About Guiding Post

A chef's guide to where to eat, near Roseville.

Guiding Post is written by Rob Salamon, a CIA Hyde Park graduate with eight years on the line in professional kitchens. He lives in the coverage area, drives these roads, and eats out several nights a week. Every piece is his, written in his own voice, under his own byline — the kind of informed opinion you'd get from a friend who happens to have cooked the food professionally.

What we cover

Greater Roseville — the towns where “worth the drive from Roseville” is a credible frame and where a single editorial team can eat often enough to have informed opinions. That's Roseville, Rocklin, Granite Bay, Lincoln, Loomis, and Auburn. The map gets wider as we get to know it better.

Inside the coverage area, we publish two kinds of pieces. The Review is for destinations — restaurants worth making a plan around, based on at least two visits. The Regular is for rotation — the weeknight spots, the reliable takeout, the places we actually eat when we're not working on a review. Both formats get the same standard of honesty and the same chef's eye. Neither uses stars or scores.

Why this, why here

The aggregators average everything to four stars and call it a day. National outlets have voice but don't cover the suburbs. Local blogs cover the suburbs but rarely combine editorial discipline with a credential that means something. Guiding Post sits in the gap: a credentialed chef, actually living in the area, writing with the discipline of a national publication and the specificity of a neighbor who's been to these places more than once.

The chef's eye is the whole point. When a review mentions the sear on a steak, the acid in a vinaigrette, the color of the onions in a ragù — that's not a flex. It's the vocabulary of someone who's stood at the pass and can tell you, with specific language, what a kitchen is doing well and what it isn't.

What we won't do

We don't take comps, we don't run sponsored reviews, and we don't use AI to write the editorial voice you're reading. We don't aggregate or summarize user reviews from Yelp, Google, or anywhere else — the opinion on this site is one person's, and it's accountable to a byline. We don't rank places from 1 to 10 or hand out stars. If you want to know what we think of a restaurant, the piece will tell you in sentences.

More on how we work

The methodology page is the full version — how we visit, how we disclose conflicts, what we do about affiliate links, how we handle corrections. If you're deciding whether to trust us, that's the page to read.

Got a place we should know about? A correction on something we've written? A question? The contact page has the right address.

Guiding Post is a small independent publication based in Roseville, California.