1. Lawrence Krubner on October 21, 2003 1:58 PM writes...

Florence Fabricant!!!!!! What a great last name for a woman who is critical of the statistical reliability of 100 people.

2. Ernle on October 21, 2003 3:29 PM writes...

Clay, although you make your point,
it is not always true that one person's
judgement is inferior to that of a mob.
And sometimes, if you know the character
and prejudices of a reviewer, even a negative
review can encourage you to consume the
reviewed product.

3. emil minty on October 21, 2003 6:30 PM writes...

Not sure I agree with your take on Grimes' re-review: Yes, he's taking another look at the restaurant based on the results of a (statistically flawed or not) poll, and yes, he's a mite bit defensive about it, but in the end he's still more or less saying what he said before - the food at Grocery is good bistro food, but it's not the same experience as going to a Grammercy Tavern, Daniel, etc. And he's right - which is why I much prefer the Grocery to the much fancier, much much more expensive other options. But to the larger point about the merits of polling vs. individual reviewers: If there was a such a schism between the tastes of the masses and the asethetes at the NYT, why is the Grocery the only one in the top 10 that Grimes and his ilk don't like?

4. Clay Shirky on October 21, 2003 9:02 PM writes...

_If there was a such a schism between the tastes of the masses and the asethetes at the NYT, why is the Grocery the only one in the top 10 that Grimes and his ilk don’t like?_

My bet is that the top 10 has a certain homeostasis -- people rate certain restaurants highly because they are told that a certain type of restaurant is the epitome of dining. As a parallel to this, I am also betting that a) opinions diverge more now strongly beneath the Top 10, and that b) Grocery is a harbinger of future disagreements.

As for Grimes re-review, he is emphatically _not_ saying what he said before. What he said before was "it's a one star neighborhood place." What he's saying now is "Its nearly perfect for the kind of place it is." His _tone_ is "I said it was good before, and its still good now", but the content is a significant reconsideration, which he then tries to bury under tortured analogies with Olympic diving and baseball.

What Grimes desparately wants is for diners to prefer places that try to be exclusive culinary temples and fail to places that try to be good restaurants and succeed. And this year's Zagat's is contradicting that hypothesis.

5. TPB, Esq. on October 23, 2003 10:14 AM writes...

I find it interesting that Grimes contradicts Fabricant's article. Both comment on the alcohol selection at The Grocery. Fabricant claims there's no alcohol served, that the restaurant lacks a liquor license. Grimes praises the restaurant's wine list. Doesn't the times fact check related articles?

6. clay on October 23, 2003 10:17 AM writes...

I don't see what your problem with "expertise" is.

If you want to go to a restaurant you're almost certain to be satisfied with, go to one rated highly by Zagat's. It's not likely, though, that that restaurant will be the one that would please you most because its rating describes what is most commonly considered best, i.e., the highest common denominator. A critic's preferences, on the other hand, reflect a sensibility that has been refined along a particular, individual path, i.e, combines learned notions of what is good with intrinsic personal preferences that are as inevitable as the color of one's eyes. Insofar as they are likely to steer you wrong, critics are also capable of pointing you to the restaurant that suits you and your eccentricities better than any other. Zagat's will not do that. Further, a critic's review is going to be much more interesting than a blurb from Zagat's: The critic is better at inspiring me to check out a place, Zagat's is better at letting me know when I should not.

7. clay b on October 23, 2003 10:22 AM writes...

hey, just realized my name is confusing. call that last post clay b

8. Jon on October 23, 2003 10:58 AM writes...

In Clay's (nearly unintelligible) comment, he seems to be inferring that Grimes wants restaurants like the Grocery to fail. This is asinine: he simply draws a distinction in kind --not degree but kind -- between places like the Grocery and places like Le Bernardin. Admittedly, the existence of the star system, which forces ambitious neighborhood places to compete against gilded culinary palaces, makes this distinction difficult to maintain, but that distinction is obvious to anyone who actually reads the review without either wanting to laugh at Grimes or cheerlead for smart mobs. All he's saying is that they are different experiences. Unless Shirky has spoken to Grimes and knows that he is evilly rubbing his hands at the persistent failure of excellent neighborhood restaurants like the Grocery, the imputation of malice is simply laughable.

Empirically, people prefer McDonalds to Le Bernardin: that hardly makes McDonalds the superior restaurant.

