Peels ice cream and a new kind of resto listing
I think there are two holy grails in the world of food recipe review, and restaurant reviews. The first is a recipe that either a robot or another person knows you will love. Obviously this is not a recipe blog therefore I'm more interested in the other holy grail, which is how to best recommend restaurants to people. Yes, I know, some of this exists in the interwebs. They suck balls. Sorry, but that's true. If there's one good one, then everyone would use it. Let's look at the demographic breakdowns... you have folks who read food blogs nearly daily (like those of you who follow Food in Mouth), and ya'll can figure out what you want on your own. Then there's people who hear things from friends randomly or specifically from a "foodie friend". Then you'll have folks who go out rarely and want to find the best possibly place for their situation/budget. In any of those situations, you have one serious problem which is that the cost of being a shitty recommendator is very high. Think about it, if I suggest this Peels ice cream cone to you, and I will in a minute, it'll cost you a few dollars. If instead I'm recommending a whole restaurant experience to you, the cost of that is different. Personally I like NYTimes reviews, however I've heard personally from other bloggers, whose opinions I trust, that they think Sifton isn't always on point. The truth is I don't eat at enough pricey places to know if Sifton is right all the time, although I heartily agreed with him on M. Wells. Back to the point, when the cost of an experience goes past a certain threshold, let's say $20+, then you can't be wrong too often. And then when that threshold goes up, you can't ever be wrong. Suggest a wrong direction to someone for a $100 dinner for two? Off with your head!
A few weeks ago, Peels had this "Ice Cream Social," from 1 PM to 10 PM or to put it another way, Ice Cream Happy Hour for take-out. The ice cream was $1.50 per scoop (pre-tax). Since it was such a deal, it was imperative to try this thing even though it was a one day event. Milk chocolate caramel twig was the flavor and it was delicious. With ice cream this good, you don't need innovative flavor combinations to win my heart. Just throw chocolate with caramel and I'm smitten. The crunchy bits in the ice cream was a nice touch too. And again, at $1.50, this was super awesome. See? I can write about ice cream and not use a controversial word.
See, I can recommend this to you because even if Peels never has another ice cream social, the ice cream they have is still baller and under $5 bucks. It's easy to recommend anything under $5. Back to the issue of current systems of recommending things to readers of food blogs. The most well known is Yelp. Although you look at the stats and an overwhelming majority of all restaurants on Yelp get between 3.5 and 4.5 stars. So much for a recommendation that sticks out. Sure there's user reviews... do you know any of the users unless you frequent Yelp? And if you frequent Yelp, how much do you really need it except for meta information like address and subway stops? I know one other system is made up of lists that your friends create and you can read. The problem is of course your 'friends' have to read your list. And I bet the number of 'real' friends on those lists is small if not zero and you trust people even more if you know them in person. There's a lesser known recommendation system out there that reads your credit card entries to see what you like. The downfall to that is cash-only restaurants and cheaper ethnic eats. There's even another one that does it based on how often a restaurant gets in the news. And then there's another that aggregates blogger's reviews if the bloggers agree to have a badge on that review page. Oh and then there's Google places. They even throw parties in NY to get people to use their shitty ass service. What's the point of saying all that? If there was one dominant service, everyone would use it.
Let's look at the restaurant Peels for example. NYTimes gave it 1 star out of 4. NYMag also gave it 1 star but out of 5. Did you know Village Voice also reviewed it? Sorry, they don't take stars. Serious Eats gave it a B on a A, B, C scale, but honestly B sounds as ok as B- or B+. Usability sometimes is an issue. If you read the title on the serious eats review, you know Peels has problems salting properly, but look at the url of their review and there is no title in the url... instead it's: review-peels-bowery-southern-comfort-food. Yup, for search engines. Did you know you taste with search engines? You do now. Adam Kuban, who is not at SE anymore, once told me on twitter that going for SEO is just good practices. What else is good practice? Web usability.
Speaking of usability... I'm thinking what's useful is this... you need a page with basic info about a restaurant. You need address, phone numbers, website if they have one, twitter if they have one, and facebook if they have one. Some other useful thing is the hours of operation because some restaurants have one day a week that they close. A quick word about what type of restaurant is useful too. You need a map. Then you need reviews. You can't steal it obviously, so maybe you can quote some big time players out there like the Times or NYMag. What if you mix in some notable blogger reviews as well? Like Serious Eats. I made a page like this for Peels restaurant. Check it out. Let me know if it's useful and if I'm on the right track here. I've got other ideas like maybe adding subway directions but I know Food in Mouth is not for the casual reader in NYC, so if you read this, you can probably find your way around town. No need to let it clutter up the page. I've thought of adding an Open Table link just to save readers an extra click and some typing in Google. So yea, if you like this kind of thing, I'll work on it more. If not, fuck it. I rather enjoy my summer than spend it aggregating data that no one sees or comes up on search results.
