Many years ago I came up with a rule of thumb. Restaurants have three basic strategies, be a known quantity (chain), have a good location, or be actually good.
I've found some gems by looking for the third category.
Given that "near the train" is a good location, that would support this theory.
The formal terminology is “selection induced negative correlation”. If a quality score is the sum of two factors, those two factors will tend to be negatively correlated.
Mathematically a trivial example is the equation 1=x+y, where 1 represents some cutoff and could be any value. Clearly x and y are inversely correlated.
They are not mutually exclusive. Counter examples:
- Katz's deli in NYC is incredibly famous, in a great location, and actually has kickass pastrami. The trade-off are relatively high prices and lines down the block
- restaurants with exclusive relationships.
- restaurants that make money another way, e.g. gambling.
- family owned restaurants with legacy rent deals.
- restaurants that cater to niche audiences e.g. small ethnicities and religions
The grand parent post clearly stated it is the poster's "rule of thumb". By definition they are aware that the rules are [likely] "not mutually exclusive". Starting with "these are not mutually exclusive", is what makes this comment so unnecessary. Don't be proud of having listed exceptions to someone's rule of thumb.
Had you started with, "I like that; these are a few exceptions I've observed to your rules that I find interesting", that would be a productive way to start a conversation.
But starting with "these are not mutually exclusive" makes you seem like an ass for having pointed at an exception to something that by definition has exceptions.
It's right in the posting guidelines [1.]
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
For what it's worth, I interpreted GP's response as trying to build on the rules of thumb by adding some color in the edge cases, I didn't read it as any kind of a dig at the original proposition.
Do you worship the posting guidelines or something? Are you that offended by someone adding information to a post? The forum is a public one, not a 1-1 conversation.
The poster added valuable information, that is interesting and not self-evidently obvious to the average person who doesn't think much about restaurants, that makes the forum more useful to others?
>Comments of this quality are getting frustrating.
Yeah I'm not a fan but it's orders of magnitude less frustrating than the people that try to take a very lossy rule of thumb with a fat "better safe than sorry" factor baked in and then do mental gymnastics to try and plug all the massive gaps.
Is Katz's actually a great location? It is for some--well, many/most places in Manhattan are a great location for some given the density--but it's hell and gone from Midtown, UES, etc. As someone who has visited Manhattan semi-regularly over the years (and even lived there for a summer) I think I've been to Katz's once and would never have described it as convenient.
ADDED: These days, sure, close to Lower East Side and Orchard Street but that sure wasn't primo real estate a few decades ago (including When Harry Met Sally was filmed).
I think it's probably even more close to being the opposite. Well known Restaurants in great locations tend to actually be very good. I think being good and in a good location leads to restaurants being well known. But I also think people claim Chick-fil-a and McDonald's aren't good are lying to themselves. Those restaurants routinely focus-group their food and make sure that it's ranked very high for taste and not just among their fast food counterparts. It an acquired distaste for people not to like it.
They're not mutually exclusive because they're a triangle.
Cost, Convenience, Quality: Pick 2
This isn't that deep either - convenience and quality are 2 things that cost the restaurant money (either via higher rent, or more expensive ingredients).
You can't do all 3 because you'll never make a profit.
You can't do only 1 or you'll never get any customers.
Where I live, video slots have infiltrated many restaurants. It is weird!
Even some slightly fancy restaurants have a corner full of slot machines. They must make a small mint to offset putting off diners.
I know what you are thinking: This guy lives in Nevada. Nope. Illinois.
That last category seems to be growing as well nearby. There are 3 Uzbek restaurants in the neighboring towns. 3! All opened within a year of each other, I think.
Based on the empirical evidence from OP, this seems correct. But there's a theoretical argument for why "good location" and "actually good" should be positively correlated:
1. Good locations are more expensive.
2. People are willing to pay more for better food.
3. Therefore (all else equal), better restaurants earn more revenue.
4. Therefore, better restaurants have a higher willingness-to-pay on rent.
5. Therefore, better restaurants will outbid worse restaurants for good locations.
Your logic works in a world with only restaurants. In reality, every other type of business has better margins than restaurants and also competes for the best real estate. So the good restaurant in a good location is soon having their rent hiked and closing down, or has to follow the beaten path: Decrease quality and increase prices.
