

In the meantime, we lost two more RJG restaurants to closures. One is Billadelphia's, a favorite of ours since the beginning of this blog, and one we always had front and center in the update column. They recently closed down, and now a Mexican take out is there (really? Is that we need - another one?). Maybe we'll try it anyway. The other is Apeizza e Vino, which was one of many Italian styled pizza joints to have sprouted up in these parts. We did like it, but only managed to get over there a couple of times. I suspect they had too many customers like us, and hence they are no longer here. They too became a Mexican restaurant (Un Rincon de Mexico) and we did try it and were nonplussed. So if you see our Closed Places tab on the right, 46 restaurants we've written about have now closed (including outside DFW). And that's just the ones we know about. It's been a rough industry for the last decade that's for sure. And I just recalled that the Freebirds on Tarrant closed as well. I'll probably just update that post with another location.

On the plus side, we have continued to see the development of the craft beer fueled restaurants, and so that can only be considered something to celebrate. More to come on that.

Concerning social media, it appears Zomato was hapless. The one bright spot was Alyssa, who may or may not still be there (and I have since found out she is no longer there - can't blame her!). In any case, she was unable to have executed any of the changes I suggested (like restaurant openings, closings, etc...). And as predicted, the site has fallen into disrepair. The readership is almost nonexistent. With Urbanspoon, some of the RJG reviews reached into the 1000's of page views, as it added up over time. Those days are long gone. We're lucky to get 100 anymore. Not very inspiring. Facebook is the ultimate ADD tool, and while we might get hits on the first day, there is no sense of history or reference checking via that channel. It definitely serves a purpose, and we'll stick with it. If we were more aggressive, we'd be all over it with constant postings, but that's not our nature.

Word on the street says more and more people are heading over to TripAdvisor for restaurants. That's interesting to me. I have hotel reviews on there going back to 2001 (!!), but under a different alias of course. But we never considered them seriously for restaurants, but there does seem to be more activity. So we plan on investigating further.

Back soon!