Year-End Stats Review

We launched this blog one year ago, to the minute — posting our first review just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. On the first day of 2018 we could therefore say that we’d “been blogging since last year.” And we did.

In this post, we’ll breakdown some of our publication stats by form type (Reviews, Recipes or Rants/Other), cuisine type (Japanese, Indian, etc.), and géographie de cuisine (Europe, Middle East, etc.). We wanted to take a moment to look back on the first full year of this blog and do some statistical slicing-and-dicing, mostly out of curiosity and to help us assess how to make Plate Cup Table even more unbelievably great in 2019.

We’ve made 30 posts in the past year, including this one — a monthly average of 2.5, or one every 12 days or so. Our most active period, in terms of the highest posts-to-days ratio, was late March to late April. I don’t know why, other than that the weather was pretty mild then and some period had to be the most active. That surge was followed immediately by a period of relatively little activity: late April to mid/late-July, during which we posted just five reviews. The longest stretch of total inactivity was from early August to late September (51 days!); I was housebound with herniated discs for much of it and swamped with work.

Almost 60 percent of our posts have been restaurant reviews, mainly of places serving Asian or American fare; 10 percent were reviews of food trucks; and 10 percent were recipes. The remainder were product or store reviews or uncategorizable rants.

Looking ahead to 2019, we’d like to post more recipes and topical entries, like we did for National Curried Chicken Day, and review a couple local delis. We also look forward to continuing the series that inspired the original idea for PlateCupTable: “Seven Corners Dining,” for which series we’ve made three entries so far (Kao Sarn, Nhu Lan, and Rice Paper). Finally, we’re looking especially forward to exploring some of the more exotic eateries in NoVa, including Ethiopian spots clustered around Alexandria West and the Uyghur restaurants around Ardmore.

But no pressure. This blog is a hobby, we make no effort to track clicks or “eyeballs” or any of that. Keeping it as a background hobby — a platform to share observations about the food scene of Northern Virginia (mostly), and lessons from preparing our own plates and cups and tables — keeps it fun. Running it like a business or something would quickly grow monotonous. So we’ll keep it fun.

Thanks for your interest, Comments, Shares, Follows and Likes. Happy first birthday, PCT, and happy New Year!

More:
♦ Dinner for One
♦ … Enjoy it with a New Year’s Eve cocktail or two. May we recommend our own take on the Saint-Florent.
♦ Bing Crosby, “Let’s Start The New Year Right” (Irving Berlin)

∎ MMXIX… ∎