Well, it’s been a hectic few weeks. My last term of teaching ended on March 12 and I left for the airport an hour after my last class, headed to Delhi. I returned to Minnesota at the end of last week and have been in a fog of jet lag ever since. I’d barely adjusted to the time shift in Delhi before it was time to come back and now my body’s wires are well and truly crossed. Helpfully, my new term of teaching began yesterday. Thankfully, I’m wide awake during the day and so only slightly more addled than usual during class time. In Delhi I ate out about as much as I usually do when there on my own. Some of those meal reports have already showed up on the blog in March (Matamaal, Ping’s Bia Hoi, Shilloi, Fort City). The rest will be posted over the next few weekends. My goal is to have them all done before the end of April. Twin Cities metro restaurant reports will go up alongside these reports in April on Wednesdays as normal. And I’ll have the usual weekly booze reviews on Mondays as well. Alright, let’s see what March’s traffic patterns looked like.
The counts of both page views and unique visitors rose in March over February, though stopping well short on both counts of January’s numbers—which, you might recall, were due to a massive upsurge of traffic to my review of the Indri-Trini whisky, on account of news breaking of its proprietor’s criminal past. That review did remain among the most read posts of March as well but only received a fraction of the views it got in January. This news should please the person—presumably an employee of the company—who wrote to me last month, urging me to take my review down.
Here’s the full list of the top 10 most read posts in March:
- In and Around Mangwon Market (Seoul, March 2024)
- Eating at Mercato Centrale (Florence, June 2023)
- Indri-Trini, The Three Wood
- Mingles (Seoul, February 2024)
- Bukhara (Delhi, March 2022)
- Trattoria Monti (Rome, June 2023)
- Eating at Noryangjin Fish Market (Seoul, Feb/March 2024)
- At Namdaemun Market, Pt. 2: Eating (Seoul, March 2023)
- Soul Dining (Seoul, March 2024)
- Lunch at the Kalguksu Alley in Namdaemun Market (Seoul, March 2023)
A number of the usual suspects are in the top 10. Rising up to #4 is my review of Mingles in Seoul. This is doubtless due to its receiving its third Michelin star at the end of February. But a number of my reports on meals eaten in decidedly less fancy settings in Seoul were popular too. The Mercato Centrale and Trattoria Monti reports from Italy in the summer of 2023 remain popular as well—and I expect they’ll continue to be so as the tourist season approaches. No Twin Cities restaurant reports made it into the top 10 last month—my review of Diane’s Place just got pipped at the post. Let’s see how April goes on the local front: we don’t really have set plans for eating out yet.
No recipes either in the top 10—that’s probably due to the fact that it’s been a couple of years now since I posted a new recipe on the blog. I continue to post recipe videos on Instagram, of course—but if you’ve resisted following me there until now, you’re probably not going to start anytime soon. Will I start posting recipes on the blog again? Stay tuned for some news on that front.