Restaurant guides

Restaurant guides review restaurants, often ranking them or providing information for consumer decisions (type of food, handicap accessibility, facilities, quality, etc.), using various notations such as stars or other symbols, or numbers. Stars are a familiar and popular symbol, with ratings of one to four or five stars commonly used. Ratings appear in guidebooks as well as in the media, typically in newspapers, lifestyle magazines and webzines. Websites featuring consumer-written reviews and ratings are increasingly popular.

In addition, there are ratings given by public health agencies rating the level of sanitation practiced by an establishment. These ratings are given from a numerical scale, with 100 being a perfect score and points deducted for each violation, such as keeping food at the wrong temperature, roach/vermin/rodent infestation, failure to use NSF-certified equipment, or improper food storage. From that, a grade is often assigned.

Restaurant guides list the best places to eat. One of the most famous of these, in Western Europe, is the Michelin series of guides which accord from one to three stars to restaurants they perceive to be of high culinary merit. The Michelin Red Guide is the Holy Grail of sorts, awarding up to three stars. One star indicates a “very good restaurant”; two stars indicate a place “worth a detour”; three stars means “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”. A three-star Michelin ranking is rare. As of late 2009, there were 26 three-star restaurants in France, and only 81 in the world. Stars are awarded strictly for cuisine; a separate scale of 1 to 5 denotes the ambiance, setting and decor, and is symbolized by a crossed fork-and-spoon icon. The main competitor to the Michelin guide in Europe is the guidebook series published by Gault Millau. Unlike the Michelin guide which takes the restaurant dйcor and service into consideration with its rating, Gault Millau only judges the quality of the food. Its ratings are on a scale of 1 to 20, with 20 being the highest.

In the United States, the Forbes Travel Guide (previously the Mobil Travel Guides) and the American Automobile Association (AAA) rate restaurants on a similar 1 to 5 star (Forbes) or Diamond (AAA) scale. Three, four, and five star/diamond ratings are roughly equivalent to the Michelin one, two, and three star ratings while one and two star ratings typically indicate more casual places to eat.

In 2005, Michelin released a New York City guide, its first for the United States. This first edition of this guide was noted by New York Times restaurant critic Steven Kurutz to not give stars to several restaurants (such as the Union Square Cafe) that several other guides (Zagat Survey, New York Times) have rated highly. Kurutz also claimed the guide appeared to favor restaurants which “emphasized formality and presentation” rather than a “casual approach to fine dining”, for which the Union Square Cafe is famous.

The Zagat Survey compiles consumer comments instead of using professional food critics, and rates restaurants on a numerical 30-point scale. In the United Kingdom, a similar service is provided by “The people's UK Restaurant Guide”. Australian guides include the “Australian Good Food & Travel Guide”, and the “Good Food Guide”.

Nearly all major American newspapers employ restaurant critics and publish online dining guides for the cities they serve, such as the New York Times for New York City's restaurants. American newspaper restaurant critics typically visit dining establishments anonymously and return several times so as to sample the entire menu. Newspaper restaurant guides, therefore, tend to provide the most thorough coverage of various cities' dining options.

More recently Internet sites have started up that publish both food critic reviews and popular reviews by the general public. Their major competition comes from bloggers, particularly publishers of food blogs, also called foodies. These writers and publishers represent the common dining aficionado rather than the gourmet, and thus do not provide “official” reviews, but nonetheless are capable of garnering large, loyal followings.

A top restaurant rating can mean success or failure for a restaurant, particularly when bestowed by influential sources like Michelin or the New York Times. Three stars in the Times' four-star system denotes excellent, and is a class unto itself, considerably harder to get than two- or one-stars, while its rare four-star “extraordinary” rating is typically held by fewer than a dozen of New York's 20,000 restaurants. The influence goes beyond business success; writing about former Times chief dining critic Ruth Reichl, a US food columnist noted that Reichl's reviews and star-rating “made and broke reputations and fortunes and generally influenced the direction of the city's—indeed, to a lesser degree, the country's—restaurant scene.”

In 2004 Michelin came under fire in some quarters after bipolar chef Bernard Loiseau committed suicide after he was rumoured to be in danger of losing one of his three stars for his widely-admired restaurant Cфte d'Or in Saulieu, Burgundy. However, the Michelin guide had stated he would not be downgraded. Most news reports attributed his suicide to the downgrade carried out by the rival Gault Millau guide.