9. Malcolm J. on October 23, 2003 11:14 AM writes...

I read it as "yes, the food's really good, but I even if they give me the nicest table at The Grocery, I'm stll slumming at a Bistro in Brooklyn." If the food's really, really good (a distinction from McD's) and the ambience is at least decent, don't you think that should warrant more than one star?

10. Piece O' Pie on October 23, 2003 12:16 PM writes...

It's misguided to say that a survey of diners is a better form of cultural criticism than the work of a seasoned, well-traveled, professional critic.

The "mob" has always had a critical voice. In music, for instance, you'll find their recommendations every week on the Billboard charts. In dining, you'll find their recommendations in the financial ledgers of restaurants. The people, in other words, voice their opinions by critiquing with their dollars.

In this sense, Zagat's survey of 100 diners is actually a laughably LIMITED sample of the "mob's" opinion.

You make the mistake of thinking that the function of cultural criticism is merely utility: e.g., a recommendation of how to spend one's dollars. That's not what criticism is about. The best critics do more than give thumbs-up and thumbs-down; they offer perspective, they place things into their broader cultural context, they shed light on deeper meanings.

That's not a product of elitism; it's simply the very essence of criticism. By definition, 1 million Zagat voters (or record buyers, or moviegoers) will never fill the role of a single skilled critic.

11. heebyjaco on October 23, 2003 12:45 PM writes...

I like the McRib the bestest.

12. MS on October 23, 2003 1:18 PM writes...

Clay S., you should read the comments by Clay B, Jon, and piece of pie. They understand what food criticism is about and you clearly just don't. If you loved gourmet food you'd have a better perspective. Criticism is about defining and cultivating a particular kind of taste, that may be an acquired taste. A majority of people are perfectly capable of preferring "bad" food to "good" if they don't have a sophisticated or trained palate. If you want to start pounding your fist on the table and saying that whatever the majority likes is automatically better, and anything else is elitist bullshit, then go ahead and do it. But understand that what you're saying is totally irrelevant to gourmet food criticism.

With that said, critics can certainly become an cliquish in-group who use the "acquired taste" excuse to defend low quality stuff. This is where the quality, honesty, and courage of a critic comes in. Because of that, I'd be curious to taste the food at that Brooklyn restaurant and see if that is what had occurred.

By the way, the real issue here is not the sample size of the Zagat survey but *who* tends to answer it. If dedicated restaurant goers with plenty of experience and taste are the ones who typically respond to the survey, then it becomes more convincing. In fact, Zagats usually tracks critics assessments pretty well, and it has in this case. You'll notice that the restaurant only got a 24 rating in Zagat's the first year it opened, when the NY Times first reviewed it, and then gradually increased as the kinks were worked out.

Finally, the NY Times restaurant critics are hardly the most influential food critics in the country.

13. Clay Shirky on October 23, 2003 2:08 PM writes...

_ If you loved gourmet food you’d have a better perspective. Criticism is about defining and cultivating a particular kind of taste, that may be an acquired taste. A majority of people are perfectly capable of preferring “bad” food to “good” if they don’t have a sophisticated or trained palate._

I understand this perfectly well, and this is exactly the issue. A critic can only offer his own taste as a proxy for that of his readers if his readers have no way of getting at their own aggregate tastes.

The fact that his tastes diverge from theirs is their problem in a world without collaborative filtering, but it is his problem in a world with such filtering.

See today's post for more on this.

14. jimmydean on October 23, 2003 3:20 PM writes...

Criticism is elitist! *gasp* O my gawd!

Of course criticism is elitist. The whole point of criticism in any field (food, arts, the media, whatever) is the establishment of subjective and often erratic criteria by which individual works are assessed both against their own stated aims and against other relevant benchmarks in the genre, either current or historical. A great critic is someone whose depth of knowledge and experience in their particular field allows them to make interesting, entertaining, enlightening and original observations, drawing connections and comparisons between things that might not be obvious to people who haven't chosen to devote their entire lives to writing about food, or music, or dance, etc. This is entirely separate from the mere statement of opinions -- "It's good!" "It sucks!" -- that makes up the Zagat survey and its brethren. Both have their uses, but they're different things; one is fundamentally qualitative, the other fundamentally quantitative.

Experts in any field are always de facto elitists. That doesn't mean we don't need experts. It also doesn't mean that an "expert" will know what restaurant you are going to enjoy. Critics don't tell you what YOU will like; they tell you what they like, and why, and how, and what it means, and how it relates to what someone else in the field is doing, and how it reflects broader issues in the culture. The ones who are original and entertaining enough in their analysis manage to get paid for it. The rest of us fill out Zagat forms. Or blogs.

