What we mean by taste.

The word tasteis doing a lot of work in our writing. It’s in the name of the network. It’s in the footer of every page. It’s the criterion we judge applications by. It’s the word both halves of our audience are meant to recognise themselves in.

It is also a famously slippery word, easy to use and hard to define without sounding pretentious. We use it constantly without unpacking it. That seems like a thing we should fix. This is the long version of what we mean.

What taste isn’t

The word carries baggage worth shedding before going further.

Taste isn’t preference. You can prefer coffee to tea without having taste in coffee. Preference is what you happen to like; taste is the ability to articulate why you like one specific coffee and not another that looks identical.

It isn’t expertise either, though it runs alongside. The sommelier who passed her exam can describe a wine in correct technical terms; that doesn’t necessarily mean she has taste. The home cook who’s been quietly hosting good dinners for fifteen years has it, whether or not she can name the techniques she’s using.

And it isn’t a class marker. The hawker uncle who has been making the same chicken rice for thirty years has taste. The Saturday-morning bakery customer who knows which loaf to buy and which to skip has taste. Aesthetic doesn’t cover it — a perfectly composed Instagram photo can be tasteless if the eye behind it is generic, while a grainy phone snapshot can carry more in a single image than a magazine spread. What’s narrow about taste isn’t who’s allowed to have it. It’s the willingness to articulate it in public.

What taste is

Taste is a perceptual skill with three components: attention, discrimination, and articulation. When all three are present and trained, the result is what we mean by the word.

Attention.

Taste begins with paying attention. Not just to the food in front of you, but to everything around it. The temperature the room is held at. The chair you’re sitting in. The pace at which the menu unfolds. The way the staff greet a regular versus a newcomer. The choice of music and the volume it sits at.

Most people don’t pay this kind of attention because they’re not trying to; they’re trying to enjoy themselves. The person with taste is, additionally, trying to notice. The two activities sit comfortably together. The noticing doesn’t dilute the enjoyment; it sharpens it. Tastemakers, in the way we use the word, are people whose default mode is noticing.

Discrimination.

Discrimination, in the older sense of being able to make distinctions, is the second component. It’s the muscle that lets you tell similar things apart. Two laksas, two natural wines, two sourdoughs, two perfectly competent restaurants. Where does each one diverge from the other? Which one is doing what it’s trying to do well, and which one is doing something else competently?

This is the part that takes time. You can’t reason your way into discrimination; you have to eat your way into it, drink your way into it, sit in enough rooms to know the difference between rooms. The shortcut is exposure to good things and to bad things in roughly equal measure. Most people get the first; few seek out the second on purpose.

The discriminating person can say, with specificity, what’s missing. That’s the part that matters. The compliment “this is great” requires no discrimination at all. The observation “the sauce is balanced but the carrot underneath it is undercooked” requires the muscle we’re talking about.

Articulation.

Attention and discrimination on their own get you a quiet person with strong views. To be a tastemaker, which is to do the public-conversation work the network exists for, you also need to articulate.

Articulation is the ability to turn perception into something someone else can read or watch and learn from. The caption that tells you what was specifically good and what specifically wasn’t. The video that walks you through the experience without resorting to the standard food-creator vocabulary. The post-meal text to a friend that does in three sentences what a magazine would do in twelve.

Most people who have attention and discrimination don’t bother with articulation in public. They have private taste; the network doesn’t see them. The ones who do bother, who care enough to write the caption or record the voiceover or edit the carousel, are the ones we end up talking to.

Taste is a perceptual skill with three components: attention, discrimination, articulation. The combination is rarer than people expect.

How taste shows up on a feed

If those are the three components, here’s how they manifest in the public surface we evaluate when we read an application or scout a profile:

• Specific detail. The feed mentions things most feeds skip. The light, the music, the second course, the bartender’s name. This is attention surfacing.
• Subtraction. The feed posts less. Most of what they eat or drink doesn’t make the cut. When they post, you can tell something happened. This is discrimination surfacing.
• A real voice. The captions sound like the person, not like a marketing-trained version of the person. The voiceover has rhythm. The post has a beginning and an end. This is articulation surfacing.

You can find one of these without the others — feeds with attention but no edit, feeds with strong opinions but no observational detail, feeds with polish but nothing underneath. The combination of all three is rarer than people expect. (We wrote a longer field-guide version of this for restaurant operators in How to find credible food creators.)

Why this is the criterion

We use taste rather than reach, the obvious alternative, because reach measures the wrong thing.

Reach tells you how many people see a post. Taste tells you whether the post is worth seeing. The first is a function of the algorithm; the second is a function of the person.

For a venue that knows its tribe, that has a specific sensibility shared with a specific audience, reach without taste is corrosive. It surfaces the venue to the wrong people, who come for the wrong reasons. Taste without reach, by contrast, is fine. The audience may be small, but it’s the audience that compounds: people whose recommendations get acted on, whose taste is borrowed by their friends, whose presence in a room signals that the room is worth being in.

A tastemaker network is, structurally, a bet that taste compounds and reach decays. The longer argument for that bet lives in Influencer marketing has failed.

The implicit promise

When we tell a venue we’re going to place tastemakers in their room, this is what we’re claiming on the tastemaker’s behalf:

• The people we send will be paying attention.
• They will have something specific to say afterwards — including things you might not want to hear.
• They will say it in their own voice, so the audience can read the saying.

That’s the deal. It’s also why we say no to applications that don’t carry all three. Not because we’re snobs about it — but because the brand of the network depends on every placement being a credible delivery of attention, discrimination, and articulation. Send one tasteless tastemaker into a room, and the next ten get discounted along with them.