Introducing: Where We've Been
A peek behind the scenes with Infatuation NYC.
Hey!
Infatuation’s mission is simple: to help you decide where to eat, no matter how particular your situation is. Here in NYC that means we—Sonal, Bryan, Willa, Molly, and Will—go out to eat a lot. Somewhere in the realm of 30 times a week between all five of us. There are always new scenes to check out and hand-pulled noodles to check in on.
It’s all in the name of writing restaurant reviews and guides to help solve your dining dilemmas. Need to figure out how to secure that tough table? We’re on it. More interested in formerly impossible reservations that are now obtainable? Here you go. We also have intel on silly little sidewalk spritzes, burgers without any fuss, cinnamon rolls ranked by spiritual closeness to Cinnabon, and, simply, the best pizza in town.
A thing we’ve always grappled with, though, is that so much of what we eat, drink, and see never makes it onto theinfatuation.com. We just don’t always have the space to let you know about that wackadoodle dessert, the couple at the table over who were clearly in the middle of breaking up, or the sconce that made us smile. Also, we have deadlines and word counts, and Arden would be mad if every review were 3,000 words.
The place all this stuff lands in our day-to-day is #where-we-been: a Slack channel that sees a lot of action. Every morning, the five of us plus other Infatuation writers and editors based in NYC use the channel to report “where we’ve been” to eat over the past 24 hours, and leave little stream-of-consciousness notes with impressions of our experiences. One writer might lament $15 wine bar olives, or we fixate on shrimp cocktail.
All of which has led to the creation of this Substack, Where We’ve Been. A very informal newsletter where we bring you inside our brains and give you a peek at our process. It’ll land in your inbox every Tuesday with bits and bobs from where we’ve been eating and what we’ve been talking about. It’s a chattier supplement to our regular newsletters.
How We Do Things
Although our jobs are extremely fun and we try not to take a very joyful thing (going out to eat) too seriously, we do have some hard ground rules. You’ll know these if you’re a regular reader (or follow us on Instagram or Tiktok), but they’re worth reiterating because we treat them as canon:
We never give a restaurant a heads up that we’re coming and always use an alias to make our reservations. We’re fighting it out in the apps just like you.
We pay for everything ourselves (well, our corporate overlords do).
We’re always trying to get the same experience that you (a regular human eating in the city) would have in a restaurant. That said, we can say with confidence that we order a lot more food than the average person.
Talk To Us
Lastly, we’re hoping this can be a two-way street. In the comments, let us know where you’ve been eating. Ask us questions. Disagree with us. Give us your extremely specific dining dilemma. We can probably help you out, and maybe you can help us too.
For more, subscribe to our real newsletter and follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
This is very exciting
Yes please and thank you