Peels
325 Bowery.
New York, NY 10003
646-602-7015
(I invite you to follow me on Twitter so you can get more of my non-sense in another medium.)
Honestly, the page you created doesn't really seem that different from yelp... except for the source of the reviews. Yelp usually has all the hours and website info you mention needing.
I personally like yelp. Although I agree with a lot of the flaws in its review system that you have pointed out, I enjoy being able to read through numerous reviews vs. just a couple "top" blog or news reviews. Sure, I don't know any of those people so I don't know if I can really trust them. But I've often been able to get a feel for what a restaurant will be like through reading different peoples' experiences about their visit there just because yelp does have SO MANY reviews for popular places. With more information, I can form a more complete prediction of what my experience at a restaurant will be like.
I personally find that more valuable than just a few "big time players" reviews - but hey, if I want those reviews also, I can just find them on their own sites too. That's why I follow a lot of food blogs and also read reviews on yelp.
Ali - YumVeggieBurger
July 11, 2011 4:47 pm
@Ali,
Points well taken. You're right to point out the sheer number of reviews would drown out the crappy ones. I guess the differences is just how much one likes yelp. I don't like it at all and never read any of their reviews. There's a reason Eater sometimes posts crazy shills on yelp. There was also a report of a dentist somewhere who hired people to write negative reviews of a competing dentist. The whole thing smells fishy to me. The truth is people don't need a BUNCH of reviews because they'll never read them all. They just feel better if a bunch of people reviewed it. I still think the holy grail is out there, and yelp is not it, even if they have a good number of fans.
Danny
July 11, 2011 4:51 pm
In my experience, reading Yelp is like going on a gold panning trip in grade school. You sit at a stream and sift through mud for 30 minutes, and come up with a few flakes of gold on your palms, which are covered with what appears to be runny dog shit. You're supposed to be thankful for the experience.
Yelp simply is not a curator or a true recommendation service. It does not tell you what is good or whom to trust. It's a zero-barrier, crowd-sourced information dump that forces the readers to do more work than a review service should. If I'm committing to that much work, I'd rather do it on a site that has more informed and articulate users and/or core content, i.e. Chowhound, Serious Eats, etc. If I want a smart review index, I'll just wait a few years for various food/tech start-ups to shatter Yelp with a much more sophisticated, phone-based system for speedy filtering of crowd-sourced reviews. I really do think this is going to happen at some point.
Looking at your sample index entry here, I think it's tough to pump both curation and aggregation of content, especially write-ups on restaurants/eateries/trucks. The existence of food businesses is so fluid that just keeping the contact info and simple facts like open hours (not to mention whether or not it's open) presents a huge maintenance burden. And once depth and scope of writers comes into play... well, that's enough conversation to wait for a chat in person :)
James
July 12, 2011 1:49 am
Yelp has a stranglehold on the quick star rating/direction/hours of operation. I don't read your site for any of that.
I read first because you write well, there are a million reviews blogs that cover the same places you do, but they aren't as entertaining.
Further, you come across as honest, so you've got enough credibility for me to take your word over others (for when I do visit NYC).
That page is neat, but it's an ass load of work. It's probably a lot easier to link to the another site within the review. Anyone who has found your site is perfectly capable of finding directions. But they won't get your content anywhere else.
Rodzilla
July 12, 2011 1:55 am
As the previous responses have noted, the page that you created for Peels has some overlap with Yelp. Those parts - address, hours of operation, location, etc. - don't need to be included in your restaurant pages. What would distinguish your site from something like Yelp is by gathering reviews from high-profile media (i.e. NYTimes), professional blogs (i.e. Serious Eats), and notable food bloggers (i.e. The Girl Who Ate Everything), and putting all of these reviews in a user-friendly, easily accessible page. That sounds like a shit ton of work, but that seems like the best way to make an index of restaurant reviews that offers something different from what Yelp does.
And for the record, I agree that Yelp has its flaws, but I still like using it as a resource for getting a general idea of what to expect, what most people like/dislike about a place, etc. Sure, Yelp can be gamed, but I don't think that makes it worthless so long as it is not the only resource being utilized.
As for the ice cream, where does the "twig" in the ice cream's name come from?
