Disclosure
We consider ourselves to be documentarians. We are definitely not restaurant critics. And we are, largely, not unbiased reviewers. Most typically, we talk about something on this website because it is something we love, or we know and like the people behind it. We don’t often explicitly call out these connections in an editorial note outside of the article, but rather try to embed the necessary context into the story itself.
See this post for an example of this in action. It was quite clear within the story that we knew the owner, and that we were invited to his restaurant as friends. At least one reader was unhappy with this– he didn’t think it was an honest review of the restaurant. And I agree, if that was what we claimed to be doing, we would be doing it wrong. But as a document about our life it was accurate and truthful.
And that is one thing we certainly do owe you: truthfulness. When we don’t like something, we won’t claim to like it. We also won’t say we like something because someone pays us to.
We do occasionally get perks for writing for this website (such as an invitation to this tour from the Milk Marketing Board). Again, rather than editorial notes, we try to provide necessary disclosure within the articles themselves.
Privacy Policy
Your privacy is important to us. For that reason, we’d like to explain what information our website captures, and what we do with that information.
Like virtually all websites, we collect data in log files and use this data to better understand who is visiting the site. The log file includes your IP address, your ISP, which browser you used to visit our site, and the total time you were on our site. We also get information on which search terms are bringing people to our site.
We also use third party advertisements (Google Adsense at the moment) to support our site. This is something we’ve gone back and forth on, and for many years we did not have ads. As long as we can keep them unobtrusive, and not ruin the look of the site, we have decided to have some ads to help defray the costs of hosting the site. Google (and third party advertisers through Adsense) use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on our site, which will also send these advertisers information including your IP address, your ISP, and which browser you used to visit our site. This is used for showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing food related ads to someone who frequents our site).
Adsense may also use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising. This cookie is used to serve ads specific to your interests. The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history. DART uses “non personally identifiable information”. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers. You can opt-out of this ad serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting:
http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx
You can choose to disable or selectively turn off our cookies or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security. This may affect your ability to comment on our site (I know, you must be heartbroken). Just deleting cookies does not opt you out of any advertising program. Unless you have settings that disallow cookies, the next time you visit a site running the advertisements, a new cookie will be added.