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Food Critic Essay, Research Paper

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

With the proliferation of dining guides, there’s no shortage of restaurant reviews out there. But how reliable is the information customers are getting?

First, a moment of realization and then panic spreads through the restaurant, one of Manhattan’s toniest, from the front of the house to the back and downstairs to the basement where the chef is yelling the ear off of some poor, unwitting reservationist. “How did this happen?!?” he screams. “The Zagats are here and they’re not on the list! My god, they’re going to have to wait now, like regular customers!”

Fortunately for the quivering clerk, the aforementioned scene doesn’t really play out in a restaurant basement, but on a stage, during a performance of Fully Committed, a hit comedy that has been running off-Broadway for nearly a year. If the name Zagat means nothing to you, then you probably don’t get the joke. If you own a restaurant in a major American city and the name still means nothing to you, then, well, you really don’t get it.

The Zagats, Tim and Nina, are well-known for the eponymous, burgundy-colored dining guides they publish-compendiums of customer reviews of eateries from fine-dining shrines to local pizza joints-which can be found sticking out of the purses and pockets of restaurant patrons across the country. The Zagat Survey is just part of an entire movement of restaurant guides-in print and increasingly on the internet-that has been feeding off the great dining revolution of the late 20th century, and in many ways, fueling it.

But even as these guides signal the ongoing boom in dining out, their proliferation is raising some serious questions for restaurant operators, and could even be hurting their business in ways they can’t see. Because the evaluations presented in today’s dining guides, overwhelmingly, are not the opinions of trained critics, journalists, or chefs, but the unknown, hungry masses. And while the Zagat reviews undergo an exhaustive process that the company says balances good opinions with bad, the methods of other guides are lesser known, prompting some to question the fairness of the picture painted.

Nowhere does that question loom larger than the internet, where scores of restaurant review sites insure that just about every restaurant is now rated somewhere-and by anyone who wants to voice an opinion. But who are these people? In an age where everyone, literally, is a critic, is there anything to stop one troublemaker-or even competing restaurateurs-from wrecking a place’s reputation with an opinion cloaked in legitimacy? There are, of course, plenty who support this new “democratic” approach to reviewing (contending that many opinions are bound to be better than just one), but others fear that the rise of the populist review might only be adding to their operational headaches.

“Yes, it’s great that there’s more information about restaurants out there, but there’s really no way to know who’s talking about you,” complains Brad Ogden, chef/owner of the upscale Lark Creek Inn near San Francisco. “I could go online, give myself a fake name, choose a bunch of restaurants and put four stars next to them-and there you go.”

“Those outlets can be just as powerful as a prominent review in terms of sparking a fire,” says New York restaurateur Danny Meyer, owner of such hot spots as Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern. “It’s something you really have to keep your eye on. It’s almost like playing dodge ball and you’ve got a whole bunch more people throwing at you.”

For years, dining guides just meant travel guides (or small sections of travel guides) where the author starred a few of his or her favorite (usually upscale) restaurants; no real criticism and no real surprises. Actual restaurant reviews were left to newspapers, to people who supposedly knew what they were talking about.

Or perhaps they didn’t, thought Tim Zagat (that’s Za-GAT”; rhymes with “the cat”), who, after discussing the issue with his wife and their friends over several glasses of wine, decided to survey them and print the results. “It was a very simple idea,” he says of the first guide of New York City restaurants-a mere 75 of them-produced in 1979. “One hundred or 200 people were more likely to be accurate about a restaurant than one.”

The idea caught on. After the 1985 edition started selling 75,000 copies a month, Nina and Tim left their jobs as corporate lawyers to run their “hobby” as a full-time business. Today, Zagat Surveys in 45 cities around the world rate more than 35,000 restaurants. It remains the best-selling dining guide in many major cities.

The Zagat system, by using customer surveys to rate restaurants by food, decor and service and index them by different categories, democratizes the review process and fills a role critics can’t, Tim Zagat says. “What we’re really doing is giving each restaurant a free market survey of their own customers,” he says.

Others have capitalized on similar formats. Bob Sehlinger, for example, supplements critic-written reviews with customer opinions in his Eclectic Gourmet Guides that are now available for eight cities. “The voices don’t always agree, and that’s just the point. Readers need to see that to make the most informed decision.”

And indeed, some restaurateurs see significant advantages to being pondered and critiqued by multiple voices. “Any new way people can find out about us, that’s great,” says Michael Bowling, proprietor of Jupiter Grill in Louisville, KY. Other operators regard the reviews as real business resources. As Meyer points out, one-time reviews in newspapers can’t account for the fact that restaurants are organic entities which change dramatically over time. And with

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