Two questions, not one

On one street in Manama there are two places that grill fish. One has a line outside most evenings. The other has a few tables, usually half full.

It is natural to assume the line knows something. That the busy place must be better, and that the quiet one, if it were really good, would be busy too. We do this with almost everything: the most watched, the most bought, the most passed around. Popular slides into meaning good, and good is expected to end up popular, as if the two were one quality seen from different sides.

Ask a fisherman who sells to both, or a cook who has worked in a dozen kitchens, and the picture is messier. People who know a field well can usually name things that are excellent and barely noticed, and things that are everywhere and only fine. They are not being snobs. They simply keep two questions apart: is it good, and do many people want it.

The quiet place may have a cook who buys better fish and treats it more carefully. It may also have a worse corner, nowhere to park, a door that is easy to miss. None of that says anything about the fish.

The confusion costs most for the person making something. If good only counts once it is popular, every quiet month feels like a verdict. It is not. It is a reading of something else.

Before deciding whether a thing is good, it helps to say which of the two questions we are actually answering.