Incremental Restaurant Reviews: A new approach

One of my pet peeves with your run of the mill restaurant review, be it a big name restaurant critic's newspaper article, something you find in a gourmet or airline magazine, an online restaurant review website, or even wiki forums, is that it is only ever a snapshot of a tiny window of 1-2 hours at a particular time on a particular day.

What happens if there's a freak accident in the kitchen and something goes wrong with the souffle? Or the reviewer is in a grumpy mood? Or the restaurant has outed the critic and gives him/her some extra special attention and food?  All of these things create a skewed view of the reality.

I was never really any good at science or math, but one thing I remember from statistics is that the larger your sample group, the more accurate the results.

I've therefore decided to embark on an experimental approach to restaurant reviews - each time I go back to the restaurant again, I will update my earlier review. The idea is to provide a more holistic, more representative impression of the restaurant, so that you the reader can have a much more accurate feel for how good it really is.

Of course, this approach has the added benefit of giving me the eminent excuse to keep going back to the good restaurants.  That in itself can give you an indication of quality - you can rest assured that I'm not going to subject myself to cruel and unusual punishment by going back to a crappy restaurant.

As always, suggestions are always welcome - I'd love to hear your ideas on how I can improve on this concept.

The Frenchman
September 2010



Copyright Melvin Yeo 2010