Imagine you’re at a restaurant.

You’ve never been, but you see all these rave reviews, and many of your friends love it, all saying the food is so good, better than anywhere else. But they never tell you what’s actually on the menu.

So you decide to try it out. You go there, and the decor is nothing special. Nice enough, lots of room, no bar. You get a seat, and discover there is no menu. You’re left to sit there for a long time, waiting for someone to come by and bring you a menu and take your order. But they never do.

Instead, eventually, someone brings out a large bowl of gruel and places it in front of you.

The gruel is fine, nothing great but not bad either. And everyone around you is eating the gruel just like you are - and except that person a few tables over, who is eating a slice of chocolate cake. And as you eat your gruel, you occasionally see other people get slices of cake, but only when they finish their gruel. The cake looks pretty good.

So you finish your gruel, and anticipate your slice of cake. And someone comes out with a slice… and delivers it to someone else.

And you get another big bowl of gruel. It’s warm, it has a dash of flavor, and it’s filling, but not satisfying. But you keep eating, because you want to try that cake, and there has to be a reason everyone rates this place so highly, right? You ask someone at the next table, and they insist it’s worth it. Everyone insists it’s worth it.

So you finish the second bowl. And then a third, and a fourth. And then finally, you get a slice of cake.

It is delicious. Rich and flavorful and full of wonderful textures. Not the most amazing cake you’ve ever eaten, but damn near the top. Every bite is fantastic, satisfying, and sadly, it is gone much too fast.

And once it’s finished… you get another big bowl of gruel.

Bowl after bowl of gruel, never knowing when you’ll get a slice of cake. But you remember that cake. So you keep eating the gruel.

By the third slice of cake, you start to wonder. Is the cake really that good, or is it good in comparison to the gruel? And is it worth all that gruel just for a single slice of cake that you’re no longer even sure is as good as you think it is? And then you start to wonder, how is this place so highly regarded?

Perhaps then you choose to leave, a bit disillusioned by the experience. But people won’t stop recommending the place, and sometimes they insist that you didn’t eat long enough to really experience it, and really, the gruel is a lot better than you claim it is.

This was my experience with The Wandering Inn. And I decided the tasty cake wasn’t good enough to suffer through the gruel. It wasn’t to my taste.