A useful recommendation needs more than enthusiasm. It needs context: what happened, what mattered, what it cost, who it suits, and whether the experience is likely to hold up when someone else follows the advice.
The return test
The simplest internal question is whether we would choose it again with our own time and money. That does not mean every experience has to be cheap, casual, or perfect. It means the strengths were real enough to survive the first impression.
The friend test
Could we send a friend there without writing a paragraph of caveats? If the answer is “yes, but only if…” repeated five times, the recommendation probably needs to become more specific or less enthusiastic.
Context beats scoring
A number can be tidy but shallow. We care more about describing who should go, when, what to order, what to expect, and how the value equation works.