Sure, there's always exceptions, especially in older cities where the restaurant was established in a great spot a long time ago and is owned by a family. But generally, restaurants have far too low profit margins to remain for long in a top location. And I think all of us know this from experience.
This falls apart a bit if providing better food costs more. Restaurants with better food may earn more revenue all else being equal but their costs may be higher. People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location. It makes sense for a the restaurant with worse food to outbid a restaurant with better food because the location is more important to them and they are allocating more money towards towards rent rather than food quality so they have more to spend.
> People are willing to pay more for the same quality of food in a better location
If they know. West Coast bagels have been almost consistently garbage until very, very recently because the people willing to pay up for a great bagel weren't able to pick out those that were freshly boiled. Combine that with the economics of bagels prohibiting boiling and baking to order (hmm...) and you wind up with the necessity of toasting old (but not stale) bagels.
A restaurant that has more money can afford more rent. A restaurant that doesn't have more money can't afford it. So, everything else being equal, better restaurants, making more money, are more likely to rent places that cost more since. Seems pretty straight forward.
it's no different than saying people with higher income, overall, rent/buy housing that costs more.
My only rule is that restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad, which fits with your theory. If they have some built-in customer base they don’t have to work as hard at being good.
Yeah. A random mid-range Marriott probably has an utterly boring hotel restaurant serving fairly mid-range mostly boring fare. You get up to the high-end and you're much more likely to get restaurants that don't really seem like hotel restaurants at all.
I remember reading an article that had the theory that Thai restaurants in hotels were usually very authentic under the assumption that the parents were immigrants who wanted the child to inherit the business, but the kid wanted to run a restaurant instead. It would certainly explain why you get Thai restaurants attached to random hotels in the middle of nowhere, at least.
The Thai government practices gastro-diplomacy, they have a program where you set a Thai restaurant up in a foreign country, you can pick from three different packages for size or fanciness of restaurant. It's why you see a lot of the same decorations and similarities between differently owned Thai restaurants, or occasionally a family will own a number in a metro area.
> The Department of Export Promotion of the Thai Ministry of Commerce offers potential restaurateurs plans for three different "master restaurant" types—from fast food to elegant—which investors can choose as a prefabricated restaurant plan.
> restaurants in hotels are usually mediocre to bad
This varies strongly region to region (and price level). In America and much of Europe, in most cases, yes. (Exception: tier 1 cities.)
In parts of Asia it varies from being almost rule to being a solid way to avoid great food. Put another way, go where the food-obsessed locals go. If the locals are dining at hotel restaurants, go there. If they're avoiding them for street food, do that.
On a parallel note, crappy little hotel bars are something of a delight to visit, particularly in your home town. You get to meet randos seeing your familiar through fresh eyes and for the first tie, and even if you don't meet anyone interesting, the people watching alone is usually paydirt.
Hotel restaurants are feature placebo. They are give the impression of added value/fanciness, even if they are rarely accessed by value-conscious guests.
You need like always to read some of the reviews and judge. If sceptical look at the users histories (e.g. I seen perfect 5 star reviews in Google then seen the users were bots even though the comments sounded ok)
Depends on the stakes too: anniversary dinner or grabbing a coffee in a different part of town?
Given lack of other signals, my experience is that TripAdvisor or Yelp is probably better than "they have a cool name." I've been living out of a hotel because of a kitchen fire and, as someone who really wasn't in the habit of eating out around where I live, the recommendations have generally been decent--combines with a neighbor and personal knowledge.
On location, consider discriminating by repeating versus non-repeating flow. Repeat flow tends to encourage good food. If you fuck up the food, you go out of business. Non-repeating flow encourages tourist traps.
I'd be curious about the article's study being re-run with a dummy variable for predominantly commuter versus tourist train stations.
This supports the inverse square rule for seafood restaurant quality vs. being near the ocean. There are good places, but right on the water? Universally bad.
I wouldn't say universally bad. I live in Seattle, and there are some restaurants on the water that I like.
The way I think about it is this: the restaurant has to pay for the real estate, and that cost must get factored in somehow. Water views aren't cheap. So you can get good food on the water, but you'll be paying for the view.
Shipping of sea food is expensive so even the cheapest distant resteraunt will pay for premium prices since the difference isn't that much. Near the shore you can save buying cheap - but if you know what you are looking for you can buy the best off the boat for cheap.
Less true if you're talking about seafood "shacks." Tons of good places serving lobster rolls and steamers on the ocean in Maine for example. But, yes, for fancier restaurants especially in cities, the best views often don't come with the best food.
