Meet Mitch from Queen Anne Hill’s Emmer & Rye. (Right now you wish you could see a picture of Mitch…but what kind of restaurant critic goes around snapping pictures in a restaurant? A busted one!)

Mitch knows about food. He can explain exactly why chef Seth Caswell puts nettle-mint puree on the creamy parsnip soup. He knew just how seared the tuna would be; what mustard-marination would do for tender slices of rabbit loin; why that dish—with rabbit, organic leaves of mizuna and raddicchio, and neon bits of pickled rhubarb—works so extraordinarily well. (“It’s the sweet of the rhubarb playing off the bitter greens and savory meat,” he told us. He was right.)

Mitch had dined the night before at Poppy, which meant his interest in food was not an occupational necessity, it was genuine. Mitch was young, fleet, ebullient, and altogether winning. Thanks Mitch.