15. Cliff Styles on October 23, 2003 3:52 PM writes...

Ok...here's a suggestion (perhaps someone has already made it)...why not Zagat the food critics? You read a review, you eat at the restaurant, you rate how close the reviewer was to your personal experience?

Is anyone already doing it? Zagat could easily add this as a feature, right?

Hmmm...zagat as a verb? I don't know if I've seen that...has anyone seen it?

zagat, v. (1) to rate restaurants on the Zagat system (2) to compare expert opinion with the first-hand experience of a sample of people.

16. The Aphorist on October 23, 2003 4:16 PM writes...

"Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographers, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic." Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all." Raymond Chandler

"The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all." Mark Twain

17. Robert Schwartz on October 23, 2003 5:01 PM writes...

Its the old horse race bettor's problem. The odds on favorite to win is most likley to win and least likely to make you money. The way to make money is to bet against the crowd, but only when you are actually smarter than they are.

The best form of government is an absolute dictatorship of a man who is unfailingly wise and benevolent. Unfortunately, such men do not exist so we must make other arrangements.

I have eaten in a fair number of really expensive restaurants in New York and elsewhere, and I can tell you that I am almost always disapointed, because the food never lives up to the hype or the price. I might enjoy the Grocery but if I were in Brooklyn, I would probably seek out one of those old time red sauce Italian restaurants.

18. Mike on October 23, 2003 6:46 PM writes...

Sure, the flap over the Grocery is amusing and revealing, but let's not dismiss what professional reviewers bring to the table. It's well-known in the trade that amateur reviewers are consistently less critical than pros are, and it's not necessarily because the pros are snobs.

For one thing, amateur reviewers are self-selected. Zagat reviewers go to a restaurant because they choose to go; they've already made a judgment that it's a good place to eat, and have invested their own money in the experience. This tends to tilt their collective response toward the favorable side -- like the kids in Lake Wobegon, everyone is above average. (Not just in restaurant reviews: Amazon users can be similarly forgiving of crummy CDs.)

Pro reviewers, on the other hand, visit restaurants because it's their job, and their boss picks up the tab. It's easier for them to be objective about the meal.

Professional reviewers also tend to have a broader perspective than amateurs. A Zagat reviewer can judge a restaurant to be perfect without having visited most, or possibly even any, of its local competitors. A professional critic is likely to have eaten at other local restaurants of the same type, and consciously makes that comparison when writing the review.

It's also an error to assume that a professional review is based on a single visit. Most professional reviewers visit a restaurant multiple times before writing a review. Since the reviewer's party often includes other people, it's also possible for the reviewer to have considered additional visitors' opinions, not just his own. And it's likely that the professional reviewer has sampled a larger percentage of the items on the menu than the amateur has.

Ethnical professional reviewers never identify themselves at restaurants, of course, lest the establishment take special pains on their behalf. We have no way of knowing whether amateur reviewers are equally scrupulous.

Finally, if you know who the reviewer is, you can make a judgment based not just on what the reviewer says, but whether you have agreed with the reviewer in the past. If you consistently disagree with Roger Ebert, for example, his reviews are still useful: If he hates a movie, maybe it's worth seeing. You get no such reverse guidance from an anonymous review.

None of this is to say that professional reviews are always better, or that Zagat's statistical approach isn't useful. But it's a mistake to think that Zagat reviews are more useful simply because they represent a larger number of opinions.

19. ginsu on October 24, 2003 8:42 PM writes...

Clay: clay b, Jon, Piece O' Pie, MS, jimmydean and Mike all made good points on your post. Among those, MS was the least effective and temperate in expressing his(?) view--yet this was the one you responded to. I'm disappointed that you went after the easy target.

There is now a tendency in the blogosphere to seize anything (esp. anything that appears in the NY Times) as an excuse to emphasize, defend or revisit the favorite arguments of the blogosphere. In this case, those arguments being that (1) "expert" opinion is inferior in many ways to smart mobs, and (2) cultural elitism, esp. NYC-based elitism, is fatuous. I don't think this restaurant dustup is a particularly good illustration of either point, for the reasons the others I named have elaborated.

20. richards1052 on October 28, 2003 12:28 AM writes...

To go off topic...did anyone notice that Clay S. was quoted in the 10/23 NY Times article on blogging? Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/technology/circuits/23diar.html. Way to go, Clay!

21. Creno on February 20, 2004 8:08 AM writes...

Innouncement!!!