Kevin
July 12, 2011 1:54 pm
@James,
Yea, that's the problem with aggregation... you can't ever pool enough resources where the readers think they got all they need. So they'll always look elsewhere for even more info. If one is willing to invest that much time, then one might as well just visit all the sites separately. haha
@Rodzilla,
That's true that Yelp has a stranglehold, although I feel like they must have a weakness somewhere. Are people really just that nuts about saying how they feel about a place? How does that help any of us?
@Kevin,
Thanks for the lengthy reply. You're right to say that Yelp is not worthless. I think that they just get more than their share of traffic. It's quite genius to create clubs like Elite Yelpers and give those who are Elite something for their troubles. It's like thanking people to give Yelp a billion dollar valuation in their eventual IPO. Kinda nuts. It could just be that because most of the restaurants are rated 3.5 stars and above, that finding the optimal restaurant experience is simply useless. As for the ice cream, I didn't inquire about what the crunch was made out of... my bad on that.
Danny
July 13, 2011 10:45 am
You're right about the fact that Yelp isn't the most informative resource if you go strictly by restaurants' stars because, like you said, almost every restaurant is something like 3.5 or 4 stars. But having a bunch of reviews on hand to learn which dishes are done particularly well and which ones to avoid is pretty useful for me, as it can help guide how I order at the restaurant.
Oh, and as I was searching for restaurants to go to while I'm in Paris later this month, I came across this: http://parisbymouth.com/le-chateaubriand/. This actually looks very similar to what you created for Peels, so I thought I'd link you up with the site so that you could see how it would look when it is fully functional.
Kevin
July 13, 2011 3:31 pm
@Kevin,
This is true about the dishes to order. I guess for me, the thing is would trust what NYTimes or NYMag says about dishes rather than a random person. Granted, if you are on Yelp enough, the reviewers stop being random. For example, even though NYTimes Review is not the end-all-be-all, a lot of individuals still trust the review and its advice. Do a lot of Yelp readers seek out one particular yelper and only follow that person's suggestions? If it's getting to that point, then I think Yelp has won.
Thanks for the link. That's pretty much what I want to do, but Paris by Mouth has like 15 contributors. I'm doing this all myself. haha. I gotta learn how to program an algorithm... sooner or later though, Google Places' algorithm will be so good at figuring out which sentences are talking about the food, decor, wine, etc, that all this will be moot. And when that happens, they could probably even do a suggestion algorithm to suggest things to users on google+. Fuck. Their world wide domination is almost here!
Danny
July 13, 2011 3:41 pm
I get what you're saying about taking the word of a trusted food critic from a respected source like NYTimes or or NYMag over the opinion of a random person on Yelp. If I was relying on the opinion of just one person, the NYTimes reviewer's opinion would almost certainly have more weight than that of a random person on Yelp. But then again, my brother's opinion on a restaurant would probably have more weight than the NYTimes because I know my brother's palette aligns closely with mine and know what he likes, whereas the NYTimes food critic's palette, while certainly refined, may have different tendencies and/or preferences to mine. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the weight of a recommendation, either for a particular dish or a restaurant, depends on a bunch of factors, including the prestige of the source (NYTimes), a consensus from many reviewers (Yelp), and how much you know the person making the recommendation (my brother), so Yelp is a good resource to have but is by no means the only one I use.
Although I have a Yelp account, I don't follow any one person's reviews on Yelp, and I find that its primary use is that if enough people say that Dish X from Restaurant Y is good, then that would probably be enough to get me to try it out. For example, without so many people on Yelp praising Bouley's Porcini Flan, I very likely would have overlooked the dish, but I'm glad that I ordered it because it was really good.
And ever since Google was able to show images of my house and street, I have been waiting for the day when they would take over the world.
Kevin
July 13, 2011 5:44 pm
you know what would fix the fucked up Yelp system where everything is 3.5-5.0? Go well past visible precision and rescale it to 1-5. Problem solved. Well not really, but it would help.
Nicholas
July 13, 2011 7:53 pm
@Kevin,
I guess the main thing I would look for in the future is for a restaurant listings page that saves me time. If 8 people recommend one dish, I expect an algorithm in the future to simply read everyone's comments and have a section called RECOMMENDED DISHES and that'll save me time from reading like 15 posts to gather the info. Once I have to invest time, it becomes an investigation. At that point, I rather see what NYMag or NYtimes said about these dishes, because almost all good reviews talk about particular dishes. But the true true holy grail will never be obtained, and that's to recommend you a dish that you'll love, even if previous evidence says you wouldn't. So yea, I want google to read my mind. haha.
@Nicholas,
Make it happen, son. Tell googs to read my mind!!!
Danny
July 14, 2011 3:05 pm