When the Wine Spectator released its annual awards for restaurant wine lists in July, there was a note of controversy. Author and prankster Robin Goldstein fooled the venerable magazine by creating a fake restaurant and submitting a dummy wine list along with the $250 entry fee. His Osteria L'Intrepido di Milano won an Award of Excellence for the effort. Congrats.
Restaurant reviews. Restaurant awards. Zagat. Yelp.com. Restaurants have dozens of opportunities to garner praise suitable for wall decoration and ad copy. Many of these honors have validity, while some are literally window dressing. In the midst of our Best of the Bay issue, we thought it might serve diners of all sorts to look a little closer at the business of rating and awarding restaurants.
First and foremost, there are critics. Here at CL, we work on a five-star scale (half-points allowed) for everything reviewed, from compact discs to pizza joints. When I give something three stars or better, I'm recommending it — up to a point; 3 1/2 means a restaurant is consistently good, with a few extra touches that are well above average. To get a 4, a restaurant has to do what it does well across the board, with some examples of truly exceptional fare. Four and a half stars means everything — from food to service to atmosphere — is superlative. A 5 is as close to perfection as possible. Not that I've ever handed out 5. In five years of reviewing restaurants in the Bay area and Sarasota, I've bestowed precious few 4 1/2s. And I remember handing out one star only once. If you looked at my body of reviews, the bell curve would come into play, with most places ending up in the 2.5-to-3 range.
St. Petersburg Times restaurant critic Laura Reiley recently introduced star ratings to her reviews after a long hiatus started by her predecessor Chris Sherman. Why the change?
"It just clarifies things for the reader," she explained. For her, it's sometimes difficult to determine a critic's intention without a rating.
Like me, Reiley also sees food critics as part and parcel with film and music critics. Read a critic over a period of time, try out the restaurants they review, and you'll get a sense of their tastes.
Or, you can make decisions based on good old democratic sensibilities. Zagat's popular crimson guides cover almost all of the United States and beyond, listing scores for restaurant food, service, décor and cost entirely derived from voting by customers. Look at our Readers Poll in this issue, and you'll see the problem that can come from giving the unwashed masses power — some people vote strictly for their faves, and restaurants can stuff the ballot box if they want.
That's not to say Zagat isn't an informative, or even accurate, measure of a restaurant. "In a city with a very sophisticated dining public, lets say New York, Zagat has a lot of validity," explains Reiley, who also serves as an editor for the Tampa Bay area guide. "In those places, people eat out a lot and can often compare restaurants with a certain amount of authority. "When you get to a city that's less foodie, you get people writing about a place who may not be comparing it to a pool of similar restaurants."
She didn't say it, but I will: The Bay area is not foodie-centric.
Online rating sites deal with the same formula of popular opinion, but without the massive data that makes Zagat unique. Citysearch, TripAdvisor and other travel sites are a minefield of restaurant shills, haters and people with honest opinions. Figuring out who to believe is tough.
Yelp.com is the fastest-growing and most extensive example of this genre of online restaurant rating, but it has drawn more criticism than most. San Francisco news outlets have reported that the site offered to push bad reviews to the bottom of a restaurant's Yelp page if they paid to advertise. Business owners have admitted to paying shills to post reviews.
Don't trust the weight of public opinion? As evidenced by the Wine Spectator, you still have to tread lightly when it comes to awards and ratings from organizations. When the Robert Irvine debacle hit the Bay area, one of the items on his embellished resume was a Five Star Diamond Award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences. No lie there, but the Times reported that the "academy is housed in a Manhattan apartment, and recipients pay for the honor."
Some awarding bodies have more prestige than the AAHS, of course, like the James Beard Foundation, DiRoNa or France's Michelin Guide, which began awarding its prestigious stars in the U.S. two years ago. Here in Florida, we have Florida Trend's Golden Spoons.
Every year, the magazine — a St. Pete Times property — picks the 500 best restaurants in the state, with Golden Spoon Awards going to the best of them and Hall of Fame Awards for the best of those. Obviously, the lone Trend restaurant editor doesn't have the opportunity to hit all 500, so he has to rely on word of mouth and popular opinion. Think of it as a list of likely contenders.
Maybe the lesson is to take everything you read with a grain of salt. Count a slew of "awards" more as a good sign than a guarantee, try to separate the shills and haters from real opinion, and learn the style and preferences of reviewers.
Unless, of course, you read it in CL. Here, we deal in the truth.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2008.