El Bulli was considered the best restaurant in the world until it voluntarily closed and it is right on the Mediterranean with a dock. The web site even had directions to reach it by boat.
If this is true at all, it only applies to cities. Many fantastic seafood restaurants are on or near the docks in regions economically dependent on seafood production.
Totally agree but I would expand location into convenience. For example, I find restaurants that don't take reservations or have limited hours are often better.
In my head I have a category for reliable restaurants to go to when you are planning something with people and you want to make sure to have a consistent, predictable experience and restaurants that are worth waiting for or going at a weird time.
For kebab some comedian gave the best advice - look at the knuckles of the kebab maker - if they are very hairy it will be good. Then look at the neckline of his shirt - if there are hairs coming out of it - the kebab will be great.
this reminds me my experience: when I went to Salt Lake City and wanted to try Turkish food and picked nearest Turkish restaurant with the the highest reviews from google maps.
Interior was authentic and nice, but the food turned out to be AWFUL, kebab was burnt to ashes, everything food wise was horrible.
When I complained, the cook came back and apologized, and I saw the cook was White American. Not saying all Americans are bad cooks, but in my experience I would have expected turkish chef to cook turkish food for authentic experience and quality.
Have a friend who rates ethnic restaurants by the decor. The fancier the place: the worse the food.
The best places are mismatched chairs and Formica tabletops, menus left over from the previous occupant with a page of badly translated new menu pasted inside.
My family members from Iran and Syria have said that people there cook beef extra because it's usually not very fresh, unless they're rich. So overcooked beef may be the more authentic way, depending on how you look at it. Lamb is more common anyway.
There’s a bizarrely good place in Dublin called China Sichuan (double whammy; country _and_ region), located in, basically, a business park 20 minutes from the city centre in a tram. It has no business being any good; combo of name and suburban location should condemn it to mediocrity at absolute best.
(They’ve also clearly spent a lot on the decor, which, again, is normally not a great sign in a restaurant. And yet somehow it’s very good. Against the natural order of things.)
This is actually good. Its a very basic rule of thumb for selecting wine: the more regionally specific they get on the label, the more likely the wine is good.
For example, if you see "California" or "Chile" on a <$10 bottle, expect mediocrity. But if it says "Napa Valley", it'll be a little better, and if it also mentions a location or vineyard, it'll be a lot better.
My pet theory is that this is because the more specific the label gets, the more direct the reputation hit for a bad product.
For France and Italy, wine regions and sub-regions often have protective status. This makes a wine more expensive vs. a non-protected wine of comparative quality, but the upshot is that if you see a wine under a protective label, you can be sure of a certain baseline of quality.
I agree. But one exception, a lot of good Syrian restaurants aren't named for a region in Syria, or the country, but some greater region that includes Syria (usually "Shaam").
Reminds me of Panda Gourmet in DC. It’s near the edge of the city, not accessible by Metro, the name sounds it should be in a mall and it’s attached to a Days Inn budget hotel. And it’s probably the best Chinese restaurant in the city.
I've been to several great restaurants with "china" and "burma" in their names. also "siam" and "thai" but not actually "thailand" that I can remember.
Recommendations still matter and some tourists are around for a week or two. I'm highly likely to be a repeat customer at any place that is good.
In my experience finding a good restaurant in a tourist zone is not hugely more difficult than finding a good restaurant elsewhere. The search is easier as a tourist in many ways because the selection is often a limited set.
In San Carlos de Bariloche (highly touristy) I adored Alto El Fuego and I want to go back just for that. Don't try L'Italiano Trattoria: I wanted a bad experience for a masochistic change and I certainly got it. Please gain some pleasure that you've never been there. There's a massive difference between the tastes of local tourists and international tourists.
There's a waiter standing outside trying to get people to come in, and I don't mean the reservation / front desk person. No way is it worthwhile for a restaurant with actually good food to pay someone to advertise outside.
good location = higher rent = food better attract people
I'm not saying that holds up, only that it's not clear to me that "good location" = skimping on actually being good.
To go the other extreme, I guess all the best restaurants in the USA are in Wyoming since they arguably have worst locations (low population density = low traffic) so they must have to concentrate on food. Yea, ... no.
I've found some gems by looking for the third category.
Given that "near the train" is a good location, that would support this theory.