Readers write. They say, "You GOTTA try this restaurant." If I start hearing about the same place more than a couple times, or if the heads-up comes from a reader who has given me reasonable tips in the past, I check the restaurant out. Alas, sometimes the recommendation must come from the restaurateur's mom, dad or fairygodmother. Sure, they could use the business a review might bring, often because they're floundering.

The restaurant business is a meritocracy. By that I mean that, by and large, good restaurants survive and bad restaurants bite the dust. In general, if I have a miserable experience at a restaurant, I don't review it. Here are some examples: In the past year, I visited Novo in St. Petersburg, Chateau Soho in Tampa and maybe a dozen other restaurants with the intention of reviewing them. There were problems.

My decision was to give them more time to work things out...or not. In about half the cases, the restaurants have subsequently closed. It's natural selection, pure and simple.

Then why ever write a negative review? In the words of sage Thumper, If you can't say something nice... don't say nothing at all, right? Not exactly. My primary obligation is to readers, not restaurateurs. If someplace is high profile (new, splashy or whatever) and people are curious about it, it's my aim to essentially pre-screen it for readers. Most people have a finite amount of time and cash to spend navigating the wide field of untried restaurants, and I aim to point out where the landmines are buried.

That said, I try to be as specific as possible. Since I started at the Times, I've reviewed these restaurants fairly negatively: City Fish in Oldsmar; Cheap and Mangroves Grill in Tampa; Banbu, Grille 121, DeSanto (the first time) and Hammerhead's in St. Petersburg; Pan Y Vino in Dunedin; and Fishtail Willy's in Clearwater. In each case, I had plenty of positive things to say, but the negatives made them difficult to recommend. I'm not exactly sure what's going on over at Hammerhead's right now, but in all the rest of the cases the restaurants are still open (some with tweaked concepts). A bad review didn't "kill" any of these restaurants, but hopefully focused criticism helped them work out some kinks.