I eat out everyday.

I eat out seven days a week.

I don’t know how to cook and refuse to learn. There are so many great restaurants out there, why limit yourself eating only what you can cook everyday?

I call myself a “professional restaurants goer” because I take photos of my food and upload them to Yelp, and sometimes also write reviews of restaurants. I’m serious about Yelping. I spend several hours every week trying to find new restaurants to eat for the coming week. I look at food pictures and read restaurant reviews, vote for food pictures and reviews, and bookmark restaurants for my next week’s adventure. I started Yelping in September 2012, and in one year, I uploaded more than 330 food photos and had more than 500 checkins – I guess that made me a Yelp Elite :)

I don’t order take out, almost never order food delivery. I not only love food, but also love “uncovering a restaurant, its interior decoration, its food and service” this whole experience. If I order delivery I can’t experience the atmosphere inside a restaurant, this does not make me happy.

People always ask me when I’ll learn cooking, I always say “Never”. To me, different people have different expertise, and we shouldn’t try doing things we are not trained to do, sometimes it could be dangerous. Some people went to dental schools to become dentists, and when you go to your dentist, you probably will look at his/her certificate to make sure your dentist got proper training before he/she start drilling your teeth. The same thing with cooking – some people went to culinary school and got degrees to cook my food, and I studied Information Technology at school, not cooking, so I should just be a good programmer — let people who learned cooking do their job and I enjoy the food they made, instead of trying to cook for myself. After all, you probably never drilled your own teeth or fixed your own transmission ;)

Daniel on Yelp: dannizhao.yelp.com

(photo: Enchiladas de carne, from Tequila River Taqueria)