There are no secrets anymore. Everything is on every travel platform. Post about it, it’ll pop off. The convenience this affords also creates sameness. Others have written about it, but it doesn’t change the simple fact of the thing.

And so the good stuff is always hidden, out of the way, a little arcane. I think sometimes of a spot an hour’s drive away from San Jose that I drove to, called Casa Azul, that a friend recommended to me. I booked a table, but I was the only one there the whole time, on a Thursday night, with no music playing, and it occurred to me that if I hadn’t booked a reservation, would they even have bothered opening? That sort of place.