About

Truth Bang is an opinion blog about restaurants and the culture that has grown up around eating in them. It is written by one person, Otto Grimsby, who spent eleven years working front of house and now argues about it in public instead.

There are no ratings here. No stars, no scores, no lists of the best anything. There are arguments. Every post takes a position within the first two paragraphs and then spends the rest of its length defending that position, including against the strongest objection I can build against myself. If a piece does not contain a fair version of the other side, I do not consider it finished.

A few rules I hold myself to. No named restaurants, because this is about categories and patterns rather than settling scores with particular rooms, and because a small business does not deserve to be a prop in someone's essay. No writing about a place I have not paid to eat in. And no pretending to a certainty I do not have. Dining culture is genuinely contested, most of the confident writing about it is confident about the wrong things, and I would rather be interesting and occasionally wrong than